Recently I was faced with the problem of upgrading our shards client to a version that supports more Art Slots. I chose 7.0.21.1 because it has unlocked almost all the art slots and it is still pre-uop file format. I wanted to add a lot of custom graphics and I realized that the previous developers of my shard had not tracked the custom art slots.

The first thing I tried was using Fiddler's Compare Plugin:

ai22.photobucket.com_albums_b347_Praxiiz_fiddler_compare.png

That got me halfway there. I could scroll down through each art item and compare the two.
What I really wanted to do was see how the files compare, but also move graphic assets to other slots easily. In Fiddler, I ended up doing the following:
  1. Find a section of free slots (by category for the custom slots)
  2. Insert a graphic at a time into that slot (right click, insert at, enter number)
  3. Remove the graphic from the current slot (right click, remove)
  4. Then I needed to move the tiledata to that new slot
  5. Modify radar colors
To make things more complicated, if I wanted art from another Art.mul file, I had to open up a second instance of fiddler, modify the paths to point to the other file, and then export it from one instance and import it from the other.

What a pain in the ....

Whenever I am faced with a task that I think will take me a long time, I always have to ask myself if would be the same amount of time or less to make a utility to automate the process. In this case I realized that the tool I needed didn't really exist.

What I needed was a new application:
  • Scrolling lists of graphics that have their scroll bars linked to view things side by side
  • The ability to scroll lists independent of the other list
  • The ability to move art around with minimal mouse clicks and include the tiledata with it
  • A clipboard that could store entries from either list visually
ai22.photobucket.com_albums_b347_Praxiiz_uo_art_merge.png

I think I have a pretty good start, although thinking back maybe I should have made this a Fiddler plugin... The only thing that I dislike about fiddler is that the Ultima SDK has too many things defined as static. The fiddler compare plugin basically just copies and pastes the UltimaSDK files and renames the classes.

It's mostly functional, I just need to add RadarColor copying to it, which should be fairly simple.

Of course knowing my luck someone will have already written something like this, and I'll have wasted my time. :)
 
Hi Praxiiz!

Sorry to bother you after such a long time, hope you still hang around but I'm currently merging some art and this is exactly what I needed.
Would you be able to release UO Art Merge,even if incomplete? Thank you so much!
 
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