[tknarr]

Originally Posted by dragowulf

1. What do we want to achieve? Why?
2. How do we want it to differ from the current default UI? Why?
3. Who would be the target audience? Why?
4. Should it replace the current default UI, but be toggleable like the old map vs. new map? Why or why not?
5. Should there be advanced features such as click-to-cure? Why or why not?

Just my opinion: the goal should be a cleaner, more compact default UI than the current one. One of the biggest reasons new people seem to switch to a custom UI is to get one that takes up less screen real-estate than the default. The most popular custom UIs seem to be the ones that cut down the clutter and space usage in window frames, bags, HUD elements. Following that lead can't, I think, be a bad thing.

I think the new default should be toggleable, so people who're used to the current default won't get a sudden incompatible change. They've got saved UI settings and a new default UI probably won't be compatible with those settings (windows will need to be different sizes and in different places, for instance). A real ideal would be to extend the UI settings format to hold the settings for multiple UIs keyed by the name of the UI, so when I toggled on the new default UI it wouldn't overwrite or try to use the old UI's settings, it'd create a new section in the UI settings file starting out with it's own defaults. And if I toggled the new UI off, as part of the change of UI it'd load the section for the old UI. If you key it by UI skin name, custom UIs would then do the same automatically so you could change between multiple UIs without your UI settings getting messed up on every change. That'd make it easy for users to try out UIs without the "Oh gods, if I try that and don't like it I'm going to have to re-do all my UI placement again!" factor.

Advanced features? They'd be nice and I'd like to see some internal UI support for things like click-to-cure to make them work smoother, but I'm not sure they need to be actually implemented in the default UI. Aim the default UI at the new user who needs the basic functionality while not confusing them with more features than they can grasp, and make it easy and natural to move on to custom UIs that require you to understand more of what's going on to take advantage of all the advanced features. POIs for the new map system would be an example: SOE implemented the underlying support, but left it to projects like EQ2Map to actually provide the POIs and create the full mod.