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  #1  
Unread 12-03-2008, 02:45 PM
BoomWav BoomWav is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2008
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Currently working on a replacement for Enfield's Panel Viewer

Hello folks at LOTROInterface.

You guys did a marvelous job with awesome UIs prior to Moria. It was a tough job even then to design a successful and good looking UI. Now that everything can be moved around freely, the possibilities are limitless! But god.. how much more work is it?

At least some nice folks like Enfield did a panel viewer that could assists you doing that. I was blown away by all the capabilities... since it's only a web page.

Then, I thought I could maybe help out too!

I'm currently working on an .NET application that would do everything Enfield done... but with more features.

I'm still wondering what are the most important feature but here's a list of what I thought.

- View and edit panels' properties in real time (Like Enfield Panel Viewer)

- View a graphic representation of the panels and element. With highlight upon selection (and include multi-selection support)

- Edit the graphic representation and update the properties in real-time. You could grab the panels around or resize them without having to bother about numbers.

- Multiple-selection edition of panels. Select multiple panel and drag or resize them all at once!

- Include the texture of the panel (tough since there's no TGA support in .NET. I could easily add this for PNGs though (including transparency). This could let you resize panels and graphics to fit your new png in no time... Then, you'd have to convert everything in TGA though. Unless someone can help me to do a TGA adapter.)

- Undo/redo capabilities

- Absolute positionning support for multiple resolution (you set absolute positionning on for an element. When creating the mod at the end, it will create different xml for the different resolutions.)

I just throwing ideas guys. If you have more, shoot them.. and please, help me priorise them too. I'm building it using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.
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  #2  
Unread 12-03-2008, 06:45 PM
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Supermax Supermax is offline
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Interface Author - Click to view interfaces
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
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That would be amazing. I could see this tool being extremely helpful.

You must absolutely include the ability to export/save the code we have edited.
One downer about Enfield's tool is that you can't export the code or save it as a document from which you can copy/paste into the skindefinition.xml file.
That would be extremely awesome.
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  #3  
Unread 12-03-2008, 08:58 PM
BoomWav BoomWav is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2008
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Nice to see it would be appreciated.

I'm not really a skinner myself.. if you skin only a small part of the interface, do you need a full skindefinition.xml or only what changed?

BTW.. right now, there's tons of bad things in the XML.. Unclosed tags and things like that.. I wonder how I'm suppose to deal with all those errors..

I'm currently reading a corrected xml that I did and it work well. I can see the panels just like Einfield's ones. I just can't edit right now. It was only a proof of concept..

About your edited graphics in the editor, would it be helpful even if it only show the PNGs with the same name then your futur TGA?

The save feature will save directly in the skindefinition file.
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  #4  
Unread 12-23-2008, 06:07 AM
Tiaga Tiaga is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2008
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Just a little tip on TGA files and C#...

The TGA format is a very simple graphics format. In some incarnations, the blob of graphics data may even be binary compatible with a bmp file (With differences in the header only).

The quick and dirty way to read a tga in would be to read the file yourself (Do a search for tga file format, it's all over the place) and lock the bits in a Bitmap object to get at the image data, copying it in.

While this works, it can be a bit slow to lock and unlock the image data for access. A quicker way (Graphics load time-wise anyway) would be to derive a class from Stream and put in there code to translate the header (And if necessary data) from TGA to BMP, then pass the that stream to the Bitmap class to load the image data. The Bitmap object will then happily read in the faked translation layer much quicker than trying to manually load the image in.
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