How hard is it to learn?

[Muscular Beaver]

Can anyone tell me how hard it is to learn to make UIs for EQ2?
I see the UIBuilder came with EQ2, but is it easy to use or do I need to know programming/coding?
I made minor changes to EQ1 UIs a few years back with the help of some nice utility (cant remember name) but thats about it. I cant write XML files in the notepad if thats what it takes. Edit maybe, but not write from scratch.
Would I have to learn that? Wheres a good place to learn it?

Thanks guys and gals!

[Viallynor]

It is not terribly difficult to make minor changes, (I have been going through and making all the windows fit on my screen and still show the game window.)

The hard part is figuring out just what you can change, and what you can't.
UIBuilder from my understanding is sort of a "Working Project" and everything that users are capable of is not known.

Add to that, the fact that while the developers are helpful in most ways, there is some information that they just don't even appear to know.

I would suggest that if you are just looking for minor changes, take a look at what is already available for download, somethng might match what you are looking for.

Go from there, make comparisons from the original to what they did in the modification, some will be simple, some will fry your brain

Does that help?

-V-

[Muscular Beaver]

I actually wanted to try and do a whole UI myself, since I am not 100% happy with what is already available. Can I learn that in a few weeks?

[Drumstix42]

It's always good to have previous knowledge, when learning a new one. But, of course you always have to start somewhere.

The bundled UIBuilder is a great tool. But that alone would probably stop you from going farther than editing (but not for certain). I'm not really sure where's a good place to pickup on XML, the language is kind of funky really, comparatively in my opinion. Sort of different depending on what's using it.

Basically, you can look at it with "tags" that have attributes. And then if you can under stand pages having things inside them (shown in the UIBuilder tree), it's not too hard from there. In editing at least.

A cool tip though, opening your EQ2ui files in FireFox will show if your missing ending pages, just through I'd throw that out there

But yeah, start small, and easy. UIBuilder will definately get your under way. Think there are some tutorial on this forum on getting started.

[dragowulf]

To be honest, it took me about a good 2 days to learn how UIBuilder works, thanks to Faetyl. It's not hard, you got to know what your doing.

[Muscular Beaver]

But can you do EVERYTHING (especially special things) with UIBuilder? Dont you have to have at least a little knowledge of XML?