Community Wide Standard?
 

Im a long time dabbler in modding for different games and im just about to start diving into the whole UI modding for Eq2 with the aim to make a new UI for my guild.

but before i do i was wondering if there are any standards set up for modders?

im thinking mainly along the lines of. textures that can be interchanged between mods.
ie. a texture template .xml file. that has a list of all the major windows and controls and within which you can set the template style. and having this completly seperate from the other files. that way we could have some people working on textures /graphics that could be used in ANY mod.and leave the coders with more time to tweak their codes.
not sure if this is a good idea at all. (big newb label on forehead).

I tend to really like the way webpages are setup. where you have each section in different files. and a modder can just mod that particular image.

Yes, much is "standardised" insofar as we reuse a lot of elements from the Default UI (anything that we do not specifically mod will be automatically be taken from the Default UI).

For example, I'm pretty sure that the skins (graphics files) I made available for ProfitUI would work for most if not all other mods that rely on graphics from the default UI (since my skinpack modifies those default graphics).

On the other hand, modifying the default UI's basic style definitions in the XML files is generally a bad idea since you increase the likelyhood that your UI will break in some way when the DefaultUI is updated.

And of course you can generally combine any one modded window another modded window, or drop modded windows into a complete interface set, so a lot of modularity is already there.

yeah i guess its a rather complex system huh. well i thinki figured out how to edit dds files.

thanks for the answer bud.

im currently writing down my plans for my UI rework. wish me luck. ill prolly be back with questions.

You're welcome, ask all you want!

Btw, don't forget about the alpha channel when you're editing the .dds files. ;)

lol. thats the one thing i came back to search forums about :P gonna try to see if anyeone posted anything about what tyep to save.

saw somethign about 8:8:8:8 something

Hope that helps thats the settings I use [img]/images/smilies/smile.gif[/img]