Methods to easily work with previewing the UI
 

Hi there,

As a healer having moved over from WoW (:o), I'm frustrated about the UI options available to me, so instead of complaining I have decided to muck around with the UI builder myself :) And then I will give back my work if it results in something nice, to the community.

My question relates to how to preview work easily in-game/out of game.

There doesn't seem to be a nice facility to truly reload the entire UI/options/config in-game that I am aware of? I'm not at a game PC but from my understanding /loadui means you have to flip between UIs just to reload the one you're working on... and /loadui_settings jsut loads the layout config. So I've just been logging out and in, which takes a long time if I just wish to preview something small, like changing a UI element's colours :D

I've been doing some googling and reading on here towards how to resolve this issue... but it doesn't look like there is an elegant solution?

I read one comment in a thread here that one guy just has a /camp quit macro and then a shortcut to the EQ2 non-launcher .exe on his desktop...

There must be a quicker way to develop mods than my logging-in-out OR his slightly quicker version :p Surely? :confused:

How do the pro's do it? gm9 surely doesn't spend 70% of his dev time waiting on relogging in to test his work, does he? :rolleyes:

(Am I missing something, some trick? Even just a way to preview the ELEMENT I'm changing... e.g. if I am changing my target window... to preview this UI component on its own... that would be nice! Is that what the "run" button is for in the UI builder? How does this work?)

I used to do the following. For a full UI reload do

/loadui <UI_folder_name>

followed by either a

/quit <character_name>

or a simple

/load_uisettings <settings_file_name>

depending on whether dynamic data and hardcoded window pieces were involved.

However I did not do a full UI reload usually, instead I did a lot of runtime modding, e.g. I moved a UI element around via UIscript while in game if I needed to get a location exactly right, or I moved it by hand and then queried the location via script, stuff like that (in ProfitUI the control center has a text box where you can enter UIscript - the login screen has a hidden one too which I used for stuff that did not even require a logged in character, faster that way). Only once that was done I would modify the XML accordingly and do a full reload to double check. Quite a few changes I only did to the XML without ever being in game as well.

PS: also always log in via the everquest2.exe instead of the launcher, does not really take long that way.

Brilliant, thank you for the tips. I was mucking around with the image dds files last night, your advice has helped a lot :)