Theramor

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.


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