CoreBB

There have been an awful lot of request for "this and that" but everytime I hear them I think it's "too custom." I can't satisfy everyone's custom needs especially with the available time I have now.

As always, my UI is intended for function rather than beauty. There are many things that can still be improved and there are a few ideas still sitting on the shelf. So far maybe I've achieved 80% of my goal but the remaining 20% takes up too much time and offers little gain.

As you know, the current version is still G but prior to that there were A-F releases and each of those releases had one or more sub releases. Between the very first version and the current, things were deleted, added, and sometimes done in funny ways because at the time I was just trying to make tweaks to the defaults. So as you might guess, not everything is clean and in fact I'm missing some of the original photoshop files to rebuild the exact copies of the old controls. So if there is another update, it will be a "fleshing out" update of the internals to make it easier to tack on custom things and hopefully make it more resistant to random Mythic changes between patches. But I haven't gotten there because it's a lot of grueling clean up work that is not really fun and not really providing anything new. So will there be a version beyond G? Maybe, maybe not.

The biggest player in all of this is Mythic. I've already done some really ugly things with their current UI code to implement things you don't normally see. I don't want to do anymore ugly things like that. I want them to realize that these features being implemented are done so because they are a benefit to the players (the people making their business profitable) and that it's just as much of their responsibility to consider those changes and hopefully make it easier and cleaner for the custom UI creators to make good UIs. There have been some pretty "out there" requests (like programming logic for custom UI) which probably can't be met. But some features are being done in a hackish manner by the UI creator and make cause the UI creator to spend hours to modify and tweak. It wouldn't be so much more work for them to make this a little easier.

A good example is the round compass: to create the thing from scratch you need to create the image (how it looks) then rotate it for each position. The final texture file is very large and believe it or not, there is a limit to how much texture memory the game devotes to the UI. Import too many textures and depending on the computer's specs, daoc refuses to load. I've hit that limit previously so now I'm cautious about adding new texture files. So for the round compasses, many modders just copy the original (I forget who made it, shaz or something like that) and tweak it a bit. But if you ever see a completely new round compass texture, that modder probably sat in front of photoshop and wasted anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour rotating the stupid thing depending on how many times they screwed up or how many different custom round compass textures they want.

If you really want change or you want things to get better, all you have to do is everytime a modder flat out says "that feature is impossible" that's your queue to send feedback to mythic to ask for such and such UI feature. Some of your requests might be a little out there, but I've seen some people request the same feature over and over again. We, the custom UI creators, have little voice over what Mythic changes in the custom UI world, so if more people sent feedback regarding the same feature request, I'm sure it would be raised to their attention faster than any of us (UI creators) could.