I'm considering cleaning up my UI, and many people with a lot of elements choose a viewport-style UI, where the top / bottom of the screen can be used to store other information. To move all of the in-game rendered stuff between these zones, it's my understanding a "viewport" mod is the common choice, as no information is lost.

So, some of the more common solutions seem to be CTViewport and Aperture. Does anyone have a preference for one over the other, or some information about either which would lead to a choice? Thanks!

I've used both and find little/no difference between them. It's a simple operation, so that isn't surprising. If you have FuBar and Deucecommander, if you use WAU, you might lean towards aperture. If you have CTMasterMod, go with CTViewport

Thanks. Haven't run Mastermod since TBC, so I'll go with Aperture. I haven't started using WAU yet, though maybe 2.1 will make that desirable. I do like trying to stay with mostly Ace addons.

If you like the look of the Skinner mod, it comes with it's own viewport function if I'm not mistaken. It used to be called oSkin.

You don't need mastermod to use viewport. The only CT mods I have running are the mailer and viewport. Mastermod is really nothing more than a centralized GUI (with extras) for ct addons.

Not to be "one of those pretentious LUA developer types," but adding a viewport is really simple to do yourself with just a little LUA code and you don't have to incur the overhead of another addon.

If you find the features of oSkin useful it has a pretty good implementation of a viewport as far as configurations go.

I have downloaded CTViewport, but on the mod checklist it says "Incompatible", I was assuming it required the Mastermod.

It should say "Dependency Disabled" or something similar if that were the case. Incompatible means it is a pre-2.0 version (at least, the TOC number is from pre-2.0), which is quite odd if you are getting it from ctmod.net

http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/files...2/cr-viewport/

Hard-coded. The readme file tells you which lines to change in the actual .lua file. You just have to mess with the numbers and /reloadui till you get what you want. Elegant? Not really... but if all you want is a black section on your screen, it works.

Having never used viewport i have a question.
Does it simply cover the game screen with black part or does it change actual in-game resolution?

It changes the dimensions of the WorldFrame. That is, it defines the region of your screen to which the game is rendered. With my old, worse set-up, using a viewport made some FPS difference.

Is it possible to get cr_viewport to use gradient?

Here's an example:

example of ui

That's odd, I was hoping for some FPS improvements (one of the main reasons I got viewport), but I didn't notice any at all. Even when I shrunk as small as I possible could. It appears to just cover areas of the screen. Do you need to reloadui after making changes to actually change how much is being rendered?

In some places I have noticed FPS boost while in other places is same as before. Slow.

You'd probably want skinner or something similar for that.

Not to my knowledge - boomix also reported improvement above. I don't see any difference now that I have a good system, but when I was running on a GeForce MX 420, it was around 5FPS.