How do I do this? ~frustration...~
 

Ok, I've read through all the stuff in the info vault and help forums, and canna seem to find what I need.


I want to make a window that has what I want in it, but isn't square and doesn't take up so much space, you know? made and example gif of what I'm trying to do (well, I dun want it to look liek ~that~, but you get the point with the transparent areas)

Fairly sure on how to make the tga's themselves, just draw in whatever grx program you use, and save with the alpha layer where it should be. But don't know how to tell it where it is, or even how to point the windows to the image, or how to get it to load in EQ :( I suck :p

First of all, you should know that even if you make it so the window doesn't look square, that transparent cutout will still be considered by EQ to be part of the window; you can see through it but you can't click through it and if there's another window under it you won't be able to use the functions of that window.

Secondly, the key to using custom tga files for window backgrounds is fund in EQUI_Templates.xml. That has a bunch of templates that tell EQ how to draw the windows, including what background image file to use. Take a look at how the default window templates are set up, then try making your own.

So that means if I want to make a... round?... window it won't work?

Well...depends what you mean by 'work'. You can make a window that *looks* round, but the only way to define a window size in EQ is as a set of x,y dimensions, creating a rectangle. Hence you can have your pretty little round window but if you click on the transparent corners around the circle you'll get the window, not what's behind it. (exception is chatwindows- you can click through them.)

heheh, I dun care if I can click through them or not :) I really just wanna learn how to do something like this and make a better looking skin :) the box look is... boring... you know?

/agree

the only other problem will be that you can't make a resizeable window this way; by default when you resize a window EQ will tile the background. But that shouldn't be a big issue unless you want round chatwindows.

*begs the entire EQGUI community* PLEASE don't make a Mr. Bananaman-shaped window! Pleeeeeease?!?!

The only problem with having lots of non square stuff if you have to have it all scattered around the screen or else you will be constantly trying to grab or click a window and dragging the handles of another.

circles do indeed work though. Triangles as well.. it would be better to take a square and embed (via graphics) other shapes such as triangles, diamonds, hex's etx.

What I'm aing for is one standard window, made, most likely, from the hotbutton window, as you cannot, to my knowledge, move the hotbutton boxes. I dislike a lot of big windows cluttering up my screen. One big window would do it ~winks~ I have made a TGA that shows, roughly, what I am aiming at making, and as you can see, its not quite square. the 2 top ovals would be for a target HP guage, and a your HP guage ( I have found that it does seem to be easier to keep track of your hp's if there is both a guage and a numeric/percent showing also)


Attached is the TGA I made.

I am following psychogears' tut on this... but there are a few problems I am having. How the @#!@# do I figure out the images location? It's size? I have both Paintshop Pro and Photoshop 7, but am not finding this info :(

Well, after a bottle of tylenol, much glaring at the screen, and trial and error, I managed to figure this @#$% thing out on my own. I just make an image in the allowed dimensions, ignore location. ignore image size. Lots of cutting. Tons of pasting... walla... I figured it out. Now to make a ~real~ tga and try it out. (By real, I mean the zip was a thrown together example of what I was aiming for)

in photoshop 7 what you are looking for is the info window. It will show the exact coordinates of your cursor at the moment and the size of your current selection (ie 66 x 34 rectangle at x23 y29)



sorry I'm a little late with the info :(

Heheh, thanks :) Better late than never, as they say :) Now if I could just figure out why my spell cast window BG won't load (I editted the animations and templates window. it *should* wprk, as I did exactly the same thing as I did with the hotkeys window I made, and the hotkeys window works fine).


**back to the drawing board, as people are wont to say**


EDIT: Well, I figured that one out too :) Simply needed to rename the .tga file ( it wasn't liking the name scb.tga :p, too short, maybe?)

been seeing this crop up more and more lately- seems EQ's quite finicky about filenames.