UI change coming shortly

**DNeufeldSOE** · #1 10-11-2006, 09:12 PM

Heads up to all the mod developers that (hopefull) by the end of this week we're planning on having a revision to the UI on the public test server that addresses some performance issues. This is going to break all UI mods, but the fix should be relatively straighforward for you. Basically any place we use large numbers of icons is being replaced with a new icon grid control that will be able to render the icons much more efficiently.

***Dolby*** · #2 10-11-2006, 09:22 PM

Wow, this is great news! I'll be sure to keep my eye on the test server and post a compare of the xml asap for the authors.

**lordebon** · #3 10-11-2006, 10:46 PM

Thanks for the heads up! And nifty =)

**DNeufeldSOE** · #4 10-11-2006, 11:11 PM

After some thought I think I'm also going to add an IconAggregator control that has as children all the icons you'd like to aggregate. The rule being that none of them overlap each other or the rendering will be incorrect. This would be used by UIs that put all your bags on the HUD, and I'd use it in the inventory and knowledge book windows to make rendering those non gridded icons more efficient as well.

**gm9** · #5 10-12-2006, 01:37 AM

Sounds interesting, in particular that using the IconAggregator would make rendering icons more efficient (sounds like a volume page so far). Any other info on what's good and bad regarding rendering performance?

Anyway thanks for the info.

**DNeufeldSOE** · #6 10-12-2006, 01:35 PM

It's kind of hard for moders to tell where their UI performance issues are coming from, but there's two important things to keep in mind:

1. Lots of polys are expensive, so don't do things like tile a 2 pixel texture.
2. Texture changes are expensive, so try to keep things on the same texture where possible. Since rendering is done bottom up you can sometimes reduce the number of texture changes by reordering your controls. This is basically why rendering icons one after another is expensive right now.