Since it's working fine for me, and yet others are saying they are having issues, I thought I'd post how it's supposed to work (
as per Niente) and how I accomplished the goal.
When the /loadskin command is used, EQ will process the information in the following order (which you can verify with the dbg.txt file in your EQ folder):
1) Deactivates the current UI in use and resets to default.
2) Loads the SUITE (Uifiles / xml) engine Custom UI files.
3) Loads whatever files are missing from your Custom UI skin (that are still on the SUITE engine) from the default uifiles folder.
4) Tries to load a custom UI for the Gameface engine on top of the SUITE one.
5) EQ looks for EverQuest/uiresources/Custom_Skin and loads those
6) If any files that have been converted to the Gameface engine aren't found in both the custom uiresources or custom SUITE folders it attempts to load them from the EverQuest/uiresources/default folder.
Step 1: Create Custom UI Folder for SUITE engine.
- Navigate to your EQ --> uifiles folder.
- Create a folder for your Custom UI (mine is called "EmilariUI")
- Put the XML and graphics files for your Custom UI directly into your CustomUI folder (NO subfolders).
Step 2: Create Custom UI Folder for Gameface engine.
- Navigate to your EQ --> uiresources folder.
- Create a folder for your Custom UI, ensuring that you use the same name as used in Step 1 (mine is called "EmilariUI").
- DO NOT put any html or graphics files directly into this folder. See below steps for more details.
Step 3: Create Custom UI Subfolders within the folder created in Step 2.
If we want our custom UI to work in the new Gameface engine, we need to copy their
new file formatting; not just dumping all the files we've customized into one location.
Inside your uiresources --> CustomUI folder (IE: inside my EmilariUI folder) create the following subfolders:
Inside the "assets" folder, create the following subfolder:
Step 4: Add your custom files for the Gameface engine to the appropriate locations.
- Graphics files belong in "img" or assets --> "images" folders.
- html files replacing the xml files belong in the "windows" folder.
My UI so far only has image assets in the "img" folder:
And the new files replacing the xml files in the "windows" folder:
Step 5: Load your CustomUI in EverQuest by either the /loadskin command or the "Load a Skin" window (from button in Options window).
If you've done things correctly, you should see your results in-game, and see the following in your dbg.txt file:
Code:
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00741:Loading UI.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00742:Deactivating previous UI.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00743:Unloading previous textures.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00744:Resetting UI.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00745:Resetting character select UI.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00746:Resetting game UI.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00747:UI Reset.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00748:Initializing UI.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00749:Initializing UI manager.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00750:Initializing fonts.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:39 2023]00751:Parsing UI XML.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:40 2023]00752:Loading default UI resources.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:40 2023]00753:Initializing game UI.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:42 2023]00754:Loading Icons.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:44 2023]00755:Resetting viewport.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:44 2023]00756:Game UI Initialized.
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:44 2023]00757:Setting new UI engine skin to UIResources/EmilariUI
[Mon Jun 05 22:51:45 2023]00758:Loading UI Complete.
The default UI folder in uiresources also contains some additional CSS, Javascript, JSON, and html index files - which you don't need to modify if you don't want to (modifying these is like modifying EQUI_Animations.xml, EQUI_Templates.xml, etc).
You don't need to include them unless you choose to modify them; the new engine will also pull any files not included from the default just like with the old engine.
You can read more on what these do in
this lovely post by Trenus.