New from SoE - /copylayout
 

Posted this in reply to the Sept 12th patch message, but then noticed it doesn't show up on the home page so repeating it here. There's some interesting news on the SoE forums about the UI fixes. It appears the majority of problems have been well and truly fixed, and in addition we have a couple of absolute beauties being added to the game:

/viewport will have a scale option:
/copylayout:
And another gem I didn't know about:

The /copylayout and /loadskin settings between them make for some very nice ways to load a UI complete with it's layout. For more details please read SKlug's post here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/p...topic_id=118687

They aren't fixed until they implement the changes live.

There's still no estimate on when they will be pushing the UI fixes.

Yes that /loadskin and not keeping your settings hosed my UI on my laptop.

I had to get the ini files from my main machine and copy them to the EQ directory

Minalcar

SKlug says in his post that he's hoping the changes make it live next week, so shouldn't be long.

And yes, /loadskin without keeping your settings will move things all over the place, SKlug cautions about that. It loads the positions from the XML, but very few people will have added positions to the XML files, so you're likely to get things everywhere.

I mentioned /loadskin because if a UI developer could use that knowledge to put the positions in the XML files and then give people a really easy way to add the UI, without having to mess around with ini files.

Knowing the xml will take precedence, itll be nice for fixed width uis to set everything up.

No, XML will only take precidence if you untick the option to save your layout, or if you have no layout saved for a particular resolution.

So yes, it's handy for UI designers to add XML positions just in case, but the best thing to do is to make use of /copylayout. I've just added a big reply to the SoE thread if you want to see what I think, but the gist of it is:

• If you set positions in the XML they are for one resolution only. With users being able to size the window how they like, it's impossible for a developer to guess what's best for a user.
• /copylayout however lets a developer ship support for as many resolutions as they want, and users can easily try a few out and see which layout suits their screen best.
• /copylayout also covers the occasions where your .ini file has no positions saved for your current resolution. If you find your windows are all over the place, no problem: just do a /copylayout and grab positions from a resolution that you know works.

That one command solves a huge number of problems. All UI designers need to do is ship a .ini file, and any time window positions get messed up it's (hopefully) going to be a piece of cake to fix.

And what I've just realised is the /copylayout command is SKlug's way of letting us fix the UI's for everyone who's layout got messed up.

Myx

Its a shame they're wasting so much time developing fixes for this when it never needed to be changed in the first place.

Yeah, SKlug said these changes were never meant to go live. On the plus side however, some of the fixes they are putting in place are looking very very good.

IMO it's much better the SOE UI people are working on this than on actually making any chances to other actual windows.

It didn't move them all over the place on my laptop. It completely removed most windows and what was there were just the top lines on the screen.

Minalcar

How did you get that fixed Minalcar? That's not a bug I've seen anyone else report yet.

The only way to fix it when it does that is to del the defaults.ini. Run the game without patching, and reload your custom ui with keep layout selected.

I made a zip file of the ini files on my desktop, put them on a zip drive and connected the zip drive to my laptop USB port and copied them to my EQ directory.

Good thing I had a separate compuer to test it.

Minalcar

I've been doing /copylayout the hard way for a long time. I would just copy the UI file from my main character and then rename it for each of my other characters. Also, if I did something to mess up my UI, like load a UI without keeping the layout, I just copied it back from one of my other characters. I've always wanted a way to do this in-game.

Danedori

if i ever load a ui where i don't use "keep my layout" or make a big screw up on my layout from manual error, i just type /exit and start again. the ini files aren't touched when using that command.