UIBuilder update
 

Hello.

I wanted to let everyone know that the EQII team is planning on pushing an update to UIBuilder soon. It will likely end up on the test server first.

Highlights:
- zoom and scroll around the windows view
- splitter control
- VolumePage has a VolumeFill property (double click on it to cycle)
- Progress bars should now work vertically
- a few more property fields cycle on double click (Horizontal/Vertical, Left/Center/Right, Top/Center/Bottom,VolumeFill)
- UILibrary bug fixes since the last UIBuilder release (Oct 2004)
- A few modifications to the documentation

Please continue to report bugs with the tool and documentation as well as adding your feature requests to the wish list boards.


I also wanted to warn people that modifications to the Maintained window are going to break in an upcoming client update. Our goal is to not break user mods whenever possible. Sometimes however, it is necessary.

MrBobble

That is great news!

Ooh, good news. And a good reason to stop mucking with my maintained window. ;) Thanks for the heads up!

Sweeeeet :D

Awesome!

Love the fact that I didn't get a memory leak message on exit when I loaded it up and played with the new features..

Suggestions:
Make it so that the Popup Windows (ie SourceRect Window, Property Editor) are always on top of everything.. And the Main Windows paint correctly when they are moved.

Make it so the title on the tree view and in the task bar are the name of the UI from SkinInfo.

Make it so that If I right-click on an EQ2UI.XML and click "Open With" then choose the builder it opens the builder and file.

Thanks!

Released
 

The updated UIBuilder is on the test server.

Please post any new problems you run into.
MrBobble

thank you for letting us know!

Wow, Looking good :) No Memory Errors Woot.. Thanks SOE Bobble.

Bobble! Sorry to go off topic, but would you have any comments about /loadui? Is it on the backbuner? Is it in development? I could go for anything :)

Bobble, UIBuilder desperately needs a ColorStyle for assignment to any color property.

This would allow us to create a ColorStyle for all objects of a given type (window titles for example) and tweak the color globally.

With a properly configured UI, users could then easily change the appearance of their UI by editing the ColorStyles file ;)

I tried facking this by converting titles from Text objects to buttons, but it broak WC_Title behavor and no text replacement occured for dynamic titles.

Color Effectors are almost workable for this, but the need for a trigger event directly on the text object is problematic.

Sweet changes, thanks for the update. :D

Anyone know how to work the new "Splitter" control? It's got OnChange as a listed property so it's gotta be something useful. :p

UISplitter Sample
 

How to use UISplitter:

Splitters are currently not be available to test in the game (even on the test server.) Might be a case of letting you have access a little too soon. :)

However, you can play with them in UIBuilder.

Think sliderbar without the thumb/slider--
It needs a style - horizontal means the splitter moves vertically.
Background is the bar image. Startcap/Endcap draw on either end.

And then assign a widget/page to ControlBefore and ControlAfter. Before should be above or to the right, after = below/left.

You can set a minsize and/or maxsize on the two controls if desired.

Here's a sample window with a splitter:
It may be a challenge for UI mods to use the splitter for windows where the code is searching for widgets. Adding another page as a container solves lots of layout issues, including those for the splitter. But by default, the code doesn't search children for widgets. There is a fix for that, but it hasn't been applied everywhere yet.

The first "official" splitter will be used for the quest journal window in an upcoming update. To keep older versions from breaking, it will search subpages for widgets. If that proves useful, we will likely apply that to more windows.


MrBobble

Named colors
 

Zonx,

I have been trying to figure out a way to introduce "named colors" into UIBuilder since Beta. I'll start thinking about a solution again.

<Insert disclaimer here about scheduling and promising features and Gallenite never letting me post on the boards again>

You almost got me excited enough to start going into the code this morning instead of playing EQII. Maybe this afternoon...
MrBobble

I'm sure I'm going to get stoned as a heathen for saying this, but speaking as someone who's given up play time to be elbow-deep in C# for a mod support file, don't work too hard. We don't want you deciding this isn't fun anymore. ;)

/loadui
 

Drumstix42, it is on my whiteboard as a nagging reminder. I'll see if I can get it a higher priority (it is a crash bug afterall.)

Slightly off topic, I highly recommend The Bug by Ellen Ullman.

MrBobble

More from Mirk...


There is more good news ( besides the additional maintained slots ):

- The tooltip will display the target name.

- The window will fill down then left then left to right. It used to fill left to right is there was space.



UI modder notes:

- VolumePage now has a VolumeFill property. Set it to "left to right", "right to left", "down", "up".

- The DynamicData for the maintained window has been expanded to include spell name, target name, and duration data.



--
bob mitchell
EQII programmer

You have no idea how happy thi makes me. It'll make remodding the maintained window to the horzontal/right-to-left format I'm using so much easier than it was last time. :) Thanks for the updates.

..bought it...read it...good book :) I'll leave it at that. :nana:

any chance of making vertical progress bars show up in the ui builder?

More GameData Types, Save Window Settings.
 

One thing I would love to see in future versions of UIBuilder, and EQ2, is the removal of some of the 'FIXED' data, and adding more gamedata types.

Currently it is impossible to move around Inventory slots for bags, and hotkey slots.

For example, I want to create a bag that uses a 'Volume Page' so that the
bags can be resized. However the only way to do that now is to replace the Inventory.Bag 'Page' with a 'Volume Page'. And I may say doing so is a very UGLY solution. Adding a 'GameData.Bags.Slot1' ... 'Slot30' would fix this problem.

I would also love to have options, like checkboxes, and window settings to save. I had a mod that included checkboxes for 'player window settings' but they had to be re-set every time the player logged in.

the ones I have been making have allways worked :confused:
( first vertical bar I created was in december )