Thread: How to Customize Your UI

The recent TTCT got me thinking I should post this as I saw some people didn't know about this.

1. Customized UI skins are 100% legal to use. The people who make customized skins are even supported by the UI dev, Frosty.

2. The best place for customized UI skins: www.lotrointerface.com

3. Always make sure your skins are current. Especially after the SoM update, many customized skins bein almost unusable until they were updated.

A Quick Tutorial On Downloading, Installing, and Using a Custom UI

<<EDIT: I will post a guide about the /ui command later today, but I have to go to class right now >>

Originally Posted by Cithryth

The recent TTCT got me thinking I should post this as I saw some people didn't know about this.

1. Customized UI skins are 100% legal to use. The people who make customized skins are even supported by the UI dev, Frosty.

2. The best place for customized UI skins: www.lotrointerface.com

3. Always make sure your skins are current. Especially after the SoM update, many customized skins bein almost unusable until they were updated.

A Quick Tutorial On Downloading, Installing, and Using a Custom UI

<<EDIT: I will post a guide about the /ui command later today, but I have to go to class right now >>

I think the community question is not about skins but customization. The skins just change the look and size and such, but does not allow much in the way of customization. I HOPE they are going to provide a way in to really change some things, rather than just slightly alter the look and feel -- something closer to wow where you could write your own code to display what you wanted where you wanted and how you wanted. Still, please finish this when you can, its an awesome start & is already very helpful.

Originally Posted by forusrname

I think the community question is not about skins but customization.

Yes, but the poll question asked if people used skins or not and almost 15% of the people didn't even know you could use skins, thus this thread.

How to use the /ui Command In-Game

If you type '/ui' in-game, you'll get the following message:

usage /ui [layout [<save|load> [<filename>]]]

What this means is, you really have two options. Saving a layout and loading a layout.

Saving a UI layout saves your position of UI elements as well as any of your UI settings (chat colors, combat and social options, etc).

So to save you ui, type the following:

/ui layout save Filename

and hit enter. Then you can log on another character (even if it's on a different server) and you type this:

/ui layout load Filename

and hit enter again. Your layout should now be the same as your other character!

I really wish it were easier to deal with making a custom UI. Are you...planning to go into this as well? The limited tutorials I've seen haven't been very accessible to me initially. I basically just have the graphics and photoshop skills, and I'm afraid to spend a ton of time figuring it out because of the recent community questions on the topic of the UI, which may indicate another re-vamp on the way making everything semi-obsolete again.

Originally Posted by Silverangel

I really wish it were easier to deal with making a custom UI. Are you...planning to go into this as well? The limited tutorials I've seen haven't been very accessible to me initially. I basically just have the graphics and photoshop skills, and I'm afraid to spend a ton of time figuring it out because of the recent community questions on the topic of the UI, which may indicate another re-vamp on the way making everything semi-obsolete again.

Unfortunately no, I have no intentions of covering how to make custom UIs. That, I believe, is something beyond my skills. Have you tried asking questions on the lotrointerface.com forums? They always seem very willing to help people.

Working right now on a more advanced tutorial that covers how to mix and match parts of various custom UIs to get the exact look/feel/function you want.

Again, I will probably never get to the level of being able to write a tutorial on how to completely write your own UI code, but I can help you rearrange it

Originally Posted by Cithryth

Working right now on a more advanced tutorial that covers how to mix and match parts of various custom UIs to get the exact look/feel/function you want.

Again, I will probably never get to the level of being able to write a tutorial on how to completely write your own UI code, but I can help you rearrange it

Care to share how to take the bottom bars (main toolbar center bottom) and mix just that with another UIs other stuff?

Originally Posted by gHzSWB

Care to share how to take the bottom bars (main toolbar center bottom) and mix just that with another UIs other stuff?

Just for clarification, because I'm not sure what you're asking:

Are you asking how to take the toolbar from one UI and use a different UI for all other aspects of the UI?

If so, yes this type of thing will be covered in the advanced tutorial.

It's going a bit slow because my free time is a bit limited right now, but I hope to have it out Soon™, to use Sapience's terminology.

Here are some preliminary screen shots of the UI I've been working on mixing and matching for the purpose of the advanced tutorial:





Again, these are just preliminary and I may make more changes (Will probably change to a widecraft instead of tallcraft)

Oh btw, this is a lorebook entry now:

http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/How_t...Up_a_Custom_UI

So if you have any contributions you want to add, feel free to do so, just make a new heading at the bottom for Notes or something.