Angahran

What I would love to see in the EQ UI would be something that would allow you to 'redefine' an item and not have EQ freak and crash.

e.g.
Currently, if for example you wanted to change your spell casting bar to neon pink, you would have to copy the .xml file that has the casting bar in it into your custom directory and modify it. This means that you also have everything else in that file in your custom directory.

Maybe the casting bar wasn't the best example.

Try this...

Say there was a Bars.XML file, that contained every 'bar' in EQ, casting, breath, health, etc and you wanted to change the casting bar to pink.

You would copy the 'bars.xml' file to your custom directory and mdify the colour. You would also have the other bars in your custom directory, and if SoE modified, say the breath gauge, you wouldnt see that change until you modified your custom file.

What I would like to be able to do would be have EQ look in the custom directory and see what is there and then get everything else from default (as it does now) BUT (and heres the good bit) if it hits a duplicate it should use what it found in the custom directory and continue, NOT crash.

So, for the 'bars.xml' example you could have a custom file named 'bars.xml' that ONLY contains your modified casting bar, and when EQ loaded the UI it would take your new casting bar, then look in the default 'bars.xml' file for everything else, and skip over the default casting bar.

What do other people think ?

Ang.

Turlo

Going to have to disagree with you on this one. By allowing what you are requesting, you are limiting compatibility between different UIs, and basically gives the end user a work around for sloppy programming.

By learning the correct interaction between the windows, with correct name conventions, etc., you can create a product that will work with other peoples work.

For example,
Bars.xml has the casting gauge in it. What is the person is using Turlo's Casting Window? All of a sudden, you have two casting guages in the same directory. The result would cause it to crash to desktop, and well it should.

If the designer of Bars.xml used Bars_Casting_Gauge as the piece utilized within the window, the naming conventions are kept seperate, and there is no compatibilty problem with other components.

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Angahran

Not sure why you think that this would cause problems between different UIs.
If the people creating the UIs use reasonable naming conventions, (which they have to do currently to avoid conflicts) allowing overloading shouldnt change anything.

e.g. Fred creates his super ui and adds a new gauge, calling it FredGauge and puts it in a casting window.
Then Bill creates a gauge and calls it BillGauge and puts it in the breath window. No problem.

However if both Fred and Bill modified one of the default UI gauges there could be problems. But having overloading would not make this any worse.



This is a problem with the current setup so I'm missing the point?

What should happen would be the Bars.xml would have a casting gauge, named BarsCastingGauge, and the Turlo's casting window would have a gauge named TurlosCastingGauge (for example).

What my suggestion would allow would be to have, for example, if you wanted to change a single element that is contained in one of the large .xml files, you could simply have that element in your custom UI and not have to worry if the default UI changed something else in that file.

Does that make things clearer ?

Ang.

rjengel

I kinda grasp waht you are asking for.
You want to be able to say.. Change the Color of the Gauge without having to go in to the specific UI file of that window and changing the color coding, so that the Color of say Casting Gauge is Always PINK no mater what UI are you using (correct me if I am wrong)
Problem is this would cause a tremendous server wide lag with people using customs mods, because every time someone logged in or zoned in, the Server itself would have to do a search for the specific changes in not just the custom UI folder but also the defualt UI folder and this Custom Gauges Folder as well, which would cause more LAG and MORE Server slow run time..
But enough with that, simply put it is a great Idea that would be kool to have implemented, but it is not something I see Sony working on at all in the future. Just not enough people asking for Hey let me Change my Gauges Without Learning XML guys.. They hear too much about HEY I want more Content or Hey I want Kooler Loot, that is what they work on....
Sorry to say, but they always seem to quell the mass riot before they even think about the 1 or 2 guys in the back asking for something easy.

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Angahran

Not quite.
What I'm lookin at would allow someone to modify a specific part of the UI, e.g. the casting bar, WITHOUT having to have everything else that is also contained in the casting bar .xml file. You would have a file containing ONLY your specific changes.



The UI has nothing to do with the server. All UI processing is entirely local.
Not sure why you think someone else logging in would have an effect on your ui ?



This dosen't mean you don't have to learn XML. It simply means that if you wan't to make a very small change to 1 line, you don't have to include 500 lines of code simply because they happen to be in the same .xml file.

Ang

Mahein

Well, so far as my understanding of XML goes, the effect of a certain line of code depends as much on WHERE it is in the file in relation to the other parts (ie: what tag it is under) as it does on what the code itself says. Considering that in a given XML file you could have several lines of code that look identical but affect different items because of where they are, it'd be awfully difficult to make a system that could look at one or two separated lines of code and "decide" where they fit into another file.

You'd have to have some way of showing EQ WHICH line in the original XML you were wanting to replace with your modified line, and since XML doesn't use line numbers (a la BASIC) or any such to identify individual lines, you'd have a job coming up with some way to do that.

Not to mention that you'd have to look at the original file to find the line you wanted to change anyway, and since the size of the file (in terms of storage) isn't that big, why not just open the bloody thing up in your editor, make your changes, then save those changes to the new location anyhow? Seems to me that THAT is quicker, and cleaner, than trying to kludge up some way to do what you seem to be describing....

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Magelo

Daggun

EQ already does this. If you make a modified file, all you need in the custom folder is the file you customized. The game then looks in the custom folder and see's what you have and loads it. The files you do not have in the custom folder it automatically loads them from the Default folder. They did this to keep people from having to eat up hardrive space and having to update every patch all their UI Folders with the patched files. Makes for a very clean UI System I think.

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Daggun
Vazaelle

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