4e UI

[senshikaze]

Is it possible to change the UI? While I am sure some people like the blue textured background with white text, it is fairly grating to me. I looked over the other systems and it seems some of them are 1000x more usable than the 4e color schema.

This is a minor request since I am pretty much going to buy Hero Lab anyway (I use Linux only and it runs in wine perfectly), but it would be nice to be able to change to something more native, or at least less blue.

[Colen]

Unfortunately it's not currently possible to change the UI for a game system. Sorry

We sometimes get the opposite requests too ("can I make Pathfinder look more like 4e?"), so I think this is something that people just prefer one way or the other. We don't currently have the bandwidth to make multiple UIs available for each game, but it is something we'll consider in the future.

[senshikaze]

I can understand that. Thank you for answering my question.

[DMayhew469]

Colen. What about the ability to just change the color scheme? Wouldn't that be fairly easy to accomplish?

[Colen]

We could allow you to change the text colors fairly easily, yes. But then they'd be incredibly hard to read on the dark blue background.

OK, so we let you swap out the background graphic. Now all of the controls which are designed to look good on that background look garishly bad. So now we need to either color shift everything automatically (which we've tried before and does not work well at all), or create a whole second set of graphics for everything.

Creating that second set of graphics takes a lot of time, and means that whenever we want to do anything new with the graphics in future, we need to spend twice as much (or more) work as before, because we need to apply every set of changes to twice as many images.

Not only that, we need to spend more time testing changes to the data files, because we need to make sure that new tabs / forms / other features look good in both styles.

Now, if we do it for one game system, people will want it for others as well. So now we need to do it for every game system.

This is something that sounds simple, but turns into a can of worms if you want to do more than just "change the text from white to black". As a result, it's not something we're planning to do soon, given the other tasks we have on our plate right now.

[DMayhew469]

I wasn't sure how you were producing the interface. It's obviously more complicated than others I've worked on.

[Colen]

Unfortunately so. We have a bunch of pregenerated graphics that get used, which would all need to be altered if we allowed users to change the color scheme. This is actually something you can do for 4e with the authoring kit - all the bitmaps and colors are defined in user-editable files, so you could replace them if you wanted. But it'd be a lot of work to do that and have it looking good at the end.

[Fox Lee]

Please, if anybody makes their own "skin" for 4e, post it here? I find the original really jarring too, in a late-90s-web-page kind of way (plus it's not great for my eyes over long periods). I tried to sub out some of the graphical elements but just replacing them, but HL didn't like them so I put it in the low-priority basket.

If anybody knows how to deal with the scripts properly but can't do the visual work themselves, give me a bell! I'd gladly contribute.