Interesting, we had all given up on that one (I don't think anyone is still using UIbuilder really), thanks for looking into it.
Issues we have that you have not addressed:
- UIbuilder is not fully UTF-8 compliant and breaks encoding of non-ASCII characters
- UIbuilder sometimes breaks encoding of special characters, turning e.g. an ' into an ' (according to lordebon below this may already have been fixed - haven't used UIbuilder in a while myself)
- It would be immensly helpful to be able to just save a specific window and not "vomit" (as I think Faetyl aptly put it) all files at once
- I assume that "asset tags" are the localization :f: tags? If those are filtered automatically you could stop saving all the redundant LocalText, LocalTooltip etc. tags to the files, making files smaller.
- If the ability to reload graphics within UIbuilder could be fixed that would be very helpful indeed
- Generally alignment within UIbuilder is often not like within the game. But I assume this cannot be helped as it is probably an issue of the UIengine itself (e.g. US server align differently than localized servers...)
- I personally would love to be able to write a complete uisettings.ini file from within UIbuilder, based on the layout I made there.
And a suggestion outside of UIbuilder that I recently though about
: Every other update a window gets added/renamed in the Default UI, "breaking" all mods that include module files (e.g. eq2ui_mainhud.xml). The problem is that we need to use the default module files to add our windows since the game has those hardcoded and will not display module files we add. If we could get a new file hardcoded just for UImods that would be great, i.e. a eq2ui_custom.xml root module that will always be read, where modders can add their own windows and which will be copied to root._HUD during runtime so it will be displayed.
Apart from that get rid of hardcoding, add more DynamicData and fix existing ones, give us string manipulation operators, allow us to work with UTF-8 characters from within the UI so we can mod for international users and we will all be happy.
