Further resources for UI modding
The main means to get up-to-date documentation on how to modify the UI is to take a look at the addons/scripts contained in the catalog files.
Use the catalog tool to extract the content of the UI-directory. The following is a quick run-down of the directory and the files it contains:
| file/directory structure | description | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ui |
| the root directory containing all ui data | |||
| addons | root-directory for Egosoft-provided UI addons | ||||
| ego_xxxx | each addon (prefixed with ego_) has its own directory | ||||
| ui.xml | this file describes the content/basic information of the addon (see below) | ||||
| *.lua | Lua script file(s) (see below) | ||||
| *.xpl | these are internally used files not relevant for UI modding support (just ignore them) | ||||
| core | root-directory of coreUI related files | ||||
| Lua | |||||
| jit | folder containing internal XPL/Lua files not relevant for UI modding (just ignore this) | ||||
| *.lua | Separate scripts for the different parts of the UI. Each script represents a certain part of the UI. Certain scripts (at the time of writing this these are: Billboard.lua and WriteText.lua) are used internally and are of little interest to UI modding. | ||||
| *.xpl | these are internally used files not relevant for UI modding support (just ignore them) | ||||
| presentations | |||||
| * | These are the resource files used by the different parts of the UI. There's no official support for modifying these at the moment. | ||||
| *_recovered | These directories contain textures used by the UI. | ||||
| addon.xsd | The XSD describing the structure of the ui.xml-file for mods. | ||||
| coreaddon.xsd | The XSD describing the structure of the ui.xml-file for addons provided by Egosoft - not relevant for UI-modding. (just ignore this) | ||||
| default.bgp | UI-internal file. Not relevant for UI modding. (just ignore this) | ||||
| messageconfigurationgraph.dtd | Describes the structure of the corresponding XML-file. | ||||
| messageconfigurationgraph.xml | Description file for displaying target elements. There's no official support for modding this file at the time of writing this. | ||||