where does journals.activequest get the checkbox art from?

[thorvang]

title sums is up. where does those art for the checkboxes in journals.activequest come from? it's not images/commonelements.dds

[thorvang]

found it, makes use of those imagelist styles.

[lordebon]

Yeah, if you open it in UIBuilder you should be able to look under "Style" of the checkbox to see where its getting the art from.

[Landiin]

Yea, the UI is a really unorganized After the release of DoF I they looked like they where in the process of changing how they organized things. WindowElements, CommonElements ect..

But with the coming release of EoF I notice they are adding stuff in random places. Some new things here and there that doesn't follow any pattern.

The best thing to do is look at the style property to find the style. Then you have to look at the style to see where it's getting it's images from. Kind of depressing they don't have a standard. I makes it a pita to make drop in skins. When 95% of the UI elements use things from a common place, then there is that 5% that use things from another place.

[Zonx]

Which is one reason I use my own namespace with replacement styles for everything

[lordebon]

Originally Posted by Zonx

Which is one reason I use my own namespace with replacement styles for everything

I must say, its great too Zonx.

Whenever I've modified FN that really helped, especially since I have limited experience with the UI /grin =)

[thorvang]

Originally Posted by Zonx

Which is one reason I use my own namespace with replacement styles for everything

that's what i'm currently doing for my full UI ^^ own namespace with a couple of styles, striking out unused stuff and finally getting rid of everything that offers styles, fonts, images etc.

guess my UI will have half the size of the original

[thorvang]

Originally Posted by lordebon

Yeah, if you open it in UIBuilder you should be able to look under "Style" of the checkbox to see where its getting the art from.

that has been my problem, the journals.active window has no checkbox widgets. it's a treeviewstyle container what receives the checkbox styles as parameter.

the whole UI is SO inconsistent it hurts

[lordebon]

Ahh right, I forgot we were talking about the journals window, which has to be dynamically filled by the game.

I think if you find a checkbox like it though, then the path should be the same =)

[Landiin]

Oh yea, that info is in a template. I forget the templates name, but I beleave it pulls the style from /CommonElements.Checkbox.data.style and /CommonElements.Radio.data.style

Originally Posted by Zonx

Which is one reason I use my own namespace with replacement styles for everything

I too use to do that. But I only do it now for object I add. The reason is; if any one wants to use a window from default or some other mod, that/them windows take on the look of default and then you have an ugly mix of styles. So I just change SOE's and you can drop most any mod into eXtreme and it will use eXtreme's skin.

[Zonx]

Modifying SOE styles has a whole slew of other issues. Here's a few...

1) They use image slices pulled from a slew of "less than optimal" images, which hurts performance (though they have consolidated a bunch).

2) SOE designers insist on gratuitious use of dropshadows and blank space. This forces their developers to allow space in frames to accomodate the shadows (results in dead space around the window frame). It also requires a fatter image format with multiple levels of transparency (hurts performance).

3) If you tweak SOE style sizes to accomodate your frame/image widths, chances are other mods that use those styles will have alignment problems and look like hell anyways.

4) If you rely on SOE styles and only change images to work within those styles, you're either stuck with the bulky layout and controls they use or you wind up with hit area issues (a 16x16 checkbox image is displayed in the SOE standard 30x30 object, so clicking near your checkbox image acidentally activates it).

5) When SOE tweaks a style or image (say they decide the entire UI should be blue instead of tan), anything of theirs you're using gets changed weather it works for your UI or not.

Ultimetly it depends on the level of control you want over the UI. If you don't want SOE changes to directly impact your work, NEVER use their styles or images.

Personally I've found the "Replace Everything" method has resulted in far less breakage per LU. It was more work on my part initially, but has saved me time in the long run. Its also allowed me to optimize things SOE didn't for one reason or another. Generally the only changes I need to make are adding totally new elements or hard-coded architecture changes. When SOE reskined the default UI, almost nothing in Fetish needed adjustment.