Need help with Dashboard Skins

[Coasty]

With the recent updates to nUI+, including v5.07.24, a problem has arisen for me. I don't know if it's a bug or a planned change which is why I'm posting here.

For quite some time I've been using the nUI_Transparent Console dashboard skin. I use it because it removed the top-of-screen nUI background graphic (the sort of upside down wide squashed T) and the art work around the action and pet bars. I especially liked the upper screen background graphic being removed as I like the Player/Target and Blizzard Bar elements placed down on top of the console. So, basically I much prefer a dashboard skin that is completely minimalist AND without distracting (not to mention some times down right ugly) art work in the console background. Not to mention it's annoying to continuously look at a large unused background graphic.

The problem is that the Transparent Console replacement skin quit working correctly two days ago as the top-of-the-screen default nUI background graphic is once again always displayed. But, being a glass half full kind of guy, at least the art work graphics replaced by the skin in the console at screen bottom are still hidden. Also, there are no LUA errors generated for this problem.

I've removed and re-installed nUI, removed all nUI related /WTF files, none of which has made a difference. I looked at the TOC/LUA files of those replacement skins that were updated this month, but if there's any changes I can't see them, so I have no idea of what was actually updated.

Subsequently, after going through the nUI: Art downloads I found that ALL the skins that removed the upper background nUI graphic no longer do so for me. Unfortunately, all of the skins that were updated this month also make use of the default nUI upper screen background graphic, so even if they were to work correctly, I still wouldn't be using them .

So, this leads to a couple of questions.

Is this happening because something changed that requires an update to the replacement skin TOC/LUA files?

Did something change that requires a modification to the relevant replacement graphic file?

Is this a problem specific to just my system?

Or is this just a bug that crept into the woodwork?

In any event, suggestions are welcome as to how I can fix the problem. I'm completely stymied as nothing I can think of to try and fix things has worked.

Oh, out of curiosity, what is the actual graphics format used by the dashboard files? I'd like to look at some of them and see how they're put together.

[spiel2001]

/nui console off
/nui console mouseover

Either one should do the trick for you.

Nothing has changed that would prevent it from working that I know of.

As for the graphic format, it is a proprietary Blizz format (or at least a non-standard format). I create all of my graphics in PNG and then convert them to BLP

[Coasty]

I gotta write down those command line strings and print myself a handy cheat sheet, I keep forgetting about the darn things.

As for the non-standard BLP format Blizz uses for its pix, is there a BLP format file viewer available somewhere so one can look at them directly?

[Chmee]

There's a wikipedia article on the blp format that links to at least one viewer.

[spiel2001]

Originally Posted by Chmee There's a wikipedia article on the blp format that links to at least one viewer.

There's a nifty little BLP/PNG file converter written in Java you can grab... you just drag and drop your image files onto it and it converts them between formats for you. I think it's just called "PNG to BLP" or something... should be easy enough to Google.

Then you just work in PNG as you normally would and convert to BLP for testing.

[Coasty]

Nifty... Thanks...

[Vis]

Originally Posted by Coasty I gotta write down those command line strings and print myself a handy cheat sheet, I keep forgetting about the darn things.

There's a thread dedicated to the slash commands that you can print from the FAQ Forum. It should have everything