Curious as to what class you play? My class requires me to time CAs between AA rounds and I find the combat window useful for that.

Easiest solution for the two chat windows, ask Samejima really nicely to release his autoattack cast bar for the project ;) Or spend some coding time to recreate it.

I *really* like this idea. *Wanders off to Rothgar's office to bug him about it*

Berserker. Most of my CAs are one of two lengths, so I find it easier to just work out how many CAs per autoattack swing and then pause a beat at the appropriate count. I probably lose a few swings, but it's sufficiently close (especially since TSO with taunts and hate generation taking priority over sheer DPS for holding aggro). Part of it's that we tend to avoid things where it's absolutely critical that everybody be at 100%, I take being that close to the edge as a sign we need bigger guns. Old Shin'ain proverb: "If you find yourself in a fair fight, it means you screwed up somewhere in the planning stages."

If I needed better timing, rather than watching the combat scroll I'd probably just set up audio triggers in ACT (ding on auto-attack going off, dong at weapon delay - 0.5s later to cue me for the upcoming swing). That way I can get the cues without having to try and spot them in a scroll that's going by too fast to read.

I thought docking would be semi possible because i just noticed earlier that the voice bar docks on to the chat window.

God I hated that when it first came out.

Back to the topic... I personally think 2 chat windows are useful and should be incorporated. Make one optional -- give it a place to be, but don't make it so integral that it looks wrong if it's not there.

So now that there is some dev attention on the topic, how the heck did Raz(Samejima) do it? =\ The thread here on it died a while back and my side efforts proved futile.

Easiest way to get me to pay attention to something is to send me an IM in all caps ;) -- To be honest though I think we were all just busy with expansion and then holiday stuff and once that settled down we started scanning the community sites again.

Of course with a slice of Gnome pie and some Pixieberry mojo...:nana: ;)

Ok I am finishing up this functionality today, but I wouldn't expect to see it until GU52. Basically I am giving you 3 new elements:

Self.TimeSinceAutoAttack
Self.TimeSinceSecondaryAutoAttack
Self.TimeSinceRangedAutoAttack

These will all have the following meaning:

Float Val => milliseconds since last auto attack around
Progress Value => Float Val / Weapon Delay

Does that sound about right to everyone?

Nice. If Float Val > Weapon Delay will you be capping it at Weapon Delay?

And regarding the progress bar would it not be better to have it count down instead of up?:

Progress Value => 1 - Float Val / Weapon Delay

Not a modder, but going to chime in

In vanguard and war, alot of the ui's have a ingame option panel aka control panel if you will. You can turn things on or off, change the look of the ui, scaling, save, load different settings, and other things. But with the panel, you could really cater to the new players and to the players that like the added info, or added features like click to cure or stats. Good way to hit both target audiences. I really havent seen anything like this in the eq2 uis. I think and correct me if im wrong, but profit has something similiar, but not as fleshed out with options.

Also for me, coming back to eq2, I find it a little hard to find a ui that works. I love profit with vangurk skin. I think the author of vangurk would be a great addition to the ui since he can make a awesome skin for it thats easy on the eye.

If you need people to test the ui out, let me know. Would happily test it out and give you feedback.

The problem is that we (as modders) cannot store any changes to windows that we make via script, that is why you are not seeing this.

The problem is many of the modders have left so many nice interfaces are no longer maintained. :( Always go by the last modified date, if it's too old it will very likely not work anymore.

Ok I went ahead and capped it at weapon_delay and added a toggle "cl_reverse_autoattack_timers" to select the direction of the progress bar.

First point: If that isnt an option of doing, could simply do what your UI does with auto update. Intial install is the basic ui, but when you run the updater you can pick different features you want. Taking the scripted file and putting it into the ui. Maybe Im thinking of things that cant be done.

Second point. Ive been noticing that and its sad to see since the game is better one out of the mmos that have come out lately. But still 4-6 really good ones out.

rhyoin, is sounds like you want more of a addon/plugin based system through the UI options, where you can toggle different modifications on and off.

I agree this would be cool, but seems like something not accomplish-able through just a UI modification/reskin.

Aye, i think that is what really made alot of ui's stand out in those games. Added tons of functionality (sp) to it. But I understand not every game can do that. DAoC had many great mods that were able to cater to both parties. Just took a little time and energy.

If I read write, you (modders) want to do a rekin/ui mod of the default ui that is more user friendly but also be something an advance user would want to use. Going to use profit ui because I think it gives the best example of what I am saying. Adding a auto updater and letting you choose different varients (sp?) Many post back where talking about removing click to cure and other features like that. YOu can do that with the main ui, but for people that want that feature, then can click on the varient and installs that window with the feature.

Advance windows would be zip files with the xml/images and when you choose the window or mod (whichever you like to call it) it automatically installs. Believe profitui AU does this and works great. AU caters to the new players and existing players. Giving you the "basic" ui + different "windows" to the players that would like it. Which is your target goal. Making the Ui cleaner, more functional to both type of players. I agree the default UI needs some uplifting.

Yeah, I specifically coded that window to dock to chat windows. I could probably come up with a more generic solution, but you'd have windows snapping to other windows when you don't want it to happen.

Looks like the AutoAttack timers will go out with GU51, Rothgar also took it upon himself to see about adding it to the default G15 windows.

If you want one window to stick to another they could mod it via your OnMove command. Add a configuration window with a dropdown to select the window you want to dock to and which side you want to dock to (N, E, S, W), then have it add OnMove code accordingly.

We're getting a little off-topic here, but its all good stuff so that's ok. :)

Has anyone had a chance to work on any UI mockups yet? I haven't had a chance to do mine, but I have one sketched out on my whiteboard I was showing to Zoltaroth. I should have time this weekend to sketch it up in Photoshop.

I've also added a new page to the Logitech G15 to support Zoltaroth's auto-attack timers and its working great! I was just testing this out and its very cool, I think you guys will like it. We discussed whether or not we should support this in the default UI and decided we'd leave it for mods. It falls into the realm of advanced features and would be one extra window that new players and casual players would have to deal with.

Something else I wanted to let you guys know. I'm finishing up the conversion of our INI files into XML format. It wont be done for 51 but hopefully will go out with 52. This new format will be much easier to view and tweak. It'll be more friendly for us as developers as well. This change will also pave the way for me to provide you guys with a method to save and load values from UI windows so your custom mods can save data between sessions. As long as your saved values don't conflict with values we expect to find, you should be able to save whatever you want in a player's UI settings file.

It'll probably work something like this; any custom values you write to the main page will be serialized into the INI file and read back in when the UI is loaded. Unless of course you guys have some better ideas, I'm all ears. We could require that you create a data object with a specific name like "CustomData" and all values in that object would be written to the INI file. This might be a cleaner implementation.

I posted what I think should be changed but I can post a graphic mock up easy if you prefer sir.

Yay for the xml settings, I admit I didn't believe I'd yet see them. :) Saves me from abusing the Add/Delete POI functionality for this. :p

I think it would be a bad idea to write just any value, we use a lot of temporary variables that should not be stored. A CustomData object would be fine I think. Or alternatively if you want you could just store any variable that ends with "Store" or something like that.

But if at all possible could you please store non-custom properties that have been changed by script as well? E.g. if I show, move or resize a window via script it would be great if that could be stored. For bonus points also the window settings modes None/Frame/Frame & Titlebar according to the visible status of the respective window elements (since we can't toggle it directly).

Chat windows
 

I used to use multiple chat windows, but since I play a priest I have a zillion hotbars open for rezzes, buffs, etc. so I don't have a lot of screen space even with a 1440x900 monitor. I've consolidated it into one window with four tabs: General (channels, ooc, say, quest text, etc), Combat, Guild, and Tells.

One thing most casual players don't know about tabs that is very helpful: when you receive a new message in a nonactive tab, the tab label color changes. A change this small is often missed. If you decide to use tabs in this UI, perhaps we could see a small ! icon appear when there is new text in a tab. This would be more intuitive and noticeable.

As for the combat tab...I rarely ever look at it. When you add in procs, haste, or other players, the amount of spam makes it far too fast to bother looking at during a fight. So personally I don't feel like it warrants a separate window, because as mentioned above you can keep track of that stuff just as easily with floating numbers.

Keep in mind that the UI settings file doesn't really correspond to the physical layout of the UI window. So I don't want to use a solution that requires I parse the entire UI structure looking for variables that need to be saved. This is why I think something like a custom data container would work well. In code I just need to check for the existence of this container and save the values.

Also I'm not sure that trying to save every modified value in script would work, or even give the behavior that many people would want. I think there are plenty of times you don't want things to persist. Also, this would require reproducing the structure of the UI page in XML so we would know how to apply the value changes. Like in the case of the "Text" field being changed on multiple elements.

I think for this feature, its best to stick with a container and let you guys determine what gets saved and what doesn't.