Creating an UI

[Essq]

Hey guys, i recently started playing everquest II. I'm used to playing a Restoration druid in World of Warcraft, and now i'm trying out the warden of EQ. And to be honest there is not a whole lot of difference on these healing classes from different games. Sofar i actually have the same binds as i did in wow.

So i heard ppl talking about addons, and ofc you need addons to survive this endgame, so i thought i might aswell start doing my ui as i progress. In world of warcraft i used a whole lot of time on designing UI's and did a few guides for some guilds, so i have a basic understanding of what addons are.

So what i would like from you guys is to point me in direction on some addons that have some similarities to what i want. First off, let me post a picture of my old wow UI, to give you an idea of which addons i might be able to use.

Old UI:
Here


Player/Target/Target's Target/Focus:
I want these to be big since i'm only going to give them a quick overlook once in a while. And i only want to show nessecary info, such a focus bar only is a healthbar with a name and a cast bar above it.

Raid Group: These boxes indicates the HP, Dispelable debuffs, Running HoT's, and Afk/dead status + range indicator.

If a player gets low the bar behind the names will indicate how low the target is, atm all is at 100%. If there is a debuff on the player i can cure as a warden i want i shown as a green border around the player. Also the square you see on one of the groupmember is showing that a Heal Over Time is running on that targer. The position of the square (right. left, top and bottom) shows which hot is running. The coulour on this is yellow which means that the heal is soon over.. (staus are Green - Yellow - Red) Another thing it indicates is when a player runs out of range it gets gray.

Damage / Heal Meter:
It just measures the damage and healing done over the last fight and records it. Shows stuff as Total Damage, DPS, Damage taken, Deaths and such.

As you may have figured i have none of the "original" WoW bars or panels. This is done to secure a clean UI where the eyes can relax and focus on what's needed. I would like and addon which removes all the EQ panels, and a addon that lets me create new panels aswell..


I know that this was an awefull lot, but i hope you'll still be able to help me out.. If you do i promise to put up a screenshot when' im 90 and done

Regards Essq.

[EQAditu]

Well, the first thing you're going to have to learn is that there are just a large amount of things that you cannot do. Having never played WoW, I don't really have a grasp on how much is allowed and how expansive the API is, but essentially you write mini-applications. In EQ2, you more or less modify the already existing functionality. There are few things you can accomplish outside of what Sony has already done -- we lack the data sources and the programming language needed to easily do much.

Take a look at the UI\Default\eq2ui_gamedata.xml file or similar. That will list the entirety of global data we can access at any time. Things outside of that are hard-coded by the game to display on certain elements in certain windows. One part of the UI can reference an unrelated part, so we can share data among windows, but it's obviously rather hackish and quirky.

The only game actions that can be taken by the UI are actions that can be accomplished using an in-game slash command. Like /say, /camp or /useability. All game options are also in-game commands, so those are available as well.

The concept of the UI is a hierarchy of "pages" that contain child pages which might contain things like labels, buttons, etc. The base XML file references other XML files and that's how the hierarchy is generated. In concept, at least... during runtime some of the base complexity is merged. Like Windows Forms programming, the EQ2 UI is event driven. You handle events in the UI to accomplish things. You can technically create your own custom windows, but more often you'll modify(override) existing XML files.

Unfortunately the UI scripting is extremely basic. There is no innate flow logic, no parametrized methods, no string manipulation, no arrays and only simple comparisons. Offline storage is completely hackish. Anything resembling the above is done by taking advantage of what little we do have and using it in unique ways.