ACUI - Design Model
 

By no means it this done, but it's my first venture into the EQ Modding Scene in quite a while. I'll do my best to explain the screen image below...



Starting Top Left and working around Clockwise...

Lag Meter:

Simpler Lag Meter, Green Good, Yellow Partial Loss, Red Drop pending...

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Stats Center:

Two main bars complimented by sub highlights for Pet Health and Casting time.

Perhaps placement of a yellow bar for stamina in-between the two primaries.

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Spells and Effects:

Using the normal small tKing G2 Spell Gems to provide a small yet visable spells and effects window.

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Long Target Window

Displays a long named target window

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Group Window

Traditional Simple Group Window, Red for Health, Green for Pet Health.

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Inventory Window:

Standard Inventory window with minor offsized icons and transparencey standard.

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Chat Window:

Normal Chat Window (Custom Scroller)

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Bottom Command Interface:

A mix of Hotkeys and the Window Selection box. Allowing the use of several commands or windows from a simple, non-intrusive selector..

Preferences
Map (For LoY Users)
LFG
Combat Mode Toggle

Hot Buttons
Hot Button Menu Selector

Inventory
Skills
?
Chat Options

Before anyone says anything, this design and the basic imagery is borrowed from another online game. I feel this style of simple interface is what EQ has needed for a while over all the extremely oversized windows that are common....

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Spell Selection Window:

Normal window used to cast spells.

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Please give me your opinions and thoughts, I'm surely not a coder here so I'm just working up a concept I might be able to work with a coder on if any showed an interest.

I'm still working on the other windows, however they are not complete and I will update this thread from time to time.

I love it!

very nice :) AC2's interface I very muched liked, its too bad the game still was too bleh for me :nana:

Ya, I worked as staff in AC(1) and just couldn't get into AC2 after the beta. Too much bad blood, but the UI still is pretty good. ;)

Good stuff, and I think it would be a very well received EQ UI if you do the work.

Great look I would defintely be willing to try it out depending on the lag effects, but looks great.

This UI going to be interesting to try

Updated with a bit more detail...

I think it's shaping up nicely, however give I'm not a coder as I said before I don't know if this will ever evolve past a massive (24 meg) Photoshop Document. ;)

Who knows, when I finish the mockup maybe one of the awesome Modders around here will be interested enough to pick it up and work with me to put the design into use.

Hey Elezibeth, remember me? =)

Anyway, if you could supply me with the graphic texture files I can try and give you a hand in making this UI. I don't have much experiance using and manipulating textures and what not, but I'm willing to learn...

Let me know.

Nastix

I think you are going to have some trouble with that bottom window. You can't put the hotkeys into the window selector window and you can't put the window selector buttons into the hotkey box. You can achieve approximately the right visual effect by making a lot of window pieces that look nice when you set them next to each other, but you will have to have all the window selector pieces on one side or the other of the hot buttons. Perhaps you can balance them visually by putting the actions window on the other side.

That is an attractive ui. I'm a big fan of long targets, clean lines and for the love of god NO TITLE BARS lol!
Will be pleased to see how this shapes up.

Hey there Nastix! I sure do remember you! ;)

I'll be glad to do that soon as I finish a few more of my mockups in that main screenshot...need to get a few more of the concepts implimented before it could even hope to start to be coded....

Also, given the previous messages, I am going to attempt a rework on part of the bottom bar and see what I can come up with balacing out the actions and window selectors...I might just keep it that way and reassign values. ;)

Naw, actually you wouldn't have to do that. You could just build the window selector to be really wide and have a large empty space in the middle, then when you line up the hot buttons window and the window select window properly, you'd get the illusion of one large bar with buttons on either side.

Can't click through transparent areas so once you clicked on the selector window's buttons the hotbutton window would be unclickable. That's why people said this wouldn't be viable. I have a way to get past this and force the selector window buttons into two windows but one of them would have to have a set location regardless of resolution so it would only look good at one resolution (or you'd have to make a seperate version of the XML for each resolution).

Enok

I was kinda thinking there would need to be preset locations for this just to keep the bottom bar looking right...in that effect would the dual windows still be a problem?