Sigil Support, UI Mods, Performance and Crashes

[Drox]

Hello folks,

More and more people are bringing UI related issues here to VGSoHInterface and the mod community for help. I've tried for months to offer as much individual support as I can muster but I'm starting to question how much more I can do. I had a feeling that Zowch was no longer working at Sigil and that was confirmed for me this week. It appears to me that no one else has been assigned to support the UI mod community and very very little UI changes have been made in the last few patches. This leaves me feeling that Sigil has put the UI and the UI mod community on the back burner and that dissapoints me greatly. It also makes me downright angry that they have significant UI issues that have been around for months and their solution so far has been to leave it to the mod community to provide support and work-arounds for their UI related client bugs.

The top three issues I'm refering to are:

1. FPS/Freezes - It's well known that the UI is updating windows that are not visible and when a UI mod provides multiple versions of windows such as the group and encounter (ie vertical/horizontal/huds) these cause a noticable reduction in FPS and freezes when starting large group encounters. A solution to this would be to add commands to load and unload windows and save their load state in vgsettings.xml.

2. Crashes and/or repatching the vgclient.ini can cause it to lose all entries in the [UI] section making it difficult for users to recover without getting a copy of those entries from someone else.

3. File permissions - users can run the game with limited permissions which doesn't allow the game to change or create vgsettings.xml and uisave/uiload files. Most users have no clue how to fix this problem.

If Sigil continues to remain silent on these issues, I will eventually just stop supporting the Drox UI. And, as it stands now, I will not be updating it until we get some response from Sigil on how and when they will address the FPS/Freeze issue.

--Drox