24 réponses à ce sujet

[Skydiver8888]

Specifically, i'm wondering about things that seem to be unchangeable from the game/configuration program, such as adding more possible keybondings to the quickbar (currently the max is 10 with no apparent way to increase that).

Also, possibly resizing the party portraits.

This is an area of modding that i am really clueless about, just wondering if anyone has tried.

[Ranlas]

If you mean the Game's UI, then it's fairly rigid compared to most things. Since the game uses Flash processed through the proprietary (ie, not BioWare's ) ScaleForm technology for its GUI, its pretty much stuck the way it is, visually, at least.



I know during the beta test we asked if this would change, and I think the response was that they'd look into it.



As for the Toolset's GUI, that's a lot more customizable if you delve into the XML files that define it.

[Chronovore]

I'd love for the UI to be moddable. Then perhaps we'd be able to change the pesky 6 class/background limit. :-D

[Chronovore]

Modifié par Chronovore, 17 novembre 2009 - 07:28 .

[Skydiver8888]

Yeah, Ranlas, i was meaning the game's UI. I hate having to click on things in hotbar slots 11+, since i'm a pretty dedicated keyboard user. I mean, it's not AS vital as it is in other games due to the pause functionality, but it would be nice.

[Y0ken]

I was hoping more in the lines of:



:- Adding extra toolbar containing health potions, so that you don't need to drag/drop common potions over and over.

:- Changing inventory background colours to highlight better/worse armour, weapons etc.

:- Include a bit more sub-sorters (not just type/ alpha, but also when armour is selected, to be able to filter only helmets / heavy armour / leathers etc.



Anyone know if stuff like that is possible. perhaps the sort category could be possible as it is showing a list?



... just a thought

[Driveninhifi]

If it's scaleform, you might be able to modify the flash files. As it works now, it is rendered to its own rendertarget, so you maaaay be able to change a postprocessing xml file and make a shader write to that texture, but I doubt you could get it to interact with you that way.

[FollowTheGourd]

I've had some success modding the UI for the bigger text mod I'm working on (link in sig). It's more just ordinary Flash than you might think, but still some somewhat non-standard stuff thrown into the mix.

I see the bigger problem still being the lack of being able to call a specific UI file from scripts or passing data between your script and the UI, since the closed-off game engine is the middleman in the way there.

You could probably even go so far as to create your own minigame currently, but have no way of telling the game "display my snazzy UI"... unless you did something like replace the popup UI or something else with your custom thing.

If you want to reskin the UI, that should be easily done as well. I haven't tried it out yet myself, but it seems like it's easy enough to change.

I probably need to do some sort of writeup, but I'm still trying to get a more complete understanding before I do so.

Modifié par FollowTheGourd, 18 novembre 2009 - 06:07 .

[Kunikos]

I hope you guys have luck. I would like a mod that compacts the interface a bit more. The toolbar is a bit large for my taste since I have a lower resolution.

[FollowTheGourd]

Kunikos wrote...

I hope you guys have luck. I would like a mod that compacts the interface a bit more. The toolbar is a bit large for my taste since I have a lower resolution.

That shouldn't be hard to do... but you never know what issues might crop up until you start working on it.

[DecalGuy]

Kunikos wrote...

I hope you guys have luck. I would like a mod that compacts the interface a bit more. The toolbar is a bit large for my taste since I have a lower resolution.

Opposite for me, its to small. I hope its becomes modiable.

[S3RV0]

Yes please! At the very least have a scale option. I run at 1900x1200 and the bar is still too massive for my tastes.



Also having multiple toolbars instead of one massive long bar at the bottom of my screen would be great. ie a different bar for sustained abilities, pots, heal spells, offensive spells etc.

[ladydesire]

Chronovore wrote...

I'd love for the UI to be moddable. Then perhaps we'd be able to change the pesky 6 class/background limit. :-D

Bioware is aware of the issue here and is planning to fix it for us, according to some of my sources. I know of a few modding teams that are waiting for this to happen before they begin serious efforts on their projects.

[Vasindrin]

My biggest complaint about the UI is the omitting of your target's vitals, portrait, mana, stamina, buffs, debuffs ect.. It is all a big guessing game with the buffs and debuffs and trying to make out one tiny bar above the enemy's heads and circles at the bottom of enemies can get a bit tedious in a crowd. Bioware could of easily added target's portrait, vitals, buffs and debuffs to the right of the players, and as well as perhaps mini ones for party targets. Is it to much to ask to see who the other party members in my group are targeting without having switch to each one every time, and why can they not target themselves or other party members and display that info, so you know who that character is healing or buffing or attacking? I understand their need for this game to be different and unlike other rpgs ect.. but this is vital information (pun intended) that I cannot fathom why it was overlooked.

Modifié par Vasindrin, 18 novembre 2009 - 10:32 .

[FollowTheGourd]

ladydesire wrote...

Chronovore wrote...

I'd love for the UI to be moddable. Then perhaps we'd be able to change the pesky 6 class/background limit. :-D

Bioware is aware of the issue here and is planning to fix it for us, according to some of my sources. I know of a few modding teams that are waiting for this to happen before they begin serious efforts on their projects.

I take it you're only referring to the latter part with the class limits? Bioware could go a long way in helping us by providing some basic GUI functions, but I don't know how they'll make it easier to create or modify the GUIs themselves - they could start by providing the .FLA files, even though I think they'd be somewhat incomplete since the GFx files seem to use non-standard SWF-tags to specify DDS files for the GUI, among a few other things.

At least Crytek actually released the .FLAs for some of their GUI files that use GFx, although their files were actually more standard Flash than Dragon Age's are... plus if they used the CLIK library, then we still probably couldn't directly export those files, but at least it would still help in understanding a few things.

Modifié par FollowTheGourd, 18 novembre 2009 - 11:48 .

[Y0ken]

anybody had some more success on this topic?

[Phaenan]

I tried during the week with the help of FollowTheGourd (there's a thread about it on the custom content forum) but that's not a small task (nor as easy as falling off a log) and I didn't took the time to look further into it since.
One thing for sure, distinct mods/addons won't be able to change the same UI element(s) without one overwriting the other(s).

Modifié par Phaenan, 29 novembre 2009 - 07:43 .

[yslee]

Just want to say, I'm looking forward to some UI mods. The default unitframe and hotbar UI just sucks. I'm resorting to looking at my G15's LCD screen to see what my health and mana/stamina is at!



I'm playing the game in mostly real-time; can't go back to pause-based gameplay anymore! The UI deficiencies are heavily magnified in real-time combat

[FollowTheGourd]

yslee wrote...

Just want to say, I'm looking forward to some UI mods. The default unitframe and hotbar UI just sucks. I'm resorting to looking at my G15's LCD screen to see what my health and mana/stamina is at!

I'm playing the game in mostly real-time; can't go back to pause-based gameplay anymore! The UI deficiencies are heavily magnified in real-time combat

Well, that sort of UI issue what I'm currently working on. The link in my sig is just for conversation text, but I'll imminently be  pushing out a test version with more of the interface readable, especially at higher resolutions. It probably won't include any changes to the quick slot bar in the upcoming release, but that's one of the things I have in mind of scaling up - I've just been focusing on the more annoying parts first. For me, it was either get the conversation text scaled up or give up the thought of creating adventures for Dragon Age, since I didn't want to write dialogue only to have people complain about reading (moreso anyway).

I can guess, but I wouldn't mind hearing what you mean exactly by "unitframe".

Modifié par FollowTheGourd, 03 décembre 2009 - 12:00 .

[ladydesire]

The unitframe is probably the arcs on both sides of the mini map that display your health and mana\\stamina levels.

[yslee]

Right, sorry for the WoW-speak. A unitframe is a frame which shows the status of a "unit", which is essentially any creature, including the PC. In Dragon Age on higher resolutions, the health and stamina/mana bars are two small round slits in the corner of the the screen. Makes combat really tough.



I was hoping for something like Pitbull from WoW, but having read that the UI is based on a third-party middleware platform, I'm not too hopeful something that flexible can be done.



I actually don't mind the smaller text for conversations. Gives more room for the scenery. Though increasing the size of the text for the Journal is certainly a good thing.

[FollowTheGourd]

yslee, I can look into that. Now that I've got a handle on modifying the GUI scripts, a lot more is possible - but still a bit tedious since it's like having to program in assembly language until I figure out why some of the ActionScript seems to use non-standard properties and what they should be. And even if I did, there'd still be the task of making sure the FLA was exported back into a SWF with the tags it should have (which should hopefully be less of a problem).

At least one of the nice things about Flash is that you can create your own stuff through scripting, although you may still need to edit some things in the GUI file to give them identifiers so you can easily manipulate them from script (which is what I had to do to be able to scale the paperdoll).

Some things I can scale or not scale separately from others. But some things share common resources and it's difficult, if not impossible, to let them be independent. For example, anything that uses the book background will need to be scaled the same way, since the book background is actually a separate UI file and there's no way (there's some remote chances to try, but I'm not hopeful) to communicate from the inventory or journal to that UI file or vice versa. What I'm saying is that if the inventory UI is scaled up, then the journal needs to be as well, and so on, or else you'll have a huge book background but a regular sized inventory on it, looking more like a weird bookmark than content on a page. But if it's just the text (and not the UI around it), then that can be totally separate.

Modifié par FollowTheGourd, 03 décembre 2009 - 02:28 .

[yslee]

Follow, that's a lot of good work you're doing! If I can give you kudos on this forum I would!

Looking forward to whatever you cook up!

[Cnox]

I know this is late response, but I'm interested in this. the eyefinity setup in DAO is flawed: the movies are too big for 5:4 monitors, and the UI elements are all strewen across the screen. Id like to get a mod that puts all the elements (including cutscenes) within the center 1/3 of the widescreen resolution. This way it works on 3x 16:9 or 3x 5:4 screens.



Anyone have anything for this?

[FollowTheGourd]

Cnox wrote...

I know this is late response, but I'm interested in this. the eyefinity setup in DAO is flawed: the movies are too big for 5:4 monitors, and the UI elements are all strewen across the screen. Id like to get a mod that puts all the elements (including cutscenes) within the center 1/3 of the widescreen resolution. This way it works on 3x 16:9 or 3x 5:4 screens.

Anyone have anything for this?

Re-reedit: nothing available, but might be possible to do. As far as conversations go, is it an issue with black letterboxes taking up too much space or something else? If so, that's fixable: the "offending" formula for calculating them is (heightscreen - [widthscreen / AspectRatio]) / 2 where AspectRatio is *always* 16:9. So let's say you have three 1280x1024 displays, then you get a letterbox height of (1024 - [3840 * 9 / 16]) / 2 = -568 (yeah, negative), which obviously doesn't work so well... I just tried seeing myself what happens there and it's like peeking through a mailbox.

The more specific you can be about the other UI issues (which elements in particular), the better.

Modifié par FollowTheGourd, 24 mars 2010 - 12:27 .