looking for information on learning ui modding

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I'd like to take my hand at learning to mod the EverQuest UI, and I'm finding information to be a bit scarce. I've found some helpful bits at eqinterface, but it's just the barest minimum to get started and leads to a lot of trial and error and waiting for the EQ client to reload the UI. Is there any comprehensive resource out there, to learn things like the different available anchoring modes and how they work in the EQ layout engine? In particular, has Sony/Daybreak released any kind of specification or documentation?

Additionally, is there any sort of WYSIWYG editor that people use? Internet history finds a few attempts that were lost to the sands of time, but I didn't see anything that is even close to a workable state right now.

This is a link to some utilities. Not much but what I have.
http://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/UI_utilities

I've just added a link there to a document created by SOE in 2002, when SOE first allowed us to create our own UIs, explaining how it works. Note that a great deal may have changed since then.

The utilities listed there might also help.

That's pretty much it. Welcome to EverQuest.

Caveat: I've only done minor tweaking to one published UI, so I'm far from an expert....

One suggestion might be to download some of the popular UIs, and see what they're doing. You can look at their code, and then look at what the windows look like, and piece a lot of it together.

For that matter, you could look at the default UI code, and do the same thing.

By the way, OP, I hear you on the reloading of the UI, it's ridiculously long. I have an army of alts, and when a new UI comes out, I hand-edit my character UI files to point to the new UI. It saves hours compared to doing it through the game.

Tat

What I did with my UI was to grab pieces from other UIs. Then I edited them to make any changes I wanted.

Of course, that was years ago. Since then, every time SOE/Daybreak updates the default UI, I look at the changes they made and adjust my UI accordingly.

Fanra, that document was exactly what I was looking for, thanks so much. There are still a few missing pieces that I suppose I'll have to put together myself, but that's a huge leg up on where I was previously.

It's an awful lot of trial and error. At least they fixed the 'load ui 10 times and crash client' bug
I'd suggest starting with something simple, like move a button, change size, change colour, etc.

http://www.eqinterface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18784

I find myself referring to this often when modding my UI pieces. It's far from a how-to, but it's a good resource to have.

I find that if I use the /loadui to switch between default and the mod that I am doing helps cut down on the wait time to view changes to the mod.

It's really a learn as you go type of thing And a lot of trial and error for what you want to do and what you actually can do . I used to love modding ui stuff but anymore I mod only what I have to and just deal with it.

I did pretty much what Fanra did. Aside from having a basic understanding of programming, I pretty much did a mixture of teaching myself and using the tutorial forums on EQinterface.com. If you have issues there are a number of people in the Developer Discussion forums there that will help you figure out what you are doing wrong, or if what you are trying to do is not possible currently.

Well, for figuring out what you're doing wrong, UIErrors.txt is your best friend. Particularly nice to have when you're trying to fix a UI that loads, but is missing functionality or has minor errors that pop up the 'not compatible' message.