Method to the UI Madness

My last UI mumbles weren't just out of the blue. :) I had (still have) fairly good reason for all the changes. They come in the name of Aygaren. Remember him? That Tauren pally who wants to L2tank?


The basic goals of adjusting the UI were such: Useable across all characters; maintaining current/already known keybinds and, "field of view." Little things like swapping out different character rotation spells/attacks to match the keybinds sort of came with the territory, minor stuff.

Not that far from the subject, I happen to like reading several specific columns over at WoWInsider. The "Know Your Lore" column tops the list I guess. If I'm particulary working a specific class, there are the class specific columns nice and sometimes helpful to read. One such column I've followed regulary is the "UI of the Week." Each week a player submission is offered up and discussed. It's just been quite useful over the years for seeing different UI set-ups and the add-ons the player used. I'm am pretty sure it was somewhere in one of these year end columns, that I recall a slight mention of a UI trend which moves everything over to the side of the screen, instead of the staple bottom of screen.

Dufit, (my resident Horde testing subject) got the call to come up with something along this line and to determine it's usefulness. Part one, the set-up, got all arranged with only minor adjustments for everything to fit within the KG panel. There was some slight action bar position changes per personal taste, though everything pretty much held it's original settings otherwise. Dufit field tested the set-up, things went along pretty well, so now all the brothers in arms are field testing as well. Here's what the set-up looks like:



Side-based UI set-up with Aygaren

(Since this screenshot; casting bar, player and focus frames have been moved down to sit between chatter and omen frames. Much more visibility)

I was pretty good with the previous UI set-up (last UI post here). It looked good, worked out pretty well for me and all. Although I had managed to make that bottom bar panal as small as possible yet still useable enough for me to quick sight things I normally click outside of rotation, I still had the feeling that I didn't have quite enough open viewing area along the bottom. Here again, personal taste. Along with the thoughts that most groups Aygaren might possibly tank for could possibly end up in that area slightly hidden from my view. All things considered, the basic line-up of tank>melee>dps>healer, I had a little fear that one or some might end up LoS poor. I know. I'm being nit-picky. But the concern for me is real so the possibility of a side based UI went into motion.

So, most everything got moved off to the right side. My unit frame, casting bar/info, focus and target of focus frames got moved down some more. Omen became a bit smaller, but is easily sizeable during play as needed. And, there is plenty of open viewing area around these bottom elements now.

I like it. Initial field tests out in the open world of questing are showing good promise. Dungeon tests are yet to come. What do you think of it? Have you used something simular before? Any suggestions/thoughts are welcome.

lol and the UI update

I happened across this little datamined script over at MMO Champion one night.

 

TIME_PLAYED_ALERT = "You have been playing for %s. Excessive gameplay can
cause inconvenience in your daily life."

 

OOPS! They're on to me. How the heck am I going to convince them that WoW IS my daily life? Roflmao!

 

KK, more slightly serious stuff ahead.

 

Some of you may remember way back when I first ventured into the world of add-ons and UI changes. If not, the UI post with screenies is here.

 

I confess to being rather slow in doing such things for reasons I'll not bore you with. I must take my time with them. I do a little here and a little there, play with them for some time to get a good feel for the changes, then take time to consider the next change. To bring everyone up to date more or less, here is the current list of add-ons I'm using. Also note that instead of linking each one, I get all my add-ons from Curse.com, via the curse client. Makes installation quite easy :)

 

• Chinchilla Mini-map
• Omen (threat meter)
• Recount (damage meter)
• Bartender4 (action bars)
• Deadly Boss Mobs (PvE modifier/alerter)
• Tidy Plates (name plate mod w/threat indicator)
• KG Panels (shiny stuffs to pretty things up)
• Chatter (obvious useage)
• Pit Bull unit frames (group/party unit frames)
• Quartz (casting bar/buffs and timers)
• Healers Have To Die (Khrox's battleground favorite, lol)

 

The KG Panels, along with tweeking out Bartender4 and adjusting my camera max distance, are the most recent adjustments I've made. One of the other important considerations I keep in mind during all changes, is the ability to use my set-up across all characters. Important for two reasons. I don't want to go through changing the overall appearance, and I don't want to be changing keybinds.

 



UI screenshot4

I've got my KG panels thingy about as small as possible, where I can still recognize the icons at a glance if needed. My main rotations are keybound to the same keys across all characters. This required moving some spells and such through Bartender4, but no big deal. I just needed to use the same keybinds for my own memory sake, lol.

 

Now that most everything is pretty well contained in the bottom portion of my game screen, I further tweeked my "camera max distance" view to 35. (settings range from 0-50, default is around 15? as I recall) This was done for the benefit of Aygaren learning to tank, and needing to see more of what was all around him including the deeps squad and healer positions. I started with distance 35 which may or may not change after a few try-outs. My middle mouse scroll button still covers camera zooming for on the spot needs. There are still a couple of other camera settings I'll probably try out in time. What I've managed to do so far is good though.

 



camera max distance 35

Other minor notes: Recount isn't all that necessary any more, though still has some uses. I have it set to auto-hide when in combat, so it works well on top of Omen which I do use in combat. And, though all my characters gain duel-specialazations abilities, I haven't really worked with those changes to the action bars yet. Yep, I'm one for staying in my main chosen spec because I like it that way.

 

Keybinds and macros are set to the left of the minimap, clickable off spells/self heals and such to the right of map. Professions, food, drink, necessary pots/flasks and such are in the two down-sized right side bars. Very much out of the way.

 

Quartz-must have for me! Centered above but near the KG panels, leaving room for the timers and such to show. My own character frame is to the left, slightly lower. And my focus frame is to the right of it, along with the "target of focus" frame.

 

I still have work to do on the group/party frames. For now, they show up near the top, left side of the screen as long columns of ten. I would like to tweek them to more of a 'block' style. Some sort of a 5x5 thing or such.

 

Bagon: shows all bags as one. Mouse over an item, I get a total count of it plus seperate counts of in bag and in bank. Along with the quantities of all alts on that server and wheather in bank or bag. Pretty useful for me.

 

Chatter allows me personal customization of the chat box and various seperate channels as I use them.

 

All in all, it's been a slow learning process which I'm quite happy with so far. Everything just looks so much better, and is easy to navigate and manipulate when necessary. Add-on's can be very useful to your game play. Personally, I use them sparingly and as learning tools. Most all that I have, are really basic when compared to more serious players/raiders. That is just my personal view though, I am something of a minimalist in my ways, lol. So...

 

...if you're new to the game world of add-on's and UI adjustments, take your time. Start out with just one, maybe two. Get them set-up and use them for a bit. Then proceed at your own pace. In time, you'll probably come up with something quite useful for yourself, and have fun using it.

 

If you happen to be pretty good with game mods and UI's yourself, feel free to add any helpful suggestions for beginners in the comments. Most of my post here is about what I use, not how to use them. Though I will mention that most add-on's come with a readme.txt and usually a link to their website and possibly tutorials. As I recall, a couple were 'good to go out of the box,' to which I made only minor adjustments over time. But this was according to my personal tastes and useage. Your milage will certainly vary.

 

HappyGood gaming everyone!

Okay, just one fun one for the road-lol!



Gizzel and his baby naga's



 

 

 

UI- Growth of the User Interface

Yes, I did originally say that this blog would not be about guides; theorycrafting and so on. There are plenty of folks in the WoW blog community much more capable than I to fulfill your needs in these areas. The reasons for todays' post does come under the other heading of writing about what has my interest in the game at any given point. Which brings me to the slow but sure development of my user interface. Which is still a work in progress!


Background: When Sol finally hit level cap in Wrath, his attention turned towards end game. In particular, he wanted to PVE and raid. This all happened rather late in the expansion, with most other folks already farming ICC. Undaunted by the hills ahead of him, everything came under the microscope. Gear, dailys, LFD, various add-ons he never used before and the user interface. It became a long journey of learning things, and then trying to put them into use.

Our first screenshot is from July 2010. Still working with the basic WoW interface, add-ons were the first additions made according to much of the blog and website info I had read through. Recount, so I could monitor my dps on the training dummies. Omen for the needed threat meter. The "must have" Deadly Boss Mods, and Chinchilla Mini Map. (because I thought it was cool and I could resize/pretty the map up) I was also learning that the better players were key-binding their spells and abilities. As you can see, my early attempts at this were rather...noobish, to say the least. Although I seperated my buffs and debuffs from my spell rotation (such as it was), I keybound the rotation to the number pad. I'm sure you can also tell that I was still clicking at least half of it. The transition to key-binds went slowly for me, but I eventually got kinda used to it. Mind you now, I was still using the W-A-S-D movement keys. Yep, I had a lot to learn yet.

This second screenshot from November last year shows some improvement, both in style and my learning experiences. Everything is being down-sized here to allow for better views of what's happening all around me. On the top bar, I'm still clicking things. The spell rotation though, has been moved to the hot bar numbers (1 thru =) I've also managed to learn how to go through most all movements with the mouse, rather than the associated keys. There was a point in time a bit before this ss, where one of the patches had done some weird thing and I lost all the changes in the action bars. It was like, back to clicking again. It was, horrible. By this time I had become so used to using the keybinds that I was really lost trying to click spells. Needless to say perhaps, it didn't take long to re-do the UI.

On this last screenshot in the present time: The further additions of Bartender and Chatter have shown up. I find myself still tweeking both of them every so often. Everything has been down-sized a bit more, and I'm currrently working on getting Grid set up. Over all this time, I'm still learning how to use and tweek all these add-ons. It's been a long journey, with both entertaining and frustrating moments. Overall, I'm very happy with all these changes and look forward to growing some more.

TL:DR; This post was written with the "new player" in my thoughts. Hopefully, it will be of some encouragement and/or help for them in the days of Azeroth to come. If I were to offer advice, it would be to start out slowly with a basic add-on (such as your mini-map), and build from there. Take time to use each one to see if it fits you, then move on to the next.

Happy Gaming!