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03-24-09, 08:26 PM   #5
Paantheaus
A Deviate Faerie Dragon
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 11
Originally Posted by spiel2001 View Post
~lol~

Yeah... they're an, ummm... interesting? bunch.
/rolleyes

Anyway... it's really pretty easy to create textures for nUI's dashboard and upper console. For starters, the master graphic is 2560x512 -- it's a rule that the dimensions on all WoW textures have to be a power of 2... 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. The height and width do not have to be the same, but they do have to be powers of two on each dimension.
I was able to find some of this info floating around, not much else.

You're observation is correct... by default nUI does repeat the bottom texture flipped upside down on the top -- it saves size by using the same textures, but that is optional... you can have two separate sets of textures for the top and bottom.
I cheated and found a BLP viewer to check out the images. Would it be easier to use the transparent skin as a "base of operations" since it doesn't seem to repeat the background for top and bottom?


So, create your main graphic, then crop it into five square blocks 512x512 and save it as a transparent PNG. There's a free download app called "WoWImage" (you can google for it, I'm afraid I don't have a link handy) which you can then drag your PNGs onto and it will convert them to BLP which is WoW's native texture format. You can also drag a BLP onto it and it will convert it to PNG... neat little program.

After that, just look at the code for the "Thin Gloss Black" dashboard skin if you want to see how to do different top and bottom textures, or the "Gloss Black" skin if you want to use the same graphic just flipped.
Okay, I'm gonna try to tackle this tomorrow.

I would be more than happy to help you with the Lua code if you need it when you get to that point.
I'm interested in learning some Lua after this Blizzard/Addon debacle, so yeah that would be great.

Couple of other random questions:

1. Have you ever thought of overlaying QuestHelper's waypoints and coords onto the map in the bottom right corner? It works on the minimap as of right now. Obviously, I have absolutely no idea how much time it would take to get this to work or even if you could (setting aside QuestHelper's apparent mothball status moving forward).

2. I play on a 24" intel imac and switching from full screen to windowed mode (and vice versa) throws the UI completely out of whack. I'm getting white blocks where the various elements of the UI should be. Simply reloading the UI after switching screen modes fixes the problem (and honestly isn't that big of a deal), but I was wondering if there was any permanent fix. From what I've read, it appears to be a video card issue specifically with macs but I don't know that for a fact.