For everyone who see's those awesome UI's on the PK videos and wishes that they could have that, look no further.
This will be a work-in-progress guide showing the entire community how to customize their UI's for EPW!
I'm making this because nobody should be expected to pay for customization. Everyone should have the right to be able to edit their client's and enjoy the game to it's maximum capability.
There are a few things that you will need (for best results) before embarking on this journey
- Adobe Photoshop CS6
- Adobe Bridge CC
- sPCK
- Patience
What do I need all of these for?
Adobe Photoshop is used to edit colors, and the models of the UI. This is what you will use to change the colors of Sparks; Skillbars; Minimap, and virtually anything else that can be edited on the client.
Abode Bridge is used to open files that normally you wouldn't have a program to open them with, such as .tga, .dss, etc. With this you will be able to navigate throughout the packed folders (
surfaces, interfaces) of your client and choose which items to edit.
sPCK is a program that allows you to compress, and extract your .pck files (
surfaces, interfaces) so that you can open them with Bridge, as well as re-compressing the edited files for use in your PW client once you're done editing them to your liking.
Now, although I can't supply to you Photoshop and Bridge personally, I can supply you with sPCK.
The link will be below. As for your Photoshop and Bridge, there are
other ways that this can be acquired if you do a few google searches.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/125v19xommu1rq6/sPCK.rarVirusTotal
Step 1. Decompressing the correct files.The files that we are going to mainly be editing when playing with our custom UI is
surfaces.pck and
Interfaces.pckThese both are found in the element folder of your EPW files. Drag these two files into your sPCK folder.
Your sPCK folder should look something like this one you've done that.
Once your interfaces and surfaces .pck files are in the sPCK folder, now we will decompress the files so that we can easily access them.
To do this; depending on the system you have (
32bit/64bit) open the .bat file you need. For me, it's
sPCK 64bitOnce you've opened sPCK, you'll see this black CMD prompt giving you several options. The only two options we'll be focusing on is
1. Compress.pck 2. Extract.pckIn easy terms;
Extracting will open the .pck files from PW and allow us to see all of the files contained within them. Once we're done editing, we'll
Compress them using the compression tool to make the edited files back into a surfaces/interfaces.pck for use on your client.
Select option
2. Extract.pck, you will then be prompted with a drop-down list asking which files you want to extract.
You will press '4' which will be surfaces.Once it's done extracting the files from
surfaces.pck; you can choose to also choose to extract the
interfaces.pck as well. You will do this by reopening sPCK, '
Extract', then
5. "Custom". Here you will
type interfaces.pck and it will extract the files for you as well.
After the extraction process has been done, you've finished extracting the files from your surfaces and interfaces .pck files. The extracted files will now be located inside of your sPCK folder; as seen below.
Since these files aren't able to be seen/edited by normal means. Don't try and open any of the files in these folders outside of
Bridge.
Congratulations! You've successfully decompressed your surfaces.pck and interfaces.pck folders! You're literally half way done already!Step 2. Opening with BridgeNow since we have the decompressed file folders, let's open them up.
Open up your
Adobe Bridge CC and find your
sPCK folder. Then open your surfaces.pck.files folder until you reach this page.
Truth be told, you won't be editing a ridiculous amount of files off the bat. Meaning, you won't be messing with a lot of the files on this main screen. This however, is your
surfaces.pck file. As you can see, there are a lot of pictures below. These are your loading screens, there is also one named "background.jpg" .. This is your home-screen where you log into the game.
There is a lot of things that can be edited & replaced, however in this tutorial I will be focusing on changing colors mostly.
Assuming you're using
the default EPW UI to start with, let's find the files we need to. We'll be editing the main UI area which contains your HP, MP bar, as well as your characters display. This is the easiest client to edit color-wise, simply because it's the
easiest client to find the files you want to edit.In the files, open the 'Custom' folder on the main page. You'll see the following. (
Mine is already edited, however I will open it in Photoshop and show you how you can change your colors too.)This folder contains
EPW's default UI, as well as it's
HP bar.We're going to change the colors of both of these files and put them into our EPW client. Onward to step 3.
Step 3. Editing Colors in Adobe Photoshop CS6Click on the main UI section and then once it's selected, right click the file, '
Open With', and then
Adobe Photoshop.
If your Photoshop and Bridge are installed correctly; the file should automatically open inside of Photoshop.
Once you've opened the file in Photoshop, you'll be at the main Photoshop screen. Here, for many of you, I'm sure that this looks alien- however, you'll only be playing with one or two different sections in this program.
In order to change the colors, you'll want to move to '
Image' at the top, '
Adjustments', and then you'll be at the screen we want.
You'll have two options, playing with
Hue/Saturation and
Color Balance. Both of these can change the color of your UI, however, I prefer using Color Balance due to it being less-permanent than Hue/Saturation.
Once you're in color balance, you'll see levels in three different tabs.
Shadow's,
Midtones, and
Highlights. Each of these can be edited. Always start from left-right on these for best results!
I'll be playing with my colors now and posting the results.
As you can see, the fully-black UI is now Red w/ white highlights. This is all due to changing the values in the 3 different bar's in color balance.
Once you're done and satisfied with the results, you can go to the top of Photoshop',
'file', and then 'save'. You've now saved your work! However, you're not done yet! Onward to step 4.
Step 4. Compressing and adding to client Once we've saved the files we wanted to save. They're now edited and saved in the decompressed files; however, they aren't in the
surfaces.pck yet.
You can exit Bridge, and Photoshop now. You've completed your UI edit!
Go to your
sPCK folder and reopen your
32/64bit sPCK.bat file.Once you're back at the CMD prompt,
press 1. 'Compress', and then 4. 'Surfaces'.Once completed; the edited files have been put into the
Surfaces.pck in your
sPCK folder. Copy your
Surfaces.pck and add it back into your EPW Element folder, and overwrite the old one.
Congratulations. You're now using a customized UI in your game!
I hope that I helped out a lot of people wondering about this, these are the most basic of basic edits and I will be adding more to this guide in the future such as
Sparks, and other elements of the customized UI such as
Skillbar's, etc. I know that this guide isn't covering the Eclipse UI, I will be adding that into this guide in a bit.
Enjoy, and Happy editing!Customization Tutorial : Spark Colors 
Tired of the boring, dull, red sparks on your UI? Let's change that up.
The process is very similar to changing the colors of your UI; and HP bar! If you're using the Eclipse, or a Customized UI template. You're in luck. Spark's are 99% of the time in the
SAME folder for
EACH client type.
Open up your Adobe Bridge and navigate to your
sPCK folder; here, you'll want to open up your EPW files like you've done before.
You'll see a '
Progress' folder; this is the folder that you'll see your sparks in.
You'll see your sparks easily. However, it's more tricky than editing just one file.
AP_A.png - through - ap_c.tga all need to be edited in order for the sparks to change color since they're all elements that go into spark's changing colors.
All you need to do is open these files in your image editing program, such as Photoshop and change the color's much like the UI edit above.
Once done, save the files and
Compress them back into
Surfaces.pck.
Place the
Surfaces.pck into your Element folder and overwrite; and you'll now have flashy-new sparks!
Customization Tutorial : Custom Russian UI"
It's Exclusive, We wanna be Exclusive yo!" -
DomgrathI made this thread in order to shed some light on some of the more "well kept secrets" in the community lately, something that I found to be unfair to a majority of members who wanted a better game experience. As you've all seen, there's a customized "Eclipse" UI; courtesy of Russia. This not only looks more sleek, but has a nicer looking interface than Eclipse; and EPW's stock UI.
Pros and Cons- Your UI will look sleek as ever! With large HP bars; and easily editable files.
- Having large HP, and Squad HP's really makes PK easier.
- Overall, It just looks 100x better, and has that awesome Minimap we all have grown to love!
- You can't open your game from the patcher, you'll have to open from the .exe
- Whenever there is a major update; you'll need to verify and re-place your files in order to keep the custom UI.
- You also won't have updated faction icons; however I've now found out how to fix this and will add soon.
- YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE THE NEW SMILEY SETS! THEY WILL CRASH YOUR GAME!
All in all; it's an amazing UI. It look's sleek, has some custom features already implemented, and has an amazing Mini-Map. I'm a pure PVP player, and I don't concern myself much with PvE, so this is the UI for me. Here is a link to the UI. Here is the path in order to edit the colors of this new UI. It is in Chinese; however this should help narrow down your search by a long-run.
I hope that you all enjoy this as much as I have, happy hunting.
How to do daily sign-in on Russian UI : Credit to CandyOpen Functions, then "Encyclopedia". From here, click 'Events' from the Wiki menu. Customization Tutorial : Updating Faction Icons | Russian UISomething that bothered me a lot about the Russian UI was that it didn't update the faction icon's for other factions. Since this UI, along with others doesn't update along with the game and has to be manually updated, certain features don't update accordingly such as faction icons, and the new smiley sets.
I'll be showing you now how to fix one of these problems; Faction Icons.
Open up your
Element folder and copy/paste your
Surfaces.pck and
Interfaces.pck. If you've been using
sPCK, these files should already be in that folder, however if you're cutting instead of copying, they may not be there. It's important to make a back-up of these files. Place them somewhere safe, then move onto step 2.
Open up your
Patcher and you'll see it's at a low server-version. Click past the prompts and
'Verify' your client.
Since you verified your client, your edited files are going to be removed and replaced with EPW's default files. This is what we want.
Copy and paste your default
Surfaces.pck into
sPCK, and then extract the surfaces so that they can be opened in
Bridge, or another gateway program.
Open the default
Surfaces.pck file in your gateway program and find the following folder:
"
iconset"
You'll want to then copy
ALL of the files in this folder and paste them elsewhere (
preferably a new folder on your desktop). Once you've copied all of the files from this, we can now revert back to our custom UI.
Copy and paste your customized UI into your
Element folder, and overwrite the default
Surfaces.pck and
Interfaces.pckOnce that is completed; open up your
customized Surfaces.pck and navigate to '
iconset'
Once here, copy and paste the files we saved from the
default UI's 'iconset' into the iconset folder for our new UI. After that's done, exit out of your gateway program and
compress the Surfaces.pck with sPCK. Replace the files in your Element folder with your custom Surfaces.pck and Interfaces.pck and you're finished.
Congratulations; you've successfully updated your faction icons to the current patch's.
Customization Tutorial : Adding Custom Pictures to Level SlotI was surprised how many questions I got about this, so I'm going to add a quick guide to this somewhat complicated process.
Open up your
Surfaces.pck in your
Adobe Bridge, or other gateway program and navigate to where your main UI is stored.
As you can see, one of the main UI's backgrounds is
black, while another is
white. I've circled the two files that I'm talking about for your convenience.
The file with the
black background is one that needs to be edited; however, it's tricky to do so.
Make sure that you make a backup of this UI file in case you want to change this, or revert previous changes. Once you update this file, the changes ARE
permanent.
Now that you've found the file that you want to edit, open this up in
Adobe Photoshop or another image-editing program.
Make sure that you do this after you've already edited the colors of the UI file, or else the image you'll be placing's colors will also be changed.
Once the editing app is opened, navigate to the '
Place' feature in order to add in another object.
For
Photoshop users, this is where you'll be editing the actual
size of the placed object as well. In my experience, if you're using a
circular object to match the circular placeholder,
20x20/21x21 is a good size to use. You can use
23x23 however it will cover the entire circular frame.
Place the object within the circular placeholder and zoom out and make sure that everything look's good!
Once you're done editing and you've made everything look nice. '
Save' at the top. Then once it's saved, navigate to your
sPCK program and compress your newly edited
Surfaces.pck.
Move it into your
Element folder and replace the old one, and you should now have a newly customized UI feature! Enjoy!
Customization Tutorial : Removing Level '150' and EXP 0.0%Not using the Russian UI and have those annoying numbers? No problem. I'll be showing you how to remove them, and then correctly put your
Interfaces.pck back together again!
Open
sPCK and '
Extract', Since '
Interfaces' is not already on the drop-down list; select '
Custom' and type in
Interfaces.pck.
Much like Surfaces.pck, you'll now have a
Interfaces.pck.files folder in your
sPCK folder.
You do
NOT need Bridge for this edit. Open up your
Interfaces.pck.files folder and open '
Version 01'
From here you will see a long list of .xml files. Use the '
Search' function at the top right of your screen and type: '
hpmpxp'
As you see in the picture above, '
Edit' the
hpmpxp file with notepad. Scroll down until you see the string:
"
TXT_EXP & TXT_LV"
Once you've found these, make the "
x=" and "
y=" to "
10000"
After you've done that, you'll now have invisible "150" and "0.0%" on your UI.
Save the file, and then exit out of the folder.
Since we're now finished editing, open up
sPCK and select the option '
Compress'. Since this isn't on the drop-down; type in '
interfaces.pck.files"
This will then compress your edits into your I
nterfaces.pck. Move this file into your
Element folder and replace the old one. Your interface will no longer have the "150" and "0.0%" on your UI.
Customization Tutorial : Genie Skillbar in a RowUpdate:
Download the interface.pck file from the link below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18BsHnkfCJ0X76Dbj-Ok65kWWcia_xNSP/view?usp=sharingMake sure to save your old interface.pck currently in your folder in case your not happy with it, (Back Up File).
EpicPW Folder>Element Folder: Interface.pck
Swap the new interface file with it.
Your genie skill will now be in a bar!
How to place Surfaces and Interfaces into your Element folder :Customization Tutorial : Updating Icons and Emotions