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Unread 01-25-2008, 12:24 AM
Keeyrah Keeyrah is offline
The Unscathed
Interface Author - Click to view interfaces
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Germany
Posts: 16
Test UI Skins: Blue & Pink

The whole UI skinning thing got me nosey enough to actually try it out.

So I downloaded the art pack and was shocked by the sheer amount of files.
After looking through the tutorial, I found that it's sadly incorrect and misleading.
There are several backslashes missing, which caused the confusion.

So here's what I did.

I went to the folder where DDO stores my screenshots.
There I created a folder ui. Then I created a sub-folder named skins.

Essentially it looked like this in my documents folder:

Dungeons & Dragons Online\ui\skins

Now in that folder I simply created another one and gave it the name of the
skin, in my case it was TestSkin and the second one was PinkSkin.

Then I copied and pasted in all the files from the UI art pack I previously downloaded.

Aside from editing the images, all I needed to do is adjust the name of the skin
in the file SkinDefinition.xml.
In the third line, you'll find a tag
Code:
<SkinName Name="UIArtPackTemplate"></SkinName>
I replaced UIArtPackTemplate with TestSkin and the other one with PinkSkin,
matching it with the folder names they were in - just like described in the
tutorial. Al the rest could be ignored for now. The structure was there and I
didn't intend to touch it.
All I wanted was to colourize it to show the change.

Btw I tested it on Risia and it works

Careful through. When you change your skin, your client will lag out! Do not click
a second time or you will most likely hit the default button.


I can only assume that the client has to load and cache all 1000+ images, which
takes a moment. During that time it looks like it's hanging and didn't take your
choice.

Here is what the result looks like. Careful, the pink might make you go blind.



Is it possible to upload the files here somewhere? They're both between 4
and 5MB in size. I used WinRAR to pack it up. I also asked my former guild
leader, who's still hosting all the guild stuff.

The blue skin images were all manually coloured and saved using Paint Shop Pro X.
Since I'm lazy and there are a lot of files, I looked into scripting and batch
processing. Turned out I could easily create a macro that coloured the file,
then saved it. PSP let me batch process the entire folder

What definitely is interesting is selecting a skin and then logging out. It will
keep the skin active and show all frames and buttons in blue or pink. Same goes
for the character generation screens. I haven't tested it yet but I assume it
takes the skin of the character that was last logged in.
If you close your client, changed skin or not, and restart it again, the login
screen goes back to default. Your character should keep the changes though

Last edited by Keeyrah : 01-25-2008 at 12:35 AM.
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