Harvesting Goblen Condensed Dialog
 

Currently, the Harvesting Goblin gives you an insane list of like ten dialog bubbles to chose from, which requires pretty much everyone to mess with their camera to click the bottom buttons.

Is it even possible to create a single, condensed panel with the options presented with radio buttons or something? I KNOW this can be made to take LOTS less room somehow.

I honestly haven't done much with the dialog-popup window, but to my knowledge the way it's set up in the UI is we just define how the bubbles look, it's the game client that chooses how to stack them so we don't really have anything that we can do around that: they'll always be a vertical stack of chat options.

Now, what might be possible would be to decrease the size of the individual response bubbles. They are something we do have access to in the eq2ui_proxyactor.xml Converation page. Along the same lines, you might be able to decrease the spacing in the Replies composite to pack them tighter together... it looks like a 10px spacing between them by default, so over 10 entires thats 100px of wasted space.

The harvesting NPCs chat bubbles annoy me too, it's just a lack of potential options. Since you brought it up and I took a look at it in the UI files I might take a look at it for Fetish and see how it'd look with the spacing trimmed down and maybe even the text shrunk a little bit. If it looks good, it should be pretty easy to make the same changes in the default or any other custom UI.

Any changes there would affect everything, right? So quest response bubbles and the like would be compacted as well.

Looks like the problem is that they laid out the bubbles for the normal cases like quests or selections from NPCs, where the norm is 2-4, maybe 5 or so, options. And they didn't adjust things for the pack pony or the goblin where suddenly we have 10-11 options. They really need to adjust the goblin to do something like what the chronomage does instead of using chat-response bubbles.

Exactly. All standard NPC conversation pulls from the same template (the only exception is the "alternative" one they designed that is only used in things like sig quests). It would be ideal if SOE would convert it to something like the chronomage (although TBH the window they made for that is a horrid kludge -- all you really need is a small window with a drop-down box).

I don't think we can even reliably script it that I know of. I don't think the composite has any properties to tell the number of elements, so it would have to be based on it's height and there's no guarantee trying to change things on the fly would work on a window as heavily hard-coded as the NPC dialog.

Could the bubbles be presented in a scrollable window, perhaps?

Not sure, there's a lot of weird hard coding in windows like that.

I did make it a lot tighter in Fetish by removing most of the blank space between the options. It makes a surprising difference, I don't have to swing the camera all over or get in a weird spot to use the goblin, it works much easier now.