Quick and dirty skinning Tut?

[MoonDeville]

Ok so I wanna whip up a few themes to better suit my taste. So I have the fetish files and Photoshop. So how do I do it? I'm trying to change it mostly to green. So anyone have any quick and dirty tips on how to do this?. Thanks for any help!

[thorvang]

open the widget files (the dds ones) with photoshop, hit ctrl + u (reduce saturation) - this will give you a greyscale image - then go to balance settings and push green up. save, et voila, a quick and dirty green interface

[MoonDeville]

perfecto! Thankyou very much. You would happen to know a quick and dirty way of changeing the font colours?

[Zonx]

Sadly, there currently is no support for ColorStyles aka named colors in EQ2 script. I've been begging for this from the SOE dev team for over a year now. It remains the one serious hurdle to my "Themes" mechanism and is the primary reason for alternate Motifs like Classic.

As a result, any text color changes need to be made directly to the window xml files. A handful of other elements also use inline color deffinitions that will need tweaking. Most notable are Table objects and graphical item list found in Inventory windows. If you have a batch text processor that won't hose the file encoding, shouldn't be too hard to replace all the color defs. I tried to be consistent

I had hoped to release motifs for several basic font colors but its just too much work to maintain them. I do hope to update Classic by end of year if the gold fonts work with your green theme.

Virtually everything else is defined in _FetishStyles.xml

Photoshop Tips
Layers are your friend. Make a new layer on top. Fill it with the desired color. Then set its blend mode to "Hue" or "Color".

Also try using the Selecttion Menu/Color Range to quickly isolate highlights and shadows. Make a new layer. Fill the selection with a highlight color and set its blend mode.

Save your layered Photoshop file, then flatten it and save to DDS. You usually want DXT3 (Explicit Alpha). 1 bit alpha will save file space if you don't ned semi-transparency.

[thorvang]

i don't like dxt3, somehow it scrambles the image, making it look dirty. normally i use 8:8:8:8, gigantic file size but no quality loss

[Zonx]

DXT3 is a smaller color space, so there will be some quality loss if your original has more colors, but you can minimize this by splitting stuff up. When needed, split elements of vastly different color range out to a saparate image. DXT3 can handle 2 or 3 basic hues with almost no quality loss. Generally suficiant for all your basic window parts.

Specialty elements that use different colors can be shoved into another file with a smaller canvas but larger format if needed.

Your UI will perform better with less memory if you keep the file sizes small.

[thorvang]

attached an image to show what i'm talking about.

above is dxt3, below without quality loss. the gradient gets some strange artifacts. and even more weird, the top line (grey) is distorted with lots of different colors, while the original is one single color.

the default UI suffers alot from those artifacts.

[Zonx]

Meh... at normal size, with text and stuff laid over it, most people wont notice the difference and almost certainly wont care enough to take a x10 memory hit. In fact, a little texture generally seams less artificial to most ppl than a perfectly smooth gradiant.

But yes, there is a bit of a quality loss that might be a problem if you just have to have a perfectly images.