Shifting main view vertically?
 

Sorry if this question has been asked and answered before, but I couldn't find anything with a search.

I really like the widescreen view that the game has by default when you first play, but I'd really like to be able to shift that window up or down so that all of the "black space" is on the bottom instead of being split evenly above and below the view window. Is that possible to do? I'm guessing it isn't since I haven't seen any UI that changed the positioning but i thought I'd ask if anybody knew how to do it.

Thanks,
Eachann

This is something I've wanted since the game was released. In eq 1 it was called the /viewport command, and with just a little knowledge of screen resolutions and pixel counts, you could basically "draw" the world anywhere on your screen - just on the upper 2/3 of your screen, or on the left half, even as a small square in the middle of the screen with "black space" on every side. It didn't outright cover your view with the black space either IIRC, it kind of shoved most of it in the space you rendered. This was ideal for dashboard type UI's that packed all the vital information in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, as you could render the viewable area above the UI and virtually have a UI free playing experience. Why this command was booted in favor of the rather inadequate widescreen option is beyond me.

In your eq2.ini file add the line

cl_letter_box_position 0.999

and it will position the letterbox down to the bottom of the screen.
Keeping the black bar only at the top. With screen visibilty all the way to the bottom.

There are probably other tricks with that command line that might work better than my example, I am sure others will post theirs.

Havent tried this like but the top and bottom of the letterbox are 2 pages within the parent, So why cant you just set the size there? with say the top being smaller than the bottom or somthing like that lol

I tried this and it worked, but it had an unfortunate side effect... it seems that players names and guild names do not get shifted along with the view window, so instead of displaying above players heads they now display over their faces. Is there a correction for that as well?

If not, I will perhaps try to figure out how to do it Laff's way... I'm not really used to xml though so I was trying to make my changes with as little "coding" work as possible :)

-Eachann

Try this then...

NOTE this is untested!

What I did was move the "FramePage" location up and then resize it down

If it dont turn out too well then maybe just moveing the page up without a resize will do the trick?

I had that problem too of the names being misplaced. What I am doing actually, is running full screen with no letter box. My screen is at 1600x1200 reso. I placed my chat windows to the top of the screen and run it like that. I made my background opaque for the chat boxes so I sorta "cheat" and make it appear my letter box is still there. Every window at the top is modified to a black opaque background so I get no bleed through of the game itself. I know it is "cheating" the letterbox, but I really was never a fan of the letterbox anyways, I felt it was a waste of space and with my monitor, I want all the background graphics in game I can get.

Screen shot attached:
Please don't post huge images directly into the post. Horizontal scrolling doth suxoreth.

Ok, I tried this but it didn't work right. It was still centered between the top and the bottom of the screen, but there was a big gap between the gold borders and the edge of the view, so I think it just shrunk down the area of the view window.

I don't quite understand what your suggestion is though. I loaded up your xml in the UI builder and looked at it, and I was going to try to remove the "resize" as you said, but when I looked at the original file to see what you had changed I found that the frame page didn't even exist originally, so then I was really confused.

I really need to learn xml :\ the EQ1 interface was a lot easier to just figure out and tweak than the EQ2 interface.

-Ea

Forewarning: Tweaking the UI files will do nothing for this.

The only way to shift the screen center at the moment is to use cl_letter_box_position, and the only way to deal with the ProxyActor shifting issues is to play in first-person view with the camera centered all the time.

Ok so there is no way to shift the player names along with the screen then? That's too bad, I'm really happy with how I had my UI when I used the cl_letterbox_position line... but the names covering people's faces bothers me a lot. I really hope there will be a solution for this eventually...

-Ea