The Menu and the Creator#
Pause Menu Creator has two screens, and it helps to know which is which from the start:
Screen | Opened with | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
The pause menu |
| What every player sees: the live theme, drawn full screen over the game. |
The creator |
| Admins only. Designing themes, saving them, and choosing which one is live for the server. |
Both draw through the same renderer, so a theme cannot look different in game than it did on the canvas. The creator's Preview button shows the theme exactly as players get it, with working buttons and pages, without setting it live.
The right theme is ready before a player spawns. The live theme travels with the connection, so somebody who presses ESC seconds after joining gets your design rather than the default one.
The Eight Themes#
Eight complete designs ship with the resource. They are starting points, not a menu of eight: duplicate one and it becomes yours, because everything in them was built with the same creator you have. Config.Menu.defaultTheme decides which one players get before you set anything live.
Theme | What it looks like |
|---|---|
Launch ( | The default. A launch night: a video runs full-bleed behind a poster headline, with a framed carousel beside it and a working pause menu underneath. Its copy ships in Spanish — every string is a text module, so translating it is a pass through the inspector. |
Onyx ( | A fixed glass rail on graded charcoal — brand, player, navigation, shortcuts and condition never move — with three pages opening beside it: overview, map and info. The one to start from. |
Aurora ( | One centred console over a violet sky and no pages at all: the map, condition, wallet, server and eight shortcuts on one screen. |
Carbon ( | Map first. A slim, amber-lit industrial bar over a full-bleed Los Santos, with the character and the server one click away. |
Cyberpunk ( | Magenta and cyan over black, scanlines and grain, hard corners, bracket markers and readouts instead of cards. The loud one. |
Ivory ( | A light pause menu, which almost nobody ships: warm paper, charcoal ink, one terracotta accent and Rockstar's print atlas on one calm screen. |
Hackerman ( | A dispatch console on a phosphor CRT: monospaced readouts in windowed frames, scanlines and a slow green glow, amber kept for alerts. |
Velvet ( | A members-only lounge: blurred photography under an aubergine wash, a centred serif hero, gold used only as a hairline, and a horizontal rail instead of a sidebar. |
Every bundled theme carries an Open GTA's settings button. Replacing the pause menu takes graphics, audio and controller settings away from your players, and that button hands them back — if you build a theme from scratch, put one somewhere.
Designing a Theme#
/pausecreator opens the creator on its Design tab. It is laid out like an image editor:
Where | What is there |
|---|---|
Left | The theme library: the eight built-in themes and the ones you saved, with Live, Built-in and Unsaved chips, a button for a new blank theme and one to import a theme code. |
Centre | The canvas: the theme at its design resolution, with zoom, a grid, the safe area, an animations toggle and the page you are editing. |
Right | The module library and the list of modules on the theme (show, lock, reorder, duplicate, delete, rename), and the inspector for whatever is selected — or for the theme itself when nothing is. |
Top | Save, Set live, Revert, Duplicate, Export, Delete, the Preview button and the Design / Settings tabs. |
Drag a module to move it and pull its handles to resize it. Positions and sizes are percentages of the design resolution, so a theme scales to any screen; it is drawn to fit, never cropped, and its background stretches to cover what is left.
Key | Does |
|---|---|
| Undo. |
| Redo. |
| Duplicate the selected module. |
| Remove the selected module. |
| Nudge the selected module by 0.1%. Hold |
| Snap to whole percent instead of tenths. |
A locked module cannot be dragged or nudged — lock backgrounds and frames so a stray click never moves them.
Saving, setting live and sharing#
Save
Writes the theme to your database. Up to
Config.MaxThemes(50) themes can be stored. Saving one of the built-in themes keeps your edited version in its place on your server; delete it and the original comes back. To keep the original beside your version, press Duplicate first and edit the copy.Set live
Makes it the menu every player gets, immediately and without a reconnect. Save first — a theme with unsaved changes cannot be set live.
Export and import
Export turns the theme into a code starting with
QSPM1:to copy. On another server, the import button in the theme library takes that code and opens the theme, ready to save. It is how a design moves between a test server and your live one.
Deleting the live theme is allowed: players fall back to Config.Menu.defaultTheme.
Modules#
Everything on screen is a module. Add one from the library, drag it into place, and set its properties in the inspector. There are 24, in six groups:
Group | Module | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
Basics | Text | A fixed string or a live value (see below), with font, weight, spacing, gradient and a prefix or suffix. |
Image | A logo, banner or photo from | |
Shape | A panel, frame or divider, filled with a colour or a gradient. | |
Icon | One of the built-in icons — socials, money, map, health, vehicles and more. | |
Effect | An animated layer: vignette, grain, scanlines, gradient, glow, particles, stars, rain, sheen or noise. | |
Player | Player card | Name, avatar or the character's own photo, job, server id and ping. |
Status bars | Health, armour, hunger, thirst and stress as bars, rings or segments. | |
Money | Cash, bank and black money, with your currency symbol. | |
Identity | Name, citizen id, date of birth, sex, height, phone, job and grade. | |
Server | Server info | Name, players, free slots, ping, uptime, Discord, website and version. |
Clock | Real time or in-game time, 12 or 24 hour, with or without the date and seconds. | |
Location | Street, crossing street, area name, compass and coordinates. | |
Map | Los Santos with your character, the game's blips, the route and saved places. The Map below covers it. | |
Navigation | Nav buttons | A list, cards, tiles or a rail of buttons, each running an action, with the open page highlighted. |
Quick bar | A row or column of round, square or pill shortcuts. | |
Disconnect | A leave button that asks your confirmation question first. | |
Content | News | Announcements with a tag, title, body and date, as a list or cards. |
Rules | Your server rules, numbered if you like. | |
Staff | The team, with roles and avatars. | |
Social | Discord, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and other links, copied to the clipboard on click. | |
Tips | Rotating hints, a few seconds each. | |
Keybinds | The keys of your server's scripts, explained. | |
Media | Video | A WebM clip from |
Slideshow | A carousel of images with a fade, slide or Ken Burns transition. |
Every module also shares the same base properties: its page, size, rotation, opacity, corner radius, blend mode, an entrance animation (fade, slide in from any side, zoom, blur or flip, with a delay and duration) and an optional backing panel — a fill (solid, linear, radial or conic gradient), a border, inner padding, a backdrop blur and a shadow.
A value the framework cannot provide is left empty, and the module hides that row rather than printing a confident
$0. That is why a standalone server shows a tidy player card instead of a broken one.
Live text#
A Text module can show more than a fixed string. Pick a Content source in the inspector and it updates itself:
Source | Values |
|---|---|
Server | Server name, players, max players, free slots, Discord, website, uptime. |
Player | Player name, server id, ping, job, grade, cash, bank. |
World | Street, area, coordinates. |
Time | Date, real time, in-game time. |
Pages, Behaviour and Background#
The creator's Settings tab holds what belongs to the whole theme rather than to one module.
Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
Pages | Add, rename and remove pages. Each module lives on one page or on every page at once, so a theme can hold a map page, a rules page and a settings page while a header or a player card stays put across all of them. A theme with no pages is one screen. |
Page it opens on | The page the menu shows every time it opens — the first one if left empty. |
Fade in | How long, in milliseconds, the menu takes to fade in and out. |
Escape closes the menu | On by default. Off leaves a button as the only way out — see the warning below. |
Live theme | Which theme players see right now. |
With nothing selected, the inspector edits the theme itself: its design resolution and its background — none (the game shows through, blurred), a colour or gradient, an image, a slideshow or a video — with fit, blur, brightness, saturation, grayscale, an overlay and a vignette.
Buttons and Actions#
Every clickable thing — nav buttons, quick bar shortcuts, the disconnect button — runs one action, chosen in the inspector:
Action | What happens |
|---|---|
Open a page | Switches page; the menu stays open. |
Close the menu | Closes it. |
Run a command | Runs it on the player's client, as if they had typed it. |
Trigger a client event |
|
Trigger a server event |
|
Copy a link | Copies it to the clipboard — FiveM cannot open a browser. |
Set a waypoint here | Drops a GPS waypoint where the player is standing. |
Open GTA's settings | This menu closes and GTA's own opens on its settings page. The ESC hook stands down until the player leaves it. |
Leave the server | Disconnects the player, or fires your event so a script can save first — |
Close the menu afterwards decides whether the menu stays open once the action ran. Commands and events are deliberately open — you are the one writing them. The one guard rail is Config.Actions.blockedCommands (quit, connect, restart, stop, start, refresh), which no theme can get past, whatever a theme file says.
The Map#
The map module plots the character on a real Los Santos that pans, zooms and follows them. There is nothing to install: the imagery is Rockstar's own Social Club atlas, streamed from their servers while the map is on screen, so nothing is added to the download every player takes on join. It is the same atlas and calibration as qs-smartphone's Maps app, so the phone and the menu line up.
Option | What it does |
|---|---|
Style | Render (the illustrated Social Club map), Game (the in-game radar art) or Print (the fold-out poster). |
Min · Start · Max zoom | From 4 (the whole state) to 9. Level 7 is the last one Rockstar drew; 8 and 9 enlarge it so the map gets close enough to read a driveway. |
Follow the player | Keeps the camera on the character. |
Radar mode | Turns the world so the player always faces up. Look-only: panning and clicking are off while it is on. |
Pan · Zoom · Zoom buttons | Whether the player may drag and zoom, and whether the +/− buttons are drawn. |
Coordinate readout | Coordinates, compass and grid scale in a corner. |
Double click to set a waypoint | Drops the GPS waypoint where the player double clicks. |
Let players save places | Right click to save a spot — see below. Off also hides places already saved. |
Realistic button | Offers the realistic 3D map from this map. Only shown while the server allows it. |
Points of interest | Markers of your own — a label, an icon, a colour and game coordinates — drawn for everyone with this theme. |
Blips, the legend and the route#
With Config.Menu.showGameBlips on, every blip the game shows on its own pause map — jobs, shops, garages, other players, anything a script created — is drawn on the map in its real colour. The legend down the right edge lists them, dressed in the theme's own colours:
One row per kind of blip, so fifty houses are one row. Click it to fly to the first; click again to step to the next, and the counter says which one you are on (
3/22). Clicking a blip on the map selects its row.A search box, a My places section for the player's own places, and a City section for everything else.
An eye on every row that hides that kind of blip from the map.
The zoom and recentre buttons sit beside the legend. The waypoint and its route are drawn too, with the road distance under the pin. Both come from the game — the marker is GTA's own waypoint and the route is GTA's own GPS — so it follows the streets, and setting the waypoint here, in the phone or on the minimap gives the same path everywhere. When the game has no road route to give, such as an island or a rooftop, it falls back to a dashed straight line on purpose, so a guess is never mistaken for a route.
Blip names#
GTA lets a script set a blip's name but not read it back, so the legend looks for each name in this order, and the first answer wins:
A name given by the blip hook or the
SetBlipNameexport — see Integrations.The name read from the game itself, with
Config.Menu.readBlipNameson. Names are read one at a time in the background while the map is open.The sprite's entry in
Config.BlipNames.The name of the blip's icon, such as Clothes Store.
Places players save#
Right click the map and a small panel opens: a name, an icon and a colour. A pulsing ghost of the marker sits on the exact spot while it is filled in, wearing the icon and colour as they are picked. Click a saved place to reopen the same panel with a Delete button.
Places belong to the player, not to the theme. They are stored on the server against the character — the framework's identifier, or the Rockstar licence without one — so they survive a reconnect, follow the character into any theme, and also appear on the realistic map. Config.Places sets the limit (30), the icons and the colours.
Inside the creator the panel works, but nothing is written: places made while designing live in the draft and go away with it, so testing the feature never fills your own map with markers.
The Realistic Map#
The Realistic button at the top of the map lifts a camera high above the real city, in 3D. The menu steps aside and the game itself becomes the map: blips, saved places, your points of interest, the waypoint, the GPS route and the player are drawn over the buildings, together with the same legend as the flat map.
Input | Does |
|---|---|
Left drag | Move over the city. |
Right drag | Turn and tilt the camera. |
Mouse wheel | Zoom, between |
Double click | Set the waypoint where the cursor points in the world. |
Click a marker | Fly to it. Double click it to set the waypoint there. |
| Zoom in, zoom out, face north, back to the player. |
| Back to the flat map, exactly where it was left. |
It opens facing the way the player is looking, with the area name in the corner. While it is up the HUD and radar are hidden and, with clearWeather on, the sky is cleared so the city can be seen; the server's weather comes back when it closes. Config.RealisticMap.enabled is the master switch, and each theme can turn its own button off with Realistic button in the map's inspector. The creator's Preview opens it too, so it can be tried before a theme goes live.
Media#
Two folders belong to you rather than to the resource:
Folder | For | Served at |
|---|---|---|
| Logos, headers, avatars — |
|
| Background clips — |
|
Anything you drop in shows up as a choice in the creator, so nobody has to type a URL — restart the resource after adding files. The URL field is still there, and a CDN link works fine.
Everything in these two folders is downloaded by every player on join, so keep files sized for what they are — a background clip has no business being 30 MB. The world map is not part of this: it streams from Rockstar and costs your players nothing.
The Player's Photo#
The player card can use the character's own portrait as its avatar — Use the player's photo in its inspector, on by default. It needs no extra resource: the game renders the headshot and the menu reads it directly.
The photo is taken shortly after the player spawns, retaken when their model changes, and refreshed every Config.Mugshot.refresh as a backstop for a change of clothes. Config.Mugshot.transparent cuts the character out against nothing instead of the mugshot backdrop. If the shot ever fails, the card falls back to its icon. An avatar URL set on the card still wins over the photo — an owner who pointed it at a logo meant it.
Languages#
41 locales ship in locales/, covering the notifications and the whole creator. Set Config.Language and that is it. A key a locale is missing falls back to English rather than printing the key, so a partial translation is safe to ship, and a new language is one more JSON file in the same folder.
The text players read inside a theme — headlines, rules, button labels — is not in the locale files. It belongs to the theme, so it is written in the creator in whatever language your server speaks.