Trelisha

Does anyone know a really good, step by step tutorial for modifying the xml and the tga files in order to customize the UI? I've been playing with things, figgured out a little on my own, but feel I could benefit from a simple tutorial that would take me, step by step, throught he creation of ONE effect - say creation of a custom buff bar or a modified name box to include Exp and AAexp.

If you know of such a tutorial, please post the url here.

Thanks.

God Bless,
mik

Sokol

open the AboutSIDL.doc it explains what all the parts/pieces are that make up the UI reading this gives you a better understanding of what your looking at while moding your UI.

A good starting point to teach your self would be to expand your player window abit and add the xp bar from your inventory window to it. A very minor change, but a good place to start learning.

-Sokol

Sokol

Oh, and TGA's are a bit trickier, beacuse you not only have to make them, and get the alpha channels right, you then have to understand the XML enough to load them and use them, mess with just the xml first makes life easier.

-Sokol

Trelisha

for people who can speak programese, the SIDL is pretty straight forward. But for dummies like me - I learn better with hands on exercises. Talk me through how to make that one change and it will all become clear :P Or at least I will understand what I am reading in the SID and correlate it to other modifications.

I can already see the relationship between the various tags and what they do. But I am hoping some one out there has an actual hands on tutorial that will walk me through one small change, along with how the targas are called - like the buff icons - how does the xml know what part of that picture to display? I can understand layerd transparancies and the like as I have worked with PSP for ages making transparent .gif images for the web.

HOW do I call just a peice of that picture - I've looked at the TGAs. I've seen that there is one file for buff icons and another for spell icons, rather than having a seperate file for each icon. The same with drag and drop items like weapon icons, back packs and all of that.

And if I want to remove a peice of a custom UI (the mana bar on the Infinity set for my rogue, for example) what do I remove and do I need to modify more than one file? I assume I only need to modify the 'player window' xml file.? I tried to remove all the tags concerning mana representation last night and crashed EQ because of errors in the xml.

Also, as I happen to like this UI and want to keep it through the various patches without havign to wait on the author to update things, it would be helpful to know HOW I parse through things to make the changes I need when my UI breaks because of a patch.

Personally, I find trial and error learning to be highly frustrating (no, I'll never be a developer) but I do like to have an example to follow so I can intuitively grasp what I am looking at and manipulating.

So that, and a million bucks would make me a happy woman. But I'll settle for a well written, learn by example and practice, tutorial :P

God Bless,
mik