sinead

Hey you two,

I'm an ameteur XMLer who finally decided to take the plunge and attempt a full blown UI. Here's the trick though: By nature, I take on projects that are beyond my know-how and then I spend hours and hours trying to figure out what I'm doing.

Both of you have touched on the topic of unorthodox gauges at times - Haliken, I commend you on your vertical spell casting gauge... it's really really slick. Cormanth, your circular gauge is totally wild, and shows both a lot of patience and a lot of creativity.

Here's the thread in question, including my idea for my first UI. Of course I had to go and fall in love with an idea that is darn near impossible. After seeing the mods that you two have done, I know that there's gotta be a way.

http://www.eqgui.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4258

THE REAL TRICK: Is there any way that we can clean up our code? I've looked over both the vertical gauge and the circular gauge, and there's just GOT to be a way to make that code repeat itself somehow and just alter the positioning of each new "horizonal gauge" by x pixels each time, then repeat.

For example, Haliken, on your vertical gauge, let's pretend that the final product only needs to be 100px tall, rather than the 250+ that yours was. Now let's say that each of the gauges in the mod are 1px in height, giving us a total of 100 mini-gauges (Heh heh you're familiar with 100 mini-gauges). Now what we need to do is figure a way to loop the commands so that it will render mini-gauge_001 at X,Y, and then loop back and render mini-gauge_002 at X,Y+1... then mini-gauge_003 at X,Y+1+1, etc, tacking on an extra +1 for as many mini-gauges as are required. That way, there wouldn't have to be a separate chunk of code for each individual mini-gauge.

I don't know for sure if it's possible, but if you two could keep in touch with me and see what we can collectively come up with, I bet we could REALLY make some cool things happen. You can E-Mail me at [email protected] if you want to discuss this away from the board.

Haliken

Iy's like 1 30 AM and my lightblub just burned out so I'm typing by computer screen light. I see what you're aiming for with the gauge question, so a vertical gauge will cause less slowdown. I'll look into it. My EQ comp is a monster machine and I can run 4 vertical gauges with no significant framerate drop, but that's jsut me. Hrm, now that I think of it though, my buddy Rallere can use my vertical spellcast bar (which he modded to be green to match his rangery UI) without slowdown and his videocard is only a GeForce 2 MX something, 400 I think. Anyway, I'll look into it tomorrow morning, k?

Enok

And call me Enok from now on, not Haliken, uhm, yeah.

sinead

Hey Enok ,

Thanks for responding so quickly. I've looked over the code carefully, and though I haven't made it work yet, I just KNOW there is a way to make my loop idea work. The objective would be this:

Set up a block of code for each SIZE gauge - in my example from my first post, there are 2 gauge sizes. One is approximately 100px in diameter, and the other is about 40. For the sake of easy math, let's say that they are exactly 100px aned 50px, respectively.

The block of code that all the 100px globes would reference would give instructions to render "mini-gauge_01" at X,Y (X and Y would have to be defined seperately for each globe, as the pre-built block of code will only give coordinates RELATIVE to a starting point). Then the code loops back, adding +1 to our Y coordinate and to our reference image (100 separate 1px tall images would possibly be required to make the image a "globe") on the next time through ("mini-gauge_01+1" = "mini-gauge_02", and it is now rendered at X, Y+1).

The code for the 50px diameter globe would be half as difficult. The gauge would only move one pixel for every 2% of change (100% tall divided by 50px).

All 4 of the large globes shown in the example would call on the same block of code to operate, as would all 4 of the smaller ones. This would both greatly reduce the total amount of code involved, and also reduce the strain on systems. Running 8 vertical gauges wouldn't even be as code-heavy and laggy as running just ONE vertical gauge all typed out the long way.

I may be well in over my head, but I'm determined to at least go at this full steam until it works, or I am 100% convinced that it cannot.

Gwynafear

I know absolutely nothing about xml code, so I could be totally out of the ball park here...but falling back on the DOS terms, would it be possible to do some sort of IF/THEN for the loop you are talking about? And have it reference whatever frame number you are currently on? And then when the Bar_100 is reached it continues on? If memory serves (from a LONG time ago when I actually thought I could learn programming), there was a way to use a pair of IF/THEN commands to set up the kind of adding loop you are talking about. I have no idea if this is even doable in this kind of code. I have not looked at programming type stuff in more years than I care to think of. But it was just something that occured to me.

__________________
Gwynafear Fenrisoul
70 Druid (always LFexpG)

jobeken

XML is totally and completely stupid. It cant do anything but transfer data...

Basically your looking for a way to make a database perform complex math when what you need is a program to do it. If the EQ program doesnt understand the XML dataset that is fed to it, you have nothing...

I will define XML for people, hopefully in an understandable way...

XML is a markup language. Markup means formatting, I put a special delimiter around something to give it special meaning.

Well XML is similar to human language markup for data. It lets you define your own data types and transport them between dissimilar computer platforms runing totally incompatible programs with no change to the source data. Thats it.

The program that parses (reads) the XML is what turns it into something useful. So all your doing is changing the database and the program intelligently reads and complies with your changes. Unfortunately Sony Online Entertainment has not given us an <Orientation>degrees</Orientation> or similar type tag (delimiter) for their XML (dataset) to run in thier program EverQuest.

There are some very very intelligent tricks out there that exploit flaws in the program (EverQuest) and make it display things differently than intended.

Again, all your really doing is changing the database...If the program doesnt understand the database it breaks. If you cheat too much it breaks.

__________________
Jobeken Xoner