I have been asked by a couple people how i fixed my UI. This is relatively simple given you have about 30 minutes to an hour to edit a little bit of code and image files.
In this short tutorial i will try to cover the major and basic things that seem to plague custom UI's on SoD.
WARNING: BEFORE EDITING ANY UI, MAKE A CLEAN COPY OF IT SOMEPLACE ELSE SO YOU CAN REVERT TO THE ORIGINAL IF YOU GOOF UP!
First thing you probably want to do is browse http://www.EQInterface.com for a good looking UI you might be interested in. Many of the up-to-date UI's intended for ********* Live servers just plain do not work on SoD, so you will have to find older versions of it. I recommend versions from around 2007 to early 2008 for best compatibility. Download and extract the files into your uifiles folder in your ********* folder.
Now log into your character and type /loadskin. This will bring up a window. Select the name of your UI, let it load and take a took at it. If it fails to load at all, you probably need to find a older version of it.
I recommend making a macro called Loadskin, and in it use the following commands to quickly reload your UI so you can see the changes you are making quickly.
/loadskin UINAME 1
The UINAME is the excat name as it appears in your /loadskin dialogue box and 1 is the command to tell it to leave the windows in the position they are in
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Now the Biggest and most common issue i find with most UI's is that they are set up for huge buff windows. Since SoD doesn't recognize all the slots you get windows that look like this. This is the Buff window and the effects window.
To remove these annoying extra boxes, lets first open up the EQUI_Buffwindow.xml file in Notepad or some other simple text editor.
Use the search or find feature and type
<Button Item="BW_Buff15_Button">
Highlight and delete this all the way down to
</button>
just before it says
<Label item="BW_Buff0">
DO NOT Delete <Label item="BW_Buff0">
Find the following lines:
<Label item="BW_Buff15">
and highlight and delete that down to
</Label>
just before it says
<Screen item="Buff Window">
Find the Section Labeled: <Screen item="Buff Window">
scroll, find and delete all the parts that say
<pieces>BW_Buff15_Button</pieces>
Through
<pieces>BW_Buff24_Button</pieces>
And also
<pieces>BW_Buff15</pieces>
Through
<pieces>BW_Buff24</pieces>
.........
Now here's the tricky part. Every UI is slightly different how it is sized and put together.. so this takes some time. What you just did was remove the code that told the UI to look for these buff slots on your character. Now you need to adjust your UI to remove the image of the buff window. I will show you how this is done on Solaria - 2.11, but it will be different on other UI's.
What you see below if the XML of the original UI code on the left and the edited code on the right.
The code on the left is telling the UI to point to the file solWindowPieces03.tga and grab an image starting at the location 280, 10 (<X> and <Y> coordinates) and use a piece of that image whose size is 15 by 574 (<CX> and <CY>). Since you removed buff slots 16 through 25, the image containing those slots can be removed. Here is where you have to play with it a little bit.
While your game is still up and you have your UI loaded, trim off a couple pixels from the <CY> coordinates until the buff window should only buff slots 1 through 15. It will look stretched out because the image is being forced to stretch to the size of the window. Don't worry about this just yet, just get the image to show buff slots 1 through 15.
To Adjust the window size and consequently correcting the stretch factor:
Find the section that is labeled
<Screen Item="Buff Window">
Below is the original code on the left and the modified code on the right.
Since you just hacked off the unrecognized buff slots, you still have a long buff window that's pretty useless. You need to size it down. Modifying the size attribute will make the physical window smaller. Entering the <CY> attribute you figured out earlier into here should result in the image size and the window size being the same.
Finally, Find the section labeled
<StaticAnimation item="Buff_Top">
and insert the same <CY> values you entered in earlier in from sizing the image.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More posts to come.. let my fingers rest.
In this short tutorial i will try to cover the major and basic things that seem to plague custom UI's on SoD.
WARNING: BEFORE EDITING ANY UI, MAKE A CLEAN COPY OF IT SOMEPLACE ELSE SO YOU CAN REVERT TO THE ORIGINAL IF YOU GOOF UP!
First thing you probably want to do is browse http://www.EQInterface.com for a good looking UI you might be interested in. Many of the up-to-date UI's intended for ********* Live servers just plain do not work on SoD, so you will have to find older versions of it. I recommend versions from around 2007 to early 2008 for best compatibility. Download and extract the files into your uifiles folder in your ********* folder.
Now log into your character and type /loadskin. This will bring up a window. Select the name of your UI, let it load and take a took at it. If it fails to load at all, you probably need to find a older version of it.
I recommend making a macro called Loadskin, and in it use the following commands to quickly reload your UI so you can see the changes you are making quickly.
/loadskin UINAME 1
The UINAME is the excat name as it appears in your /loadskin dialogue box and 1 is the command to tell it to leave the windows in the position they are in
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now the Biggest and most common issue i find with most UI's is that they are set up for huge buff windows. Since SoD doesn't recognize all the slots you get windows that look like this. This is the Buff window and the effects window.
To remove these annoying extra boxes, lets first open up the EQUI_Buffwindow.xml file in Notepad or some other simple text editor.
Use the search or find feature and type
<Button Item="BW_Buff15_Button">
Highlight and delete this all the way down to
</button>
just before it says
<Label item="BW_Buff0">
DO NOT Delete <Label item="BW_Buff0">
Find the following lines:
<Label item="BW_Buff15">
and highlight and delete that down to
</Label>
just before it says
<Screen item="Buff Window">
Find the Section Labeled: <Screen item="Buff Window">
scroll, find and delete all the parts that say
<pieces>BW_Buff15_Button</pieces>
Through
<pieces>BW_Buff24_Button</pieces>
And also
<pieces>BW_Buff15</pieces>
Through
<pieces>BW_Buff24</pieces>
.........
Now here's the tricky part. Every UI is slightly different how it is sized and put together.. so this takes some time. What you just did was remove the code that told the UI to look for these buff slots on your character. Now you need to adjust your UI to remove the image of the buff window. I will show you how this is done on Solaria - 2.11, but it will be different on other UI's.
What you see below if the XML of the original UI code on the left and the edited code on the right.
The code on the left is telling the UI to point to the file solWindowPieces03.tga and grab an image starting at the location 280, 10 (<X> and <Y> coordinates) and use a piece of that image whose size is 15 by 574 (<CX> and <CY>). Since you removed buff slots 16 through 25, the image containing those slots can be removed. Here is where you have to play with it a little bit.
While your game is still up and you have your UI loaded, trim off a couple pixels from the <CY> coordinates until the buff window should only buff slots 1 through 15. It will look stretched out because the image is being forced to stretch to the size of the window. Don't worry about this just yet, just get the image to show buff slots 1 through 15.
To Adjust the window size and consequently correcting the stretch factor:
Find the section that is labeled
<Screen Item="Buff Window">
Below is the original code on the left and the modified code on the right.
Since you just hacked off the unrecognized buff slots, you still have a long buff window that's pretty useless. You need to size it down. Modifying the size attribute will make the physical window smaller. Entering the <CY> attribute you figured out earlier into here should result in the image size and the window size being the same.
Finally, Find the section labeled
<StaticAnimation item="Buff_Top">
and insert the same <CY> values you entered in earlier in from sizing the image.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More posts to come.. let my fingers rest.