Post your unique UI that brings something new to the table

diospadre · 10/27/06, 12:16 PM

With the advent of ACE the other UI thread has degenerated into the incessant posting of minor variations on the same UI. If anyone else out there is like me, they basically stopped following it at page 55 because it had turned into a me-too contest instead of a helpful resource.

This thread means to combat that. If your UI has an interesting layout, useful new mod to show off, a feature you think is absent or underused, or some enhancement you coded yourself and want to show off, please post a screenshot and write something to clarify why you are posting and how people can use what you've done to better their own UI. Please do not post your UI if it looks essentially the same as everybody else who uses ACE except your RDX bars have polka dots and are sorted by the girls who are fucking the loot officer/those low on health/everyone else. You can go back to the other UI thread for that. You can post your improvements on someone else's UI that has been posted here, but please, lets not end up with the continued posted of minor variations on a UI. It's boring.

I'll start things off with my UI. As it has been for months, it is very similar to Silverblood's (isn't it ironic)?

I like to keep my UI smooth without jarring transitions. To accomplish this I use Discord Art to create the Tooltip borders and backgrounds which lay underneath all of the UI elements on my screen. It keeps things consistent and looks pretty nice in my opinion. I won't give you my DART layout because exporting settings from all the Discord settings is a huge pain in the ass, and you can achieve the same effect with 3 minutes of tinkering on your own.

As for features, my bars do something that I don't believe any addon does. The top right action button (currently occupied by Blackhand's) displays whatever trinket I currently have equipped, and whatever cooldown it may currently be subject to. A similar affect can be achieved with TrinketMenu (which I do use and keep invisible solely for the mouseover trinket selection menu), but I like that my way fits right into an action bar button. If anyone else isn't afraid of some memory usage and still uses Discord Action Bars, I'd be happy to post how I did this.

So the ball is rolling, let's see some new stuff and not 25 pages of the same old boring UI reposted ad nauseum.

Drauk · 10/27/06, 12:18 PM

Whats that buff mod ?

diospadre · 10/27/06, 12:21 PM

NOT FUNNY

• moz · 10/27/06, 12:42 PM

what's your spec?!?

Though really, this is going to be an awfully short thread since most frequent raiders are using 90%+ of the same mods/configurations.

♦ Praetorian · 10/27/06, 12:44 PM

This is a valid thread. Don't be dumb. The other thread exists mostly as something for people to passively browse through looking for artistic inspiration now, but it's not really a useful place for discussion. This doesn't have to be an active thread, because maybe there really are no new ideas out there, but if there are, then let's hear them.

Phlis · 10/27/06, 1:10 PM

Derail:

What about Addon's we'd like to see, as opposed to whats already out there? As a hunter there are few addons I actually feel I need. A trinket swapper, Tracking Assist, and a Range finder, are basically it besides the standard raiding mods(CT, KTM, DM, CdC). However I can see room for improvement in other areas:

Incoming Damage over Time: A mod that measures incoming damage, and then averages it out over the course of the fight through two methods, first the amount of time you've been in combat vs damage taken since combat started. This gives you a general idea as to how much healing you need directly at the moment to stay alive for the next for seconds, at least. Second, compares the averaged damage to the percent of the bosses health left. This will give you and idea of the amount of healing needed to survive the entire fight. Especially with the change to HoTs it could announce something like "I need another Rank 5 Healing Touch in the next 10 seconds" or another similar statement to the raid. Something based off this could then inform your healers which spells would be most mana effiecent for the remainder of the fight, barring huge spikes. Essentially a pre-emptive emergency monitor. It could be expanded so that when a healer targets a player they can get an idea of what rank spell would be best to use on say Hunters or Mages who take less spike damage and more periodic damage.

Pets in Raid: A mod that adds pets to the raid bars. Yes healers hate looking at bars. Yes it's more bars for healers, specifically, to look at. But, if pets are becoming raid viable, and therefore more acceptable targets for heals, then they need to be easily selectable. Make them the same color as their masters, well a lighter or darker shade, whatever. They should stand out and be clickable as raid targets. That, I think, is one of the main problems with hunter and lock pets, and soon Mage, Shaman, Priest and Druid pets as well, they are impossiblly hard to target for heals. Just add them to the raid frame, some how.

Antiarc · 10/27/06, 1:10 PM

Hm. Most of my "clever" things are event-triggered stuff. My layout is a fairly standard ACE'd layout.

I'm running Bongos (not Ace, I know), and rather like its attachable scripts function. I've got it set up to:

- Swap my #2 action to BS or SS depending on whether my MH weapon is a dagger or not. Combined with Stancesets, this makes for one-press switching between backstabbity and face-bashity modes.
- Attached a little script to show my hat depending on if I'm PVP flagged or not. The DD hat is too ugly to look at most of the time, but it has a great psychological effect in Battlegrounds. It's also a nice little indicator of my flag status.
- On my warrior, I have a big Battle Shout button set up in middle of the screen, just off center. Bongos makes it visible if I have >= 10 rage and don't have the BS buff. It's hidden otherwise (actual real hidden, not Discord "fully transparent but still clickable" hidden). It serves more as a "you don't have BS up, dumbass" indicator than anything else - I have BS bound to a key combo, so I just use that to cast it. It makes worlds of difference in ensuring that I don't let the buff lapse.

I use Sprocket for my consumables, tradeskills, and mounts. I particularly like it for consumables - it's great to have the bar off screen, but popped up and accessible via mouse gesture.

I have my basic action bar stuff visible, but on my rogue at least, nearly 100% of my play is driven through keybindings and mouse gestures. It makes for very quick responses to most any action, and doesn't induce reaction lag due to me having to stop moving, look for my skills, and click 'em. Beyond gestures, that's not really much of an addon thing, but it's a rather significant change from the stock UI.

I have a few addons I've written to provide a one-hit, accurate measure a target's AC and damage reduction, and an incoming heal tracker and parser.

I couldn't find a quick, light way to put borders around the chat frames like in Dio's UI (and there was no way I was installing the DART behemoth just for that), so I wrote a tiny little addon that just adds a border frame to chat windows.

spronk · 10/27/06, 1:26 PM

I've leveled to 67 in the beta and I'll say those who are mod-mad may want to start toning down. A lot of mods simply won't work in the expansion anymore. I believe you cant programatically swap buttons in combat so all the rogues/warriors who like to do that...

It was very, very painful the first few days playing with the default UI. However it made me go and dump most of the mods I currently play with (Necrosis etc), I did get bartender2 and a few others but even so they don't work as flawlessly as the built in UI. For example I use ag_unitframes for party frames, but there is a visible delay when getting new targets and still strange behaviour when in combat.

The mod I am currently debating dumping is SCT - its gotten to the point where a bunch of text flying around the screen is of debatable use. Does it really matter if I hit for 1k or 2k, crit or non-crit? The only things I really need to know are whether special procs are up and whether I need to re-apply dots/debuffs.

Sri · 10/27/06, 1:27 PM

nice, need to check out Bongos! :)

Thx Antiarc - always wanted something that would auto-hide abilities/hotkeys if they are active and/or unable to be used.

Antiarc · 10/27/06, 1:28 PM

Sri, be advised that I'm doing it by just dumping lua scripts into its script-attach function. It won't give you a pretty point-and-click interface that lets you do it - you'll have to get your hands dirty with some code to make it happen.

However, it is possible. :)

Edit: And yes, I'm going to be sad when BC breaks my button swap. I will come up with bindings to work around the problem, but it's ever so convenient. :(

Nurru · 10/27/06, 1:30 PM

I've leveled to 67 in the beta and I'll say those who are mod-mad may want to start toning down. A lot of mods simply won't work in the expansion anymore. I believe you cant programatically swap buttons in combat so all the rogues/warriors who like to do that...

Despite my long list of mods, I'm fairly certain if I just had Bongos, Autobar and a unitframes mod that wasn't terrible then I would be mostly satisfied. Oh, and Itemrack. But I'm pretty sure I could live without that considering how often I forget I have it.

Fugazi · 10/27/06, 1:32 PM

Ya right now I use discord to make my hotkeys dependent on my target (Friendly, Hostile). It helps me a ton because I can all the heals that I don't queue/click on the same hotkeys as my damage spells. I'm probably going to be stuck using a set of shit keys to get most of my stuff hotkeyed, which is going to be a pain since I already use alt keys for self casting.

Pyros · 10/27/06, 1:35 PM

I removed most of SCT info besides a few particular stuff for each char a long time ago. It was just spamming too much. I keep parry/dodge checks on my hunter for mongoose/counter attack, combat tags and overpower/execute messages on my warrior. Could probably remove the addon all together and use something lighter for those, but well SCT isn't making me lag so it's fine.

As for the incoming dps mod, there was one that probably still works. I had a hard time finding it tho, and have no idea where it was. The name is CombatStats, however it's NOT the combatstats on curse/wowinterface, it's something less known, and it gives dodge/parry/block/miss rate, amount blocked, damage taken, all registered by mob type/boss(so you can see how many crits you took in your dps tanking gear on the last 3 mc clears, or what's the miss rate of bosses). It also has a little window with Incoming DPS that I used on patchwerk to find out how many healers minimum I'd need to keep me up, while MTing. I wonder if I have still have it in my US wow interface dir, if you want it might upload it somewhere.

panny · 10/27/06, 1:52 PM

(click for big)

My UI was made mainly for PvPing as a supporting Priest, but I only raid on her now. The thing I like the most about my UI is that all my information is located in the middle of the screen, starting from the bottom. The ArcHUD might seem really jarring, but it actually saves me from having yet another frame in the middle of the screen, and I soon got used to having my health displayed so prominently. Having the minimap at the bottom makes things alot less cluttered because even though it doesn't take up that much space, I found I would ignore things in that upper-right corner.

I have two main groups of spells. The bottom one has three rows of my 'regular' spells and the top has my short cooldown spells/trinkets/engineering hats. Having my short cooldown abilities on prominent display is very useful, and since the buttons are small, they don't get in the way so close to the centre of the screen (all hotkeyed of course).

My hotbars are done with Flexbar. The top two rows of the main group are split into hostile and friendly spells. Depending on my target, it'll map my keys to the row and shade the other row. I found this very useful for when I still PvPed. Right clicking on a button will cast the rank 1 or group buff version of the spell, which helps save space. I can probably can similar functionality using a less intensive mod, but I've decided to wait until all the UI changes come through.

I use Theorycraft to display the amount of times I can cast a spell before I go out of mana. You can also have it display HPS/HPM/total heal, etc, but I generally know my spells relative HPS/HPM/total heal, but knowing the number of Flash Heals I've got left in me is better than looking at a blue bar and trying to perform a few calulations in the heat of battle.

Antiarc: You use Sprocket for the mouse gestures? (Wasn't really clear) How do you use them? It sounds pretty interesting.

Gort · 10/27/06, 1:52 PM

I'll ask the silly question. What's the little gadget doing the latency/money/durability/time info on the bottom of your combat log, Dios? If that's just one addon, the idea of being able to throw FuBar + stack of FuWhatevers out the window makes me salivate somewhat.