myxiplx

You may have worked this out by now, but I've just coded my own player box and the way I did it was:

- Drew out my template in advance as you've done
- Converted it to greyscale, faded it out and printed it full page
- Measured the co-ordinates of all the pieces on my template & wrote them on the printout
- Copied the default everquest player.xml file to my own custom folder
- Made the changes I wanted (I just used notepad to edit the files), copying pieces from other default .xml files as I needed
- Crossed off each co-ordinate on my printout once I'd added that element to the file.
- Loaded EQ from time to time to check the look

Creating an item from scratch can be very time consuming, it's amazing how many little details there are. If I were you I'd get the basics working first with everything in the right place and working in game. Once you've got that look to see how to get the backgrounds, etc working. Eye candy is easy once everything's in place.

If you're not sure how to do something, just have a browse of the downloads section and see how other pepole did it. Sharing code is one of the biggest strengths of this site imo. I borrowed from tons of people to create my UI, and I fully expect people to do the same with my code once I've finished it.

In fact that's my main motivation for wanting to post my update on this site - so others can see it and use it themselves if they want.

Myx