New GUI: Uncluttered

[Scabadus]

Hello Everyone.

I've made a new GUI with textures for AO with the goal of uncluttering the screen.

I have been heavily influenced by Dovve's "NotumTech" skin, as any users will probably see, but I feel that I have put several unique features into this skin:

-All of the menus and wings have been moved to the top of the screen with the exception of the left and right target windows, which can be turned off.
-There is an option to toggle off the whole GUI (excluding chat windows, but instructions are included for making scripts for toggling these on and off) for taking screenshots. This does leave a single button at the top of the screen, however this can easily be cropped or left to fade.
-New look for Health, Nano and both xp bars with a "put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye" line at the 1/5 mark on health and nano bars.
-Pet menu is always accesable, whether you have pets spawned or not.
-Seemless integration with the mini toolbar, no longer do two buttons do the exact same thing and take up space. (Please note however that due to this design, using the GUI without the mini toolbar enabled will mean that you don't have access to many of your menus. This will NOT, however, cause the game to crash or cause any instability, you can simply enable the mini toolbar from the F10 menu.)
-The Leet Fighting menu is accesible
-A choice of colour schemes

*NEW**

-Two new options, curved Status (Health and Nano) bars and Very Thin XP Bars
-New thin XP bars can be put next to a hotbar for minimal clutter
-Three packages for both options individually, or both at once


Screenshot of the red and black colour scheme Here

Screenshot with the GUI disabled for taking screenshots Here

Screenshot of the blue colour scheme with the health, nano and xp bars locked together can be found Here

**NEW**

Screenshot of the curved status bars can be found here.

Screenshot of the very thin XP Bars (alien one is empty, this is a testing character) is here.

And an interesting screenshot from within testing of the curved bars is here. I hate filesize limits.

Note that the health, nano and xp bars have been updated since these screenshots were taken. For a screenshot of them in the new grey colour scheme please look Here. The curved bars are no longer avalible, though if you really liked the look of them leave a post here and I'll see what I can do about choices between bars.

I don't have a server myself, so I'm using the website www.mediafire.com to host the folder. If anybody knows of any reason why I shouldn't use this website please post it here so that any users will know not to download it before I change the host.

The latest version of the GUI itself and installation instructions can be downloaded Here in a .zip folder.

A small patch that adds "ticks" or "notches" to the HP, Nano and XP bars as well as adding the neutral gray colour scheme can be found here, simply copy and paste or extract the "Uncluttered" folder over the same folder from the origional download and accept any overrights the computer asks you about. The curves status bars files can fe found here, the thin xp bars files here and the mixture here. Extract these files to anarchyonline/cd image/textures/archives and point the launcher to them as I explained in the origional downlaod.

Any comments, suggestions, critisisms (or compliments!) can be PMed to me here, PMed to me ingame (/tell Penin), left as comments in this post or emailed to me at scabadus@hotmail.co.uk . Don't be afraid to say you hated everything about this GUI, if I don't hear what's wrong with it I'll never be able to improve it. I only ask that you don't JUST say that you hated everything, tell me why too .

Thanks again to Dovve for inspiration and to all my friends who helped me to test this.

[ziliath]

Not bad, good to see some alternatives.

[WizMeister3000]

can we get another color instead of that redish plz, something more like blue :P or gray or something

[Scabadus]

I'll work on putting a selection of colours into the download, personally I like the black and red but AO was designed to be played with blue I guess :P

[Scabadus]

The latest version now has the blue colour scheme that's been asked for (never say I don't work fast :P) and the Original Post has been updated with both the link for that and a new screenshot of it.

For everyone who has already downloaded it, there is a patch Here so you don't have to download the whole thing again.

[Kaylinne]

Hmmm I would like more grayish lighter blue please

[Technogen]

lol, BUT I do like it! Your GUI Skin has inspired me to see if I cant learn how to make my own lol

[Scabadus]

For anyone who does want to make their own, I can highly recomend Darkbane's Thread for help.

[Demoder]

It's nice to have more alternatives on the GUI front.
I look forward to seeing how this skin develops.

Comment:
In my opinion, the colors have too much..... contrast. They're too 'filled', I guess.
It may be worth exploring to brighten them up a bit, make the colors a bit less dominant.

I like the design of the hp/nano/xp/axp bars. They look fancy. But ain't the old bars more minimalistic?
I really like the way you gathered all that info in the upper bar, though. Everything's just... there. And occupies space that is normaly left unused. For me, anyway.

[Autohead]

It's nice to see some new options, but I don't like how some parts of the GUI were left untouched (or uncolored basically) from the original textures. It doesn't match. The pale blue parts from the old GUI stick out like a sore thumb in the red & black version, and are clearly noticeable in the blue version.

[Scabadus]

...I don't like how some parts of the GUI were left untouched (or uncolored basically) from the original textures. It doesn't match. The pale blue parts from the old GUI stick out like a sore thumb in the red & black version, and are clearly noticeable in the blue version.

I was hoping to get a patch out tonight to recolour many of the old colours that I had missed, but it doesn't look like it's going to be finished in time. It should be out tomorrow, but it's exam time around here so I'm not making any promises.

For now, this patch correcting the missed colours will only be for the Red & Black colour scheme.

I'm also working on a lighter shade of blue, but it's difficult to find the exact colour that people are used to in AO.

Just thought you'd like to be kept up-to-date on progress.

I've also got a couple of questions on the exact stage of the GUI. I'd like to clarify that the GUI is completly working code-wise and (in my opinion of course :P) helps to clear up the functionality of the existing GUI. It is ONLY the textures which arn't completed, so while this may not be the best looking "mod" in the world, it still works as intended. For people who like numbers but havn't followed the link to download, the current version avalible for download is 1.1 (shown as 1-1 for formatting reasons).

[Autohead]

Ah, nice to hear it wasn't an oversight. I'll be looking forward to seeing the cohesiveness of the skin when the other colors match. I've been looking for an alternative to Dovvetech since I've been using it for so long, I'm just due for a change. Red & Black were my old school colors too, so I'd probably prefer that one.

[Scabadus]

Version 1.2 is up and linked to in the "latest version" link in the Origional Post!

I was hoping to get an executable installer by now, but it was misbehaving.

Here's what you get instead:

The Red and Black colour scheme is "complete" (tm) for windows, tabs, etc.
No doubt there will be improvements :P
Cursors are still in the "Old" style... for now.
The readme file now has some extra FAQs and a credits section, as well as a note about using this with the mini toolbar.
Updated screenshot of the Red and Black colour scheme.

I've heard that people are worried about running this GUI in a very high resolution (1600ishxsome-number-I-can't-afford), it has been tested up to 1280x800 but has been designed to run higher than that.
It definatly compresses to 1024x740 (my usual windowed resolution) with no problems.
Hopefully I can get some friends with higher resolution monitors to test it on them soon and I can alter anything needed to make it work in a higher resolution.

Here's a patch for current users. Just paste the cd_image folder into your AO directory as usual, and here is the updated readme file, I forgot to include it in the patch folder.

Oh and one last thing, any chance of a sticky from any admins reading this?

[Autohead]

Oh and one last thing, any chance of a sticky from any admins reading this?

Dovvetech doesn't have a sticky, so I doubt it.

[Autohead]

1680x1050 Resolution, the "bar" at the top doesn't cross the whole screen, cuts off about halfway across.

[IHaveHugeNick]

Not bad.

[Rktim]

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice, i particularly liked the red one, all tho for the HP bars i think you should do.. well something.. like adding a small 3e effect or something..

Nice to see the concept of the rounded bars being used again ^_^


And i R teh only one with sticky GUI thread mkay? =P

[Scabadus]

Well it doesn't look like I'm getting a sticky, so I'm just gonna have to keep working on this and getting excuses to bump it back up.

Today's excuse is version 1.3

This should now work with higher resolutions, due to a lot of recoding and two new textures (if your resolution is below about 1300x800 you won't notice a thing though; the recoding doesn't add anything, just fix broken stuff). If the bar across the top of the screen STILL doesn't meet in the middle on high resolution then the next fix should be much quicker now that I've re-coded the GUI.

A couple of bugs in the code have also been fixed, namely a few of the new menus not closing when another was opened. There's an exeption to every rule of course, and this time it's the new "Hud Control" menu, which is resolutly refusing to close when another menu opens. Honestly, I have no clue why but I'll keep trying.

In other good news ArienSky sent me a very informative message about chat windows, so there are new instructions in the readme file about setting up a system where you can toggle them off (Yes, you read me right, you have to set it up. It'll only take 5 minutes and I've made all the files and put them in the right place though). I think a big Thank You is in order for this help: as anyone who is using the new "GUI Toggle" button to take screenshots knows, chat windows are a pain.

That about sums up the changes this time, no shiny new textures I'm afraid but as I said in my last post, the textures for the Red & Black scheme at least are now "Done" (tm).

Because of the amount of files changes a patch wouldn't make sence for this version, so there isn't one. You CAN, however, simply install this version over any previous version you're using, there's no need to "Uninstall" that one. The current version is linked to in the Origional Post.

P.S. Rktim I actually got the idea for the rounded bars when looking at your Soldiertech skin, hope you don't mind me thieving your idea (yours are much better anyway). Also, after watching your video of the textures, I've spent HOURS trying to get Cooliris to open local texture files without success, any tips?

[Rktim]

Well it doesn't look like I'm getting a sticky, so I'm just gonna have to keep working on this and getting excuses to bump it back up.

Today's excuse is version 1.3

This should now work with higher resolutions, due to a lot of recoding and two new textures (if your resolution is below about 1300x800 you won't notice a thing though; the recoding doesn't add anything, just fix broken stuff). If the bar across the top of the screen STILL doesn't meet in the middle on high resolution then the next fix should be much quicker now that I've re-coded the GUI.

A couple of bugs in the code have also been fixed, namely a few of the new menus not closing when another was opened. There's an exeption to every rule of course, and this time it's the new "Hud Control" menu, which is resolutly refusing to close when another menu opens. Honestly, I have no clue why but I'll keep trying.

In other good news ArienSky sent me a very informative message about chat windows, so there are new instructions in the readme file about setting up a system where you can toggle them off (Yes, you read me right, you have to set it up. It'll only take 5 minutes and I've made all the files and put them in the right place though). I think a big Thank You is in order for this help: as anyone who is using the new "GUI Toggle" button to take screenshots knows, chat windows are a pain.

That about sums up the changes this time, no shiny new textures I'm afraid but as I said in my last post, the textures for the Red & Black scheme at least are now "Done" (tm).

Because of the amount of files changes a patch wouldn't make sence for this version, so there isn't one. You CAN, however, simply install this version over any previous version you're using, there's no need to "Uninstall" that one. The current version is linked to in the Origional Post.

P.S. Rktim I actually got the idea for the rounded bars when looking at your Soldiertech skin, hope you don't mind me thieving your idea (yours are much better anyway). Also, after watching your video of the textures, I've spent HOURS trying to get Cooliris to open local texture files without success, any tips?

Well i gave up on the rounded HP bars becouse they where so damn huge at lower rezz xD

Anyway.. Coloriris vs your local folders is pritty easy.... simply open your texture folder.. figure out the adress it uses (D:\AO program\SoldierTech extract\images for me) and enter that in your firefox brower as "adress" and then hit Coloriris xD

Or.. Apparently that doesnt work anymore xD

Dhoers.. oh well il try to figure something out for you..

Hopefully you will be able to do it again in a near future...

[gergiskoo]

I like the layout and shapes, but the hp/nano/xp bars should be smaller (or have a choice between large and small bars), and there definitely needs to be a neutral gray color scheme.

If it had both of those I'd be all over this GUI.