UIERROR.TXT and TEXTURE.TXT Information
 

I was tring to load some UI parts that I found and build a skin from then when I started to run into problems.

The first one was that I ran out of disk space. At first I thought this was wierd since I have a large and a nearly empty disk drive. I did some searching and found that I had two files that were HUGE!

The files were called UIERRORS.TXT and TEXTURE.TXT located in my EverQuest directory.

I started doing some investigating and found out a few things about those files.

First off, if there are ANY UI errors, they get logged....and there can even be errors if your UI works fine.

If a texture file is supposed to be used but isn't found the UI will use the default, but put a notation into your TEXTURE file....every tenth of a second.

If ANY file is pulled from the DEFAULT skin, a note is put into the UIERRORS file.

If your skin uses files from the DEFAULT directory, it notes that in your UIERRORS file....every time loads them (I think only once per character or session, not sure on that yet).

Over time, without knowing it, you log all this stuff into those files. Since I never thought to check on them, they grew to enormous size....over 4 gigabites each!

The logging however can be used to your advantage to locate errors in files, like the Animation errors that were causing alot of desktop drops.

First off, delete the files so you can get a clean start. They are located in your root EverQuest diretory (C:\Program Files\EverQuest or wherever you installed EQ to).

Then, log in your favorite character and open up all the windows and bags several times. Move around a little as well. Get a quick but thorough workout of your UI then camp.

You can open up UIERRORS.TXT and TEXTURE.TXT in Notepad, Wordpad, or whatever your favorite word processor is. It should tell you every time you had a UI problem or a texture it could not find.

One thing you can do to stop some of the logging is to copy the contents of the DEFAULT skin into the directory of skin you use but DO NOT OVERWRITE ANY FILES. All you want to do is make sure that a copy of all the files you are using from the DEFAULT skin are located in the skin you want to use.

Then read over UIERRORS.TXT and TEXTURE.TXT and see what is missing or needs to be replaced. You can then contact the skin maker and see about updates or replacement files.

After you make the changes, go back into EQ and test your UI again. After you camp (and if you fixed everything) your UIERROR.TXT file should be very small (1k or less) and there shouldn't be a TEXTURE.TXT file at all.

Also, now that its not logging all the errors anymore you may even see a disk performance increase, since it doesn't need to write to the error files every second or less.

I hope this helps. I'll be continuing to look over these files and see what else I can find out about them.


T

Great info - this should really be moved to a different forum under the Developer Discussions.

Hmmm... verification.
 

Well, I just checked out my own system and I am not having this problem. From my observation, each time I launch EQ, it creates a NEW UIERRORS.TXT file. As for the TEXTURES.TXT file, today is the first time I opened it and it's only a 1k file.

My guess is that there is something going on with your UI, your EQ configuration, your computer, or any combination of these things.

I'm wondering if anyone else can verify these problems?

Have you by chance checked for a virus?

You definitly have something going on with your pute.

First of all, if your info applied to everyone's computer, then I'm sure it would've got noted by sony and fixed by now.

Second, I've been doing alot of mods, and if your info was correct, then one of the 15+ mod folders that I log into to test would have logged alot of info since most of them only contain 1 or 2 files.

My Texture .txt file is only 25k, and my texturecache.txt file is only 1k.

You may want to post a list of the mods you're using... they may not be compatible and may be creating that file very quickly. What you may check is to see if one of the mods is trying to use texture info from one of the original mod texture files and can't find it and keeps going back and forth the whole time looking for it. Usually it won't load a mod if it's missing pieces that are called for.

another thing is that you may have a virus, or you may just have a broken "cache dump" file and it doesn't erase the file on it's own... any way, it shouldn't be doing that.

No virus....did check that.

Once I manged to open up the files (being 4g each had some problems), they were all about missing files, missing textures, loading files from the Default skin, etc.

Some of them had the same timestamp (HH:MM:SS) so my guess is that it checks every split second and logs any errors it finds.

I've been changing out skins alot, trying to find ones I like so that explains some of it.


T

Well, Theramor, I can verify the texture file. I've never looked at mine cause I'm basically computer illiterate and my texture file was 3.5 gigabyte! (Glad I have a 40gig hard drive) I'm wondering if this is part of the problem with my getting kicked to desktop often. I deleted it so will see what happens now. /shudder

Thanks for info

~Skarlett

Just checked mine... its only 1kb and its says:

UIErrorLog created at Sat Oct 26 13:35:09 2002

Is all... whew.. but thanks for the info for checking..

Zantaklawz

If your file is that big, then you might have a texture file missing from one of your skins. Follow the instructions I gave above and see if that is the case.


T

moved to a better forum :)