ui builder glitch?

[bioniclekid8]

In the pictures i see, the ui builder window opens the window your editing, but on mine the background stays back.

[Landiin]

You can not open up a individual window and see what it looks like visually. You can edit its xml properties but not visually see it. To visually see the window you have to open the file eq2ui.xml in the UI-Builder.

[bioniclekid8]

i just opened that, no luck???

[lordebon]

Originally Posted by bioniclekid8

i just opened that, no luck???

If you're talking about the screenshot from your original post... no you didn't. You must open eq2ui.xml and ONLY eq2ui.xml. From there you navigate down the tree to the file you want, but it will not work properly if you try to open any file other than eq2ui.xml directly.

[Ashlian]

I've opened the EQ2ui.xml file of every custom ui I have and the default ui folder and all I can still see in the UI builder is the same thing as in his screenshot myself. I've read virtually every how to use the UI Builder post in the entire forum here and I still must be missing something because nothing I've tried has yet made any window appear as anything but a red outline. Not sure what I'm doing wrong, I've followed the suggestions for placing things in various and asundry locations....the EQ2ui.xml files all open the full uis but I get no graphics for any window. Just the red outlines as he pictured.

[keezyrick]

Run UIBuilder from icon (make sure you have admin rights)
Select File|Open from the menu
Navigate to the directory where the UI is stored
typically \ProgramFiles\Sony\Everquest II\UI\Default
Select eq2ui.xml and Click Open button

After load, you will see a window with red outline in the view area. This is normal.

In the tree view for Objects, scroll down to find MainHUD and hit the (+) sign next to it to expand the list of items.

Now from the view window (where the red outline is) find the Left/Right arrow keys at the far right of the window. Press the right arrow key until the MainHUD tab is visible.

Click the MainHUD tab and the currently visible windows for that object type will be shown.

You can now select items from the tree view for objects in MainHUD and they will be outlined in the view window.

This the start to modifying objects.

Beyond that, there are layers where some windows will appear to be behind other windows. The best way to manage these is using the controls on the top of the tree view for objects to change the order of the objects so the currently selected object is moved to the top (front).

This should get you going. If you can't get here, you may have much deeper issues to resolve in your system setup.

[Ashlian]

Thank you, Keezyrick, that did get me a little farther. I'm actually using the FetishDarkRoyale set you modded, and I really love it, btw! Kudos What I'm trying to do, and I think this might be where I'm having a problem with the images showing up, is mod Aseekia's group window with the programmable buttons so that it is....smaller. Much...much smaller. It's just gigantic at the moment, it takes up so much space I find it nearly unusable though I really really like the buttons. So at the moment when I open the mainhud everything else is appearing but the group window is still showing as just the red outline, when that's the only window I want to work with. I have Aseekia's image file in the image folder as needed, and the mod works ingame. Do I need to set up a default folder with just that modded to work on it? And thanks again for the help! And the ui, I'm really enjoying your additions to Fetish....and if you ever feel like coming up with a group window with buttons I would abandon this in a heartbeat!

Though now it has my back up, I've invested a little too much time to give up yet....

[keezyrick]

Oh, sounds like you're in and things are looking better.

So you want to work with the group window. Select it in the MainHUD tree view and then hit the button at the top of the window that looks like a VCR control for PREVIOUS (kind of an arrow up with a line above it).

That will put the window to the top of the list and therefore in FRONT of the other windows. Use the other controls to manipulate a selected tree object within the list to change it's position or order. In the list Bottom is BACK, Top is FRONT.

Now, make sure the eyeball for the Groupmembers object in the MainHUD tree view is clicked so the eyeball is recessed. This makes the window visible. Subsequent layers of that window (or pages and other objects) may also need to be set to visible in order to see them in the builder. The game will activate these appropriately when group members join and such, so the designers typically turn off the pages that are not viewable under intial load sequence.

Finally, I would suggest you design with the PLAY button in the view window turned off, so you can move items around as necessary and take care to use play ONLY when you are ready to test features. Onxxxx commands can really play havoc on your mod if you got your parent.parent... stuff screwed up.

I highlight the object I am modding and save rather than clicking a root object (like MainHUD) or even the topmost root. This prevents modifying all the files in the UI.

As for buttons, you might try following the RAID window methods that Zonx used for modding the existing FetishDarkRoyale group window. I have made it pretty small (prob too small for some people's liking). You should be able to add a few programmable buttons out to the side of each player (like the raid window) and still have a smaller window than most group window mods.

Keep the faith, the modders here will help if you are clear and concise with your issues. There is a lot that I don't know about the mod stuff too, but I muddled through and used several other mods as guidelines. These guys have done some pretty cool stuff with what has been made available to them.

[Drumstix42]

Yeah, make sure you select the tabs at the top of the right-side screen. You'll usually have to resize the window upon opening, and drag it over, to see the left and right arrows to access the rest of the tabs.

Wish they would change this

[Ashlian]

Thanks for the replies, my problem was exactly what you suggested, that the groupmember windows were not set to visible...in the previous posts, I had thought that clicking the eyeball was what you did to make them visible, but after you posted about them actually being set to visible I checked in the attributes box and visibility was indeed set to false across the board. Setting it to true for all the groupmembers brought them up as I'm sure you can guess, so now I know that's all I need to do to make those red boxes fill up in future....that was very frustrating though, I wish it WAS just a clicky like the eyeball to turn the layers on and off as in Photoshop.

I have my group window just about finished though, thanks again to Aseekia for the original mod, I just didn't have room for it on my 17" monitor, wish I had the money to upgrade that one of these days! If it works, I'll post the smaller sized version for people with good eyesight. It still has all six buttons, though I took out the health percentage, since I would only use the mana percentage for stuff like VS. I can't skin it to blend with Fetish at all yet and could never get the Fetish power/health bars to fit, but perhaps I can work on the colors later. Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction, I've always been an avid user of mods, I'm afraid now I might have to start experimenting with them a little more

[Calendri]

So, to come into this thread with a similar issue and see if you wise ones can help me hehe.

I've played with UIbuilder quite a bit in the past to beat the default UI as well as a few mods I downloaded into submission to make them do exactly what I wanted them to do. I don't recall having any issues once I figured out the thing you pointed out already in this post.

However with the voice chat being implimented I have to go in and fix my raid window so that it will show the voice chat properly. However, when I open up the eq2ui.xml, it doesn't seem to be giving me everything anymore. MainHUD isn't there in the tree list nor on the tabs at the top (and I've shrunken it down so it fits on my screen & used the arrows to look at all of them).

Has anyone else had this happen and does anyone know what I could do to fix it?

[keezyrick]

I have had this issue also. It usually happens when I pull a bone-head edit directly in the files or inadvertantly add some code that saves in a module but then breaks the UIBuilder on next load.

My advice here is check your file dates and look closely at some of the last few files you have changed. One of them is likely to have some bizzarre stuff in it or be incomplete. Find and fix those issues and you should be back in business.

Most common issues for me are page copies that declare inside one module, but the new code I add ends up going to the original module I copied the page from. Not sure if this is from the CTRL +C and CTRL + V operation, or an actual bug that sometimes pops up in UIBuilder, but it has happened more than once to me. I see the code out of place in eq2ui_maindhud.xml or the file I changed has readable code up to a point where tons of stuff is jammed together.

Hope this helps.

[Calendri]

Thanks for the info =)

I'll see if I can figure out what I did.