UI Engine Changes
 

Hello Custom UI friends! For the benefit of those that don't go read the official forums much, I thought I'd repost some upcoming changes that'll be affecting us.... namely, we're getting a new UI engine.

See the 2023 Roadmap for more details.

With the new engine, comes a new language. We're moving from XML to HTML5. These changes are aimed to be on the Test server sometime in March and to go live on the April patch.

Darkpaw will be offering further details for us, and a conversion tool at a later date.

Thanks for this. Need to brush up on my html5 and html in general.

Something tells me that one month on test won't be nearly long enough to work out the kinks. I expect rough times ahead.

The engine goes "live" on test in March, but if you read both of the dev posts in the linked thread, it's going to be a slow port from the old system to the new throughout the year. Their goal is to have a port of the default UI completed by the end of the year. There are conversations happening about a new default UI, but we won't be seeing anything on that until 2024 (or possibly next beta) most likely.

There will be time to work out the kinks.

Will there be changes to what we can do as custom authors? Yes, most likely. Will there be kinks? Yes of course. I'm still more excited than intimidated personally.

You're welcome mh272, I figured there'd be other authors like myself needing to brush up on their html skills. :D

New UI engine going live today on test. good luck

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...cussion.289570/

Confused
 

I'm confused on what changed.
They said they 'converted' several windows but comparing the 'default' UI on Live to the one on Test the only difference is the slide they added to the options window.

The new UI is located in the uiresources folder, not the uifiles folder.

The conversion tool is located in the LayoutConverter folder.

Meeko mentioned on the EQResource discord that the Conversion Tool still has some kinks to be worked out, and there will be further documentation provided later.

answered
 

ok, so the new UIs live in a different folder, uiresources and not uifiles.

I really hope their conversion tool actually works because the thought of having to learn a new programming language and then rebuild my UI from scratch is terrifying :(

It is a bit intimidating for sure... So far the converter tool has only managed to give me a headache trying to figure it out, so I'm glad there's supposed to be more information coming.

I use a lot of custom art for my unpublished full UI (I was about to publish it then they announced a new engine so I held off :p ), so I'm starting with getting that all happy in the new format, which has been easy enough so far.

I haven't started to play too much with the code, but from my initial look while it's quite different it also feels more intuitive - for simple changes at least.

scared...
 

The biggest changes in my UI are stripping out all the frilly borders, so hopefully something simple like that will 'just work' ?
That and using T.King's class graphics (I wish he'd finished all the classes).

Then mainly a few customized windows.

If the converter doesn't work I may have to try begging the smarter people here to take a look and help me out :)

Has anyone tried to convert? I just keep getting the default ui no matter what I do.

Have I tried? Yes... have I failed? yes... do I hope the future update Meeko promises is coming will help? Yes.

I've been able to figure my way around manually changing some graphics, that were just custom reskins of the default UI with... odd results.

Example: in my image editing software, both my original custom wnd_bg_light_rock.tga file and my new wnd_bg_light_rock.png file for image backgrounds looks the same:



When applied to the game, they are not the same:



I'm not a graphics expert like Drakah, so I'm still not 100% sure if it's a me issue or a Gameface Engine issue... I'm thinking engine issue though.

When it comes to the code side of things, if I open the SUITE engine xml file, and the Gameface engine html file for one of the windows, I can follow along fairly easily, but anything I've tried to manually modify has been unsuccessful so far (I'm sure it's a me issue).

Also, any custom Storyline mods that have embedded links crash straight to desktop when you click a link - not sure that's going to continue to be supported going forward.

Interesting, it's not just me ;) :)

Are you doing your graphics work in the \uiresources\default folder? or \uiresources\<customui> folder? anything I do in the <customui> folder, just loads default.

So, in the uiresources folder, I made a second folder like we normally would to hold custom UI files

So EQ --> uiresources --> emilari

In that folder, I recreated the assests, img, and windows subfolders.

Inside the img subfolder, I added the custom wnd_bg_light_rock.png file.

Then, in EQ, I just did a /loadskin command and it loaded the art asset.

For code edits, there's a new command: /ui reloadhtml

dumb question
 

A dumb question from someone with no HTML5 skills...

Is there any type of error log for the new UIs like the old uierrors.txt file ?

I've run my UI through the converter but it doesn't load.
Took me a while because I didn't realize the new UIs are the ones with '(gf)' on their names in the /loadskin list.