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DAoC UI Editor
Links:
DAoC Editor Homepage
Source Code
About:
In October of 2003, Mythic Entertainment released Trials of Atlantis, an expansion pack for their popular online-game Dark Age of Camelot. Among the new features was the ability for users to modify their in-game user interface by editing a collection of XML files and images. A community of modders quickly grew to aid each other in learning how to create new mods (i.e. custom user interfaces). After playing around with this new feature myself, and reading the many forum postings, it became clear that:
- Creating a custom UI was tedious, requiring users to specify X,Y coordinates and other graphical details in a text document.
- Creating a custom UI was slow because users would need to first make XML modifications, save files, and then load the game to view their changes.
- Creating a custom UI required a level of technical skill (familiarity with XML).
Because of the technical knowledge required to create a UI, many artists (who would otherwise be most qualified to create a cool mod) were unable to create XML code to fulfill their vision. Further, even those who did know XML were slowed by tedious data input, a mess of interconnected XML files, and a slow loading game client.
I decided then to create what eventually became the DAoC UI Editor. This tool was designed to benefit the community by providing a solution for the problems mentioned above. The UI Editor hides all the XML coding from the user and instead presents modders with an interactive view of the in-game interface they’re working on. The benefit to myself was an opportunity to experience all phases of the development cycle with a product that had a tractable user-base (500 - 10,000 users world-wide) and challenging goals.
The final release version of the DAoC UI Editor was posted in June of 2004. In the three months since release, the program has had over 10,000 downloads and has been localized in English and German.
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