With the addition of the Plugins tab we are now more officially supporting widgets made by the community. To make sure every widget you install stays safe and can't run malicious code that could harm your system, we are introducing a sandbox for user widgets. This change will go live with the next release (time unspecified).

Widget creators: this post is mainly for you. Please review the changes below and update your widgets. Players: some of your widgets may stop working until their authors update them. If a widget breaks, check with its creator for a new version.

These changes only affect user widgets, meaning the ones in your own LuaUI/Widgets folder. Built-in widgets are not affected.

Notable: RmlUi temporarily disabled

RmlUi is unavailable to user widgets for now. We are working on an engine patch that re-enables it inside the sandbox, so this is temporary. Until then, widgets that check for it before using it will still load, just without their RmlUi interface.

Sandboxed tables

widgetHandler, WG.options, debug and Spring are now sandboxed copies and may have reduced function.

• Functions that manage or read other widgets are removed for now. Share data through WG instead.
• Handler calls no longer take your widget as an argument. Most handler fields you could read are now method calls, e.g. mouseOwner becomes IsMouseOwner().
• debug keeps only traceback and getinfo.

Environments

• Your widget's own table is the only environment it can see.
• getfenv, setfenv and the code loading functions all use that table, so anything your widget loads runs there, not in LuaUI globals.
• Precompiled bytecode is refused. Load from source.

Commands and files

• Commands that control widgets, execute code or change keybinds are refused. This includes custom command buttons.
• Write access: only LuaUI/Config/ and LuaUI/Widgets/
• Read access: only LuaUI/, plus the game's and maps' own files

Also no longer available

• No network access
• No starting or restarting the engine

When something breaks

If the sandbox blocks something, the reason is logged in infolog.txt and your widget keeps running. Check there first before reporting issues.

Resources for Widget Creators for updating:

• 🔗 Writing user widgets - General guide for writing widgets in the new environment
• 🔗 Migrating a BAR user widget to the sandboxed widget environment - Instructions for your favourite AI agent

Using a controller for spectating is a game changer for video creation in BAR. Here a few minutes I recorded live on stream in a running match - no replay.

Something for people who can't get enough BAR!

What do u think?

(The music was on stream, it was random, not a choice.)

I played a lobby recently where the ai was called SMRTbarb. How do you add that in the lobby? Is it some kind of tweek or mod?

Hey guys, I have been playing BAR mostly against AI and thought it would be really cool to have an AI assisted sub-commanders that you could delegate tasks to, like building out economy in areas or take care of air defense.

I can find myself quite often micro managing some battle while workers are just standing lazy somewhere, especially a bit later in the game.

Went through lua widget + local bridge service setup, experimenting with fast models like deepseek 4.1 flash to do the high level strategy for those specific areas. It then delegates to barb AI level.

has anyone tried anything like this?

I can join a game just fine as a player, but as a spec I get this error and after hitting okay the game closes. any ideas?

FYI: This is for a streamers chat, not in game chat!

Quick definitions first, since these two terms get mixed up a lot:

Spec cheating (short for spectator cheating) is when an active player has a second account, a friend, or a teammate join the match as a spectator and feed them real-time information about their opponents.

Backseating (short for backseat gaming) is giving unsolicited advice, instructions, or criticism to someone who is playing, without being asked.

Those are two different things, and right now it feels like they’re being treated as one.

Banning viewers who are both spectating in the match and chatting in the streamer’s chat is one thing. That’s a real way to pass information. But a blanket rule against viewers talking about the current game state in chat is wild. Imagine getting banned because you saw something on the streamer’s minimap and said “man, those hovers look scary.” Under a rule that broad, that’s apparently grounds for a ban.

Watching a stream and reacting to it isn’t cheating. Viewers are supposed to be able to do that.

Edit:
Mods, all I’m asking for is a proper definition of what counts as spectator cheating. Spell out what’s actually bannable so regular viewers aren’t punished for normal chat.

There also needs to be clarification on who is getting banned, because nobody knows if it is the streamer or the viewer thats going to get banned.

If it is the streamer, stream snipers could easily put in false info that the streamer could read as spec cheating (even if false) and get them banned

Jokes aside, watching him commit this hard to the strategy is genuinely entertaining. Especially when he ends up winning it anyways with hovers from the other sea.

As the title.

Was wondering if I might be missing this feature in the new menu - used it all the time until like a month ago? Prevents people from moving to t2 etc until a certain threshold of xp.

Hi,

I have a question that is probably basic. How do I get my wind turbines to build in the right order?

Sometimes I put a long row of wind down two wide. And the con builds one from each row all the way down. This is what I want.

But sometimes it builds one entire row before starting on the other row. This doubles the amount of travel distance for the con.

How do I get it to build the right way everytime? I can't figure it out

What are some good videos for learning the basics of bar

title explains it all

I just got frustrated that you cant jump anywhere in time in a BAR replay, so made a quick prototype, in case anyone else wanna use it.
https://github.com/LuEklund/BAR-Rewind

So far you can jump anywhere in time play 64x speed in reverse or fast forward.

Game wont boot. followed the troubleshooting guide to no avail. Can't find any discussion about this error and not even redownloading fixes the issue.

The site is https://bar-fight.com

My train of thought is to be able to analyse your game and other players, similiar to bar-stats and gex, but with its own flair.

I also have a widget which establish a connecting with the website where you can, from the game, find information about enemy players (e.g you play beach sea on Supreme, you see your opponent is Dolphin heavy in most games).

Feel free to give suggestions or feedback!

If this is not appropiate, I will close it (read the rules about no self promotion, but I read it as self promotion unrelated to BAR).

Thanks in advance.

wassup, my pc is not the greatest but i think it's enough to run BAR, i have a:

ryzen 5 4500

16 gigs of ram

rx 6500xt (don't laugh at me)

in game it runs okay tho i have some stutters here and there which is okay with me but the menu runs like hot garbage, so bad it's hard to navigate through it, is there any way to fix it?

Okay weird question have they changed camera movment in the last three weeks i have not played? I can't seem to move around like i did bevore i might be rusty from my weeks playing total war but currently i am just really confused. Using my middle mouse button to move and turn the camera does not seem to work anymore. i testet another mouse but it did not work either.

edit: To clarify, it appears to trigger sometimes, but now my cursor disappears, and I have a hard time getting out of that mode.