Wish List: drop in startmenu items

[pooka]

I'd love to see items on the EQII start menu dynamically added.

So authors can include a _startmenu_myAwesomeUI.xml file in their mod that will simply add a menu item to whatever modded start menu someone has.

Why? Installing a mod, editing .xml files, creating a macro, and getting it right can be intimidating for some users.

[dragowulf]

Originally Posted by pooka

I'd love to see items on the EQII start menu dynamically added.

So authors can include a _startmenu_myAwesomeUI.xml file in their mod that will simply add a menu item to whatever modded start menu someone has.

Why? Installing a mod, editing .xml files, creating a macro, and getting it right can be intimidating for some users.

Can't we already do that???

[pooka]

I know that we can totally redo the startmenu, but if you're like me and have bits and pieces from 5 different UI authors, I am unaware of an easy drop in method.

If I'm wrong (I hope I'm wrong) that would be awesome!

I'm looking for a simple format that would be auto-detected by the startmenu and allow authors to add themselves to the startmenu without having to re-write the whole startmenu and without bumping other authors.

So the mods directory wouldn't include eq2ui_mainhud_startbutton.xml or eq2ui_mainhud_startmenu.xml unless they'd specifically been modded. Instead each author could drop in their own like:

eq2ui_startmenu_myAwesomeUI.xml
eq2ui_startmenu_ProfitUI.xml
eq2ui_startmenu_InfoCenter.xml
eq2ui_startmenu_etc.xml

Thusly on the wish-list. Maybe, wherever he is, something will click in Rothgar's head and he'll say, hmm. I could do that in a few minutes ...

[gm9]

I doubt that this would be easy to do due to the way the start menu is also XML based and you want them to modify the XML tree during runtime by parsing for files on the disk that are not referenced in that tree and include them therein.

I think you'd have better chances in modding the start menu with <include>s referencing the mod's additions to the menu and in trying to convince all modders here to use that format. Like the eq2map plugin system if you are familiar with that.