EQMac.com

The stable version of the POWEROFTWO v2.00 User Interface is now ready for you to read about, view and download.

NOTE : the site is hosted in the UK, so apologies to our US friends if the files are slow to download. The .ZIP is around 11Mb and the .SITX is 6Mb. Both versions contain the same files.

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POWEROFTWO primary site : http://www.dcoffey.co.uk/poweroftwo/index.html

POWEROFTWO alternative download : http://www.eqinterface.com/downloads/fi ... hp?id=6071 (ZIP only)

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Please use this thread to post ISSUES and COMMENTS relevant to the POWEROFTWO UI.

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iMac (mid-2007), c2d 2.8GHz, 4Gb ram, ATI HD2600Pro 256Mb, 10.6.4, Wacom Intuos4

FROM THE POWEROFTWO WEBSITE...

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This User Interface is intended for EQMac players on the Al'Kabor server only. It can be used on any PPC or Intel Mac that is capable of running the DEFAULT User Interface.

POWER OF TWO - DEFAULT is closely based on the DEFAULT User Interface but is highly optimised in an attempt to improve the gameplay experience on the EQMac server in both Raiding and low hardware spec situations. It should be considered a good base version for other optimised User Interfaces to be constructed from as well as a close copy of the classic Everquest User Interface. No screen objects have been moved from their parent windows.

POWER OF TWO - CUSTOM is intended to be a little more “modern” in its layout in that it will display health and mana percentages and will move screen objects between windows to achieve a more logical and useful layout. At this time it is likely to borrow from the LODI DODI and SARS User Interfaces in its layout.


BACKGROUND

When going through the official DEFAULT User Interface, it immediately became clear that several of the constraints specific to the EQMac experience had not been considered in its specification and layout. I have addressed some of these issues when creating the POWER OF TWO User Interface.


MAIN FEATURES

ALL textures have been resampled or recreated from scratch to comply with the “power of two” rule for efficient display of OpenGL graphics. This means that they are all sized to 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 or 256 pixels on a side. This applies to both the texture files themselves and all pieces cut from them for display on the screen. The single exception is the art for the Compass which is constrained to specific dimensions by SOE.

Every texture is displayed on the screen at its full and original size. This means that no scaling of textures is performed when the screen is redrawn. While this means that all buttons have to be a certain size (64x32px, 64x16px and so on), it also means that no shortcuts have been taken... no using a standard texture for a button and stretching it to fit the available space.

All windows are fully opaque and have a clearly visible border and background. This makes it simple to place them on the screen so that they do not overlap, another significant cause of UI-related lag.

All non-essential textures have been removed from the User Interface. Strenuous effort has been taken to reduce the number and size of textures declared in this User Interface. While it does mean the loss of some of the “gloss” of the DEFAULT User Interface, the memory savings on older Macs should make it well worthwhile. Candidates for this efficiency were the backgrounds of the Book and Notes windows as well as the Class Animation on the Inventory screen.

The UI is “viewport friendly”. Where two or more windows would have been a similar width or height, care has been taken to make sure they match their neighbours exactly. For example many of the windows with gauges are 148px in width and those with long rows of buttons are 44px.

Numerous coding efficiency and internal consistency checks have been performed. This User Interface will not spit out a texture.txt error file.


SIGNIFICANT CHANGES

During the drive for efficiency, several significant deviations from the DEFAULT User Interface were found to be necessary.

The first and most visible was that all spell and item icons have been scaled down from 40x40px to 32x32px. Great care has been taken to preserve the detail of the original textures.

The second was that all gauges have increased in size from 100px to 128px. For users with serious screen space issues, an alternative 64px mini-gauge has been provided.


TERMS OF RE-USE

You are free to use absolutely any part of this User Interface as a base for your own User Interface. Whether you just want to alter a single screen to suit your tastes or release a whole new User Interface based upon this one, you may do so without seeking prior approval. The work I have put into the POWER OF TWO User Interface is a gift to the EQMac Community.

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iMac (mid-2007), c2d 2.8GHz, 4Gb ram, ATI HD2600Pro 256Mb, 10.6.4, Wacom Intuos4

BETA-TESTERS NEEDED!

Although I have done my best to test all aspects of this User Interface, there are a couple of areas I just cannot get access to myself. Here is a list of areas I need testers to examine and report whether there are any issues or not...

1. AA Point Window - I need someone to check that the AA Point window is working as intended. Can you spend AA Points? Are your current AA Points totalled and displayed correctly? Does the AA XP gauge work correctly?

2. Inventory Window - Does the AA XP gauge work correctly?

3. Bank Window - Does the Bank Window display LARGE amounts of plat coins correctly? I am talking of six-figure sums or more here. I have had to make the area the coins are displayed in slightly smaller than the DEFAULT UI.

4. Raid Window - Does the Raid Window work as intended? While I can view the Raid Window, I have no idea if it is sized correctly and that buttons suck as MakeLeader and Add/RemoveLooter work properly.

5. Raid Options Window - Can you get to this window and does it display correctly? I have had to code it blind and cross my fingers so I have no idea if all the buttons to set Class Colours are aligned properly.

Please do not leave it till 5 minutes before your next attempt to kill a PoP boss before checking the Raid Windows and discovering they do not work.

6. Overall performance vs DEFAULT UI. I have worked especially hard on removing unnecessary textures and code from this UI. I would be interested in hearing from our veteran players who are intimately familiar with how their Mac runs the DEFAULT UI. How does this one stack up in terms of smoothness and performance? Have I spent weeks of effort for no appreciable difference? Have I created a masterpiece of efficiency that will cause you all to throw platinum coins at my feet every time I pass? Are you more likely to throw horse apples because it is worse?

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iMac (mid-2007), c2d 2.8GHz, 4Gb ram, ATI HD2600Pro 256Mb, 10.6.4, Wacom Intuos4

What will happen next?

Well, I will spend a little time allowing valiant testers to flush out any issues with the POWEROFTWO - DEFAULT UI before starting work on the POWEROFTWO - CUSTOM version which you can read about on the website.

I will also be taking a bit of a break from coding to get back to actually playing this wonderful game I am paying for.

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iMac (mid-2007), c2d 2.8GHz, 4Gb ram, ATI HD2600Pro 256Mb, 10.6.4, Wacom Intuos4

/AWE!

Just a quick look through the files and graphics, utter amazement. While some may not realize the effort here (the internals), this is just fantastic. Everything will start with this now. Many thanks.

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Looks great Mak! Thanks for all your work on this!

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Duchess Lana Mercyhand
Lord Protector of Destiny
Grandmaster Baker/Brewer
Tanks for the memories
~moejoe chamois, 65 shaman~|~cambria silverfir, 65 druid~|~magella summner, 55 mage~

That was the idea. I am delighted it will be useful.

Do you have access to something that can read Photoshop .psd files, WW? I have the pot_windows/buttons.tga etc files in layers in Photoshop and all the spell/items files in various stages too and they may be useful to you (and others). PM me if you need any of them.

You will see that I have had to make the Blue/RedIconBackground textures 32x32px because they are shared between the background of the buffs and the spellbook itself. Even though it is not mentioned in the xml, it is a mask visible in the spell book behind spell icons when the page fades below 100% so I didn't want to let it scale. I can't think of an elegant way to make it (or the spell background) any other size without breaking our "power of two" or "no scaling" rules. That was why I masked the spells and spellgems textures to allow a little of the Blue/RedIconBackground to show through so we can see the difference between buffs and debuffs.

If enough folks use the EtasiIcons spell icon variant from EQInterface, let me know and I will convert it down to 32x32px for this UI. Sadly the t.king spell icons will not work well with this UI as they all have frames.

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iMac (mid-2007), c2d 2.8GHz, 4Gb ram, ATI HD2600Pro 256Mb, 10.6.4, Wacom Intuos4

Remember folks - the POWEROFTWO UI does not share any textures with the old DEFAULT UI or any variants on EQInterface. Any files from that repository will need to be carefully converted to support the constraints of this UI. You will need to check button sizes, gauges, icon dimensions and so on to make sure nothing is being stretched away from its original size.

Any "How do I..." questions on this area, feel free to ask and Whinywizard and I will do our best to help.

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iMac (mid-2007), c2d 2.8GHz, 4Gb ram, ATI HD2600Pro 256Mb, 10.6.4, Wacom Intuos4

Wizman hit this one on the head. This is how the standard UI should be. This is simply...perfect. I wish that every new EQ player would be forced to use this for performance enhancements alone. This is one of the best things that could have happened to the EQMac client.

You'll be getting bug reports from me shortly, though with the care that you have taken with this, I doubt there will be many, if any at all.

Once I get this going on some of my other characters, I will play around with the AA's.

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Elder Judah, Harvester of Tares Lichen

V

This kind of UI sorcery is way out of my level of computer literacy, but I can fully appreciate the time and effort that went into this. Truly a 'game changer' in terms of EQMac UI's. Awesome and much appreciated.

B.

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Beerswiller
-HORDE-

I am very pleased that folks are finding this useful.

What are the first impressions in terms of client smoothness? Has freeing up memory and changing the textures helped much? Does it affect all Macs or just certain models? The reason I can't quantify it myself is that I have the great fortune to play on a reasonably modern mid-2007 iMac.

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iMac (mid-2007), c2d 2.8GHz, 4Gb ram, ATI HD2600Pro 256Mb, 10.6.4, Wacom Intuos4

Very cool, Maktub. Thanks for the effort that went into this, and for sharing the results of your labor!

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Ryoku Wing, Swift Tail of Temerity

Soft-skinned alt scum:
[ Ravenwing | Syovan | Prudence | Auvry | Sycorax ]

Very impressive stuff, Maktub. I can't wait for the custom version. It does seem a lot of faster. Will test it more when I get more game time.

Not sure if this slows things down but personal preference is for the casting timer to be part of the target window. Makes it easier for healing.

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Aerili, Storm Warden
Officer of <Destiny>

I did prelminary testing last night. I thought it might be good for the boxed characters. Since I have so many characters I was going to try it with each of them.. but by the time I made a very simple modification to the template.xml file (only changed the background image it used on one window type from dark to light) and verified it worked most of my night was completed. However when I was loading it up on some of the characters that was using a ui other than default, I was kicked out of EQ and couldn't log on again for 15 minutes or so. I believe in every case where i was using the default and then switch to poweroftwo it worked perfectly but sometimes, not always, it would crash when using sars3 or sars4 and switching to poweroftwo. I ran out of time to continue my testing to see if I could find a pattern that would be helpful to isolate the issue because it took so much time to log back in.

Since I don't use the default to start with I wasn't able to tell if it lagged less than the default but it was a lot better than sars4. I ran around hoping to find someone doing a Mass Buff of some type to see how much lag I would get but, alas, PoK was nearly empty so I couldn't test that. I might have to test it on an actual raid.

Things like AA worked and I could see I had an aa point to spend but I didn't want to spend it so didn't try that.

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Daro - 65 Monk ** 4/30/2011
Lots of other characters

Got a chance to test it TSing today.

I switched a few times back and forth between the default and Poweroftwo and the mouse was for certain faster and less jerky on Poweroftwo. I was planning to just TS on the default mode due to the icons being larger, but the shear speed/smoothness improvement of the mouse sealed the deal.

I had set up both UIs to work well and still look good with no overlapping windows etc to switch back and forth between TSing and regular stuff, but there is no need now.

Very stable. As I mentioned in guild before, the casting timer is much, much smoother, the spell book moves much more quickly and the chat windows update faster. FPS is probably up a bit over the default.

I would recommend to all new players and existing ones to use this as their basic UI over the default one. It is simply so much smoother and better. It's not going to win any awards for looks, but as whinywizard said, this IS a game changer. I simply only ever dabbled in UIs before and just didn't bother due to performance hits.

My only quip would as I mentioned before in guild would be to have two versions, one with 32x32 icons and one with 64x64 icons.

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