Reviving TabletsII
 

Hello all,

I've been away from EQ2 for a long time and recently came back to find that Tablets II suffered a fall to the wayside when Talyns left EQ2. While I wasn't suprised as this happens to UIs a lot, as we all know, I was disheartened. Having contributed some to the development of TabletsII and having used it as my own personal skin I was hoping to be able to use it still. I do'nt blame Talyns though. We all burn out. I did too :)

So anyway... I've started working on reviving the interface. Its going slow as i've been away from EQ2 for so long that i've kind of forgotten all this UI stuff but at the moment i've managed to at least get the basics up and running with LU14, though still lots of bugs to fix. As things start to come back to me work will progress faster. I am NOT making any promises here, and even once/if I get it all up to date for LU14 I make zero promises on me sticking around as I tend to play these games in burts of a few months at a time. But I just wanted to let everyone know that I was here and doing this. I'm not releasing anything right now as theres still loads of bugs to fix, but hopefully within the next few days at the latest.

This is good news :)

I too have been a user of this UI since beta and though I've found a new UI that I like a lot I wish you luck in this endeavor.

If you need people to help test your work count me in :)

Just an update on this. At the moment I have everything for the most part WORKING and useable now with LU14. It isn't all pretty and theres a bunch of skinning I still need to do, but its all functional as far as I could see at a quick run through all the various elements.

If anyone is desperate to get thier hands on a working Tablets II let me know and i'll see about uploading the current state of it, but otherwise i'm going to hold off until i've at least reskinned the major elements that need to be redone.

Just another update to say that I now have everything working as far as I can tell and all the major windows skinned.

Attached is an in game shot.

I will be uploading this to the system sometime today once i've had a chance to go through and clean things up and type up instructions.

Thank you, trying to maintain 2 diffrent UIs was annoying.

Sorry I haven't gotten this up yet. Unfortunately shortly before I had to head off to work I found a few more serious bugs that I want to fix before submitting and I didi not have time before work to fix them. I'm home now and working on things and HOPEFULLY I can get a release out tonight.

Ok well I wanted to get this out last night but just before bed while playing I ran into a few more bad bugs. I fixed those this morning and now i've finally submitted the first beta release. Any testing people can help with is most appreciated.

Ok there seem to be a couple reports of the game not loading at all for people with the UI. All I Can say at the moment is it works fine for me so I need to figure out what is happening. If it doesn't load for you, please look in your TabletsII directory for a ui.log file and if preset post the contents of that here. Also if it is not loading for you do you have DOF?

yes, and I was logged out in SS. I hesitate to think that its DoF enabled-ness that is causing the problem though, but i could be wrong.

contents of ui.log (dated around the time when i had the problem, i've since switched back to a lesser custom ui):

yes
 

yes i have DOF, does it not work with that. still trying to get it to work.

Reason I asked about DOF was simply because I don't have it and it is workign for me. So it may be something DOF related, i'm not certain yet.

The error about that xml file is fine. Hmm. Guess i'll just have to go and buy DOF today so I can test with it to be sure.

Well I just bought and installed DOF and everything still works for me. So you all will have to bear with me while I see if I can't figure out what the heck is going on.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I just downloaded the file from here, and installed it following my included directions (just in case they were wrong) and everythign worked fine :( So i'm at a real loss here.

Is this WORKING for anyone?

Those of you whom are having a problem, you say it locks up. I assume it locks during loading? At what stage? Loading UI resources?

loading
 

it does not even get to load anything. just gets to the screen with the loading bar, then nothing.

I tried it as well, here is what happened. I changed my UI test character's filename, since I use a different UI for default. So essentially the character that would be using THIS UI didn't have a UI settings file. The game went through the normal introduction screen, and froze up at what would say "Loading entity resources". I then tried it on another charcter who already had an existing UI settings file for another UI, and it did the same. So it seems that whether the character has a uisettings file or not, doesn't make a difference and it freezes in the same place everytime. Hope this helps in some way. Looking great though, hope you get it sorted. :)

Darned strange. I sure wish I could get the problem to happen here :( Sure be a lot easier to fix.

loading
 

ok i just erased all the files with tabletsii in them and then reloaded the ui. it got to that screen then nothing. but it cause my eq2 to quit responding. well i hope it gets worked out will keep my fingers crossed. really want to use this ui. ;) :) :nana:

If you load into the game with another UI that works then do a "/loadui TabletsII" what happens?

load
 

ok did that. it worked but was missing some stuff like i could not see my factions, and it said that my quest journal was full, could not see that either, then i tried to change to another char and it did not load, went to the same problem got to the screen and froze.

The faction and quest journal problems are actually normal when using /loadui. If you do a /loadui and then zone everythign, including factins and journal should work fine. You might give that a try. If it works then you'd at least have a way to use the UI if in a roundabout fashion.

Seems very strange though that /loadui would work whereas logging in with it doesn't.

I still can't seem to find anything that could be causing this problem. So, what i'm going to do when I get home from work is completely rebuild TabletsII from scratch. This version what I had done was taken the latest TabletsII then just modified/fixed things until I got it working for me, but obviously theres other more subtle problems that are causing problems. So i'm going to throw all that out the window, start at the current default UI and completely rebuild TabletsII from the ground up. Hopefully this will fix the problems. It certainly should.

This will be released in a couple stages. The first stage which will hopefully be out either tonight or tomorrow will be basically the skinning of the default UI to the TabletsII standard, but will not contain much, if any, of the more advanced TabletsII features such as multiple layout windows, autosizing bags, etc. The second stage will then incorporate those more advanced features.

So bear with me here and we'll get you all up and running as soon as possible.

cool
 

hey thanks for all the hard work you are doing will wait for the new one thanks again

Agathorn, I'm having a similar problem to the one others have described. Here's what's happening:

I installed TabletsII as per your instructions (I'm using the grey - not fantasy - folder as images, if that's relevant). I logged in from the launcher directly to one of my characters, and I got through all the loading screens just fine. I get into the game, and can see some of the UI elements (I've deleted all my UI configs and have started over from scratch), but the game is frozen. I can hear the music playing in the background, and it's not looping like in a crash. I can alt-tab out and have some limited ability to switch to other windows (although I can only see that in the taskbar, and can't see the windows themselves until I kill EQ2 via the task manager).

I'm really looking forward to using TabletsII. I'm new to the game, and have been entirely dismayed by EQ2's default UI and most of the mods available for it. I came here looking for a tutorial how to make my own, and came across TabletsII, and figured all my problems were solved. ;) So, I can't wait to get this one working.

If it's of any consequence, I don't have DoF, and I run the game at 1680x1050. My experiences with TabletsII have been strictly since the 10/19/05 patch.

EDIT: And just a suggestion -- all the color schemes are cool options, but it'd be nice if you could maybe include a screanshot of each in the distribution so we can see what they're like?

Ok. For those of you having the loading problems, please do me a favor and give this a try. Some of the windows won't work, others will look funky opr downright wrong, and others are totally unskinned. However I need to find out at this point if its going to load properly or not.

Let me know what happens. If it still doesn't work, let me know if it doesn't work any differently :p

It seems to be working.

One request, though (and I know you're very early in the process), but I managed to get it (sort of) working with /loadui earlier today, and I noticed then (and with this build, it's currently the case) that the main menu button, even though it's not locked, isn't movable. It'd be really helpful if it was. :)

But as far as not crashing, this build didn't have any problems. Thanks for all the work you're putting into this, Agathorn.

Great to hear that its working. I can move ahead on it then.

As for the EQ2 button, you actually can move it. to move it you have to mouse over it till the frame shows up and if you move the mouse onto the frame you will be able to move it. I think the default UI is the same way because I don't think you can make the button itself draggable.

Just an update on this to let you all know how its going. I am almost done with the stage 2 release. Theres still afew windows to do, but I should be done sometime today, probably this evening after work but MAYBE before I head in. There will still be a few of the less used windowd unskinneds but i'll slowly bring those into the fold over time.

Glad to hear it, Agathorn; you certainly moved quickly with this! Can't wait to get my hands on it.

...and sorry to sound like such a cheerleader, I'm just really looking forward to this. It's the only EQ2 UI that actually looks good and funtional.

Sound like a cheerleader all you want! Its encouragment that keeps many of us going through the hard work.

I've pretty much got it all done now except for some very minor quirks here and there so i'm going to be uploading what I have. It is totally useable at this stage, theres just little niggling things to take care of and i'd like to get it out there so people can use it and help find those little things so I can get them fixed.

Ok I have uploaded the Stage 2 release to the site. The update has to be approved by the site admins so it wont be available for immediate download, but onces it has been approved you will be able to grab it.

Everyone hit it hard and let me know how it works for you and what problems you find.

Well, I've got the new version installed, and there aren't any problems, but a lot of it seems to be missing, so I'm not sure what exactly incomplete and what might be broken, so I'll just try to touch on what I know used to be there (this'll inevitably sound nit-picky, so my apologies in advance).

• Is the EQ2MAP integration gone? The readme doesn't mention it, and the map screen seems fine without it, although that's definitely functionality I'll miss.
  
• The screen borders for widescreen letterbox are still the standard gold color, and the fantasy grey isn't filling the deadspace with the marbley texture it previously did.
  
• Options, Help, and Report a Bug windows aren't skinned (although I'm sure these are the rarely-used ones you mentioned already).
  
• The scripts, or at least any mention of them, to do the stat bars along the edges of the letterbox seem to be missing.

That's all I see that seems to be wrong, but I didn't have much experience in the first place, so maybe someone else can spot things I didn't.

All in all the interface isn't quite minimalist enough for my tastes, although I'll probably make my own changes to it, if I can figure out how. ;) XML's not much of a problem, but EQ2's UI Builder seems a bit daunting.

EDIT: Actually, that's not a fair assessment; it's not that the interface is too busy, it's just that everything seems to be about twice as large as it needs to be.

Still, I can't believe how quickly you got that fixed and released - you deserve a pat on the back/cookie/beer for that. ;) Thanks for all the work, Agathorn!

EQ2MAP integration will be put back in soon. Its a high priority for me as well :)

The letterbox graphics were giving me some problems so I removed them for now but i'll see about getting them working

The options, help, report a bug screens I didin't bother to skin as they aren't used much at all. I'll see about getting them done but it will be low on the list behind more important things.

The statbars I guess I forgot to add back in. oops. I'll get them back in.

As for the interface itself. What you have right now is base Tablets II. I had done several mods for the old Tablets II that shrunk some of the interface pieces to take up less space and I will be redoing those mods for this as well. I'll also be doing some mods that make things bigger and give more info. The point is this is the base and mods will be released that will let you customize it further if desired.

You know, I tried modding it, and I didn't get very far. You're definitely more skilled at this than I, Agathorn. ;)

I'm looking forward to some of your future releases and mods of this theme. I'm going to keep chipping away at it on my own (what I'm ultimately trying to do is eliminate all the thick, blocky borders and have the entire interface be real slick and unobtrusive, like Milquetowst's chat window, but grey). Who knows, maybe after a few weeks of banging my head against the wall trying to figure this out, I'll come up with something resembling useful. :D

In the mean time, keep up the awesome work -- I'm sure I'll be using your own UI & mods for a long time before I even figure out how to make my own. ;) And, really... thank you very much for updating this UI!

Anyways, as for bug-hunting, here's a couple:

1. The exp. bar doesn't play nice with smaller fonts, apparently

2. The frame on the persona window still displays some of the original UI.

3. Also with the persona window (and possibly others, although the inventory works fine), if you select "frame only" in the window options, it takes out the title bar, but the frame still extends to the top of where the title bar was, so you wind up with a goofy looking gap.

Between the layout options and window settings you can pretty much make the chat window as onbvious or as unobtrusive as you want, right down to nothing but floating text.

Sort of... you still get some bizarre-looking floating tabs, but I was talking about doing the entire UI like that. It's kinda moot, though, at this point.

Here's one more bug (sort of, maybe): the vertical scrollbar appears on the loot window whether it's necessary or not. Certainly not a big deal, though.

EDIT: And one more:

The merchant window still displays the scrollbar from the original UI.

I made some changes to the text on the experience bar earlier that should fix that problem as well but i'll double check that before I release the next patch.

The leftover pieceson the persona window are fixed for the next release.
The frame positioning is also fixed on the persona window but quite possibly may be on other windows so keep an eye out :)
Merchant window fixed for next release

The scroll bar on the loot window i'll have to look at. Its an easy fix, but it doesn't really GAIN anything the way the window is currently laid out.

Can't wait for the next release, Agathorn. I'm really looking forward to those stat bars, in particular. I tried using the ones from the Tablets beta release, but that didn't quite work out. ;)

One more bug I've found: the mail screen is using tabs from the original UI.

Ah THATS the one! lol I had ran into a window with the wrong tabs when I Was messing around playing and couldn't recall which window it was :p

I'll fix that, do a bit more testing then get this first patch out.

Ok here it is. Patch 1.

Fixed:
Statbars available again
ZoneLoc window available again
Maintained Spells window fixed
Spell Effects window fixed
Fixed tabs on Mail window
Fixed text on experience bars
Removed left over default UI on Persona window
Fixed frame extents on Persona window
Fixed scrollbar on Merchant window

To show the stat bars type:
/show_window MainHUD.statbar
and
/show_window MainHUD.statbar2

The commands ARE case sensative

To show the ZoneLoc window type:
/show_window MainHUD.ZoneLoc

Also two mods will be available soon as I get them uploaded:
Just press Enter loot window
Loot window that allows you to just press ENTER to Loot All or Request All and will close (cancel) with the press of ESC.

Quick Change Shutdown
Skinned and modded to work with Tablets II by permission of the original author. This is an AWESOME shutdown window mod that makes changing characters a zillion times faster.

Patch 1 is attached to this message. The two mods will be uploaded to the official Tablets II release in the downloads section within the hour.

Just an update to let you all know that the two promised mods have been uploaded and will be available as soon as they are approved by the admins. Enjoy.