Still havent decided what unitframes to go with so im trying out both... with pictures and without. I need some help .. do you guys have any suggestions ?
I dig your action bar, and your tooltip layout is quite slick. I'm not sold on that style of unitframe or the whole pixelfont thing, but that's a personal preference issue more than anything. I also probably wouldn't opt for portraits - 3d ones are a distraction more than anything, especially in the middle of the fight - movement in that section of the screen can draw your eyes away from game events.
Your minimap needs some border skinning love to match the rest of the theme you've got going, and I'd see about about applying your action button skin to those buff icons. Would probably also move the weapon buff icon to a position where it's not just going to be floating out in the middle of the screen all by itself. Recount is similarly just floating there, and not textured to match the rest of your UI, either. I'd suggest finding a decent way to hide it when you're not using it if you can't find some way to integrate it into the look.
Still havent decided what unitframes to go with so im trying out both... with pictures and without. I need some help .. do you guys have any suggestions ?
Like the poster above me said, minimap skin, do something with Recount so it's not just kinda out there, and make XRS mesh with your bottom bar, right now it's half-on/half-off and it looks silly. =P
I have actually changed the Minimap already, to something with a black border. I'm still working on the unitframes, they are a work in progress.
I'm working on making the dogtags in Pitbull more simple, or atleast working better. Had some problems before when targeting npc .. it would just show x x 100% or x 100 x 100% instead of show mana/rage x Health x pct of health. But thats working now.
Recount, eh well ye, i actually dont have that up normally. I'll make a better screenshot later.
1. An ideal UI will be goal driven. What do you need? What information is of the highest priority? What actions will you be undertaking with this UI? Will you be PvPing? Will you be raiding? 2. Space saving – this is a big one, especially on screens with lower resolutions. 3. Centralization of important information: This is one of the most important ones, and the one which the default UI gets so horribly, horribly wrong. 4. Consistency: This one is interesting. You can have the most boring and generic UI layout in the world, but if you pick a nice visual style and apply it consistently throughout your UI, you can have an amazing looking interface.
Personally, of the four things here only #1 is particularly important to me, and thus has the greatest influence on my UI. #2 is something I try for, but I wouldn't sacrifice functionality for it. #3 to me is mildly important, but its not particularly something I need as a rogue.
If I had to rate things from least to most important in terms of a "perfect" UI, it would be something like:
1. Goal driven (as above): The goal should be something along the lines of "the most functional UI for me and my class." Specifically the class part. Certain UI elements may remain the same between characters, but for different classes needs change and the UI should accordingly. The "me" part of that is important in terms of looks and design.
2. Functionality: Having a low memory footprint, a symmetric UI, or a stylish UI is much less important to me than having a functional UI. For example, right now I cruise around with a 50-55 mb addon memory usage. I could bring that all the way down to 35-40 mb by only removing 3 addons (questhelper, omen and swstats), but functionally I would lose a huge help for leveling or questing for money, a 2 almost necessities for raiding.
3. Customizable: Self explanatory.
4. Ease of use: Ditto
5. Looks: If you can have an ugly UI or a nice looking UI with the same functionality, customization, and ease of use, take the one that looks better to you. That being said I wouldn't sacrifice looks for any of the above.
For me, my main is a rogue, and as such I don't have any special differences between how my UI functions when solo, partied,or while raiding except in that I have omen set to not track while soloing.
This is what my UI looks like. For me, space is not a particular issue because I have a widescreen laptop with 1440x900 (all the screenies are a lower res because I took all the pics in windowed mode), but I like the widescreen aspect because it allows me to centralize most of the things I want in a certain location without having to size them down. Though not necessary I prefer to have spaces in my action bars because it allows me to drag in and out things like warlocks healthstones or daily quest items like bombs for skyguard quests at whim. While raiding the buff list can get unwieldy, but it has never gotten to the point where I actually get annoyed by where it's at, so I've left it there for now.
My party frames look like this, and I don't use any sort of grid system because as a rogue I have no real need. For the most part a single focus is all I need, and as such my current focus is very basic and small. The only time I pay much attention to the focus frame is during 5 mans, and even then all I really pay attention to is the tanks target through raid marks (skull x circle etc.).
In terms of functionally enhancing solo and raid play I have scrolling combat text, omen, cooldown count, and the elk buff bars that show my dots against targets (in my case rupture and deadly poison). SCT is nice in that it allows me to see my combat potency + relentless strikes and sword specialization + windfury proc's without watching my energy bar for each tick or keeping track of my combat chat text. Not to mention that its fun to watch while playing with blade fury or haste pots in a raid and such. Omen is in somewhat of an awkward position, but I don't mind it much since usually I will only have to keep track of it for 30 seconds to a minute, after which I can vanish to clear my own threat and just DPS to my hearts content. Cooldown count (the numbers on the spell buttons as seconds or minutes remaining) and the EBB bars (in this case the stun kidney shot, but it is more useful for keeping track of the last few seconds of rupture) can be seen here, as well as a nice feature of SCT that shows when specific cooldowns are up. In addition to those the last major thing I have is the target cast bar part of what I believe is quartz, which is extremely useful for knowing when to kick to spell interupt against a raid boss like shade of aran or blindeye the seer.
Despite what I have now, there are still some minor things I dislike about my UI. One is that when I mouse over things, it shows my target on top of where my combat chat is, when I would prefer it to show above where it is instead. I would also prefer my combat chat text to be right justified, since it is on the right side of the screen. The last change I would make is that when I skip to the next song in iTunes using my keybindings, it shows the name of the new song on top of my stealth bar. If i knew how to move it up like a quarter inch or half inch that would be huge.
So yea, for me functionality for what you need is king, with looks a secondary concern.
Well I searched the whole forum but didn't really found an answer so I guess I must have missed the memo, hence this question.
While a year ago everyone and their dog talked about aceify their addons, the current trend seems to be to find the ultimate functional UI that must only use 1MB of UI memory or so.
While there is of course the overhead of loading lots of savedVariables, what exactly is the goal of going memory light ? I have different UIs, varying from ~30MB to 50MB to 130MB (with full Auctioneer and other statistical data). I can play well with any of them. I raid with any of them, depending what I need.
It is my understanding that runtime memory footprint is next to irrelevant on a system with 2GB ram when not dualboxing. So I'm probably missing something here. What exactly is the motivation of bringing runtime memory usage down that is so sexy that people kick out config dialogs and force themselves to hack lua code in order to customize the slim addons ?
Personally, of the four things here only #1 is particularly important to me, and thus has the greatest influence on my UI. #2 is something I try for, but I wouldn't sacrifice functionality for it. #3 to me is mildly important, but its not particularly something I need as a rogue.
If I had to rate things from least to most important in terms of a "perfect" UI, it would be something like:
1. Goal driven (as above): The goal should be something along the lines of "the most functional UI for me and my class." Specifically the class part. Certain UI elements may remain the same between characters, but for different classes needs change and the UI should accordingly. The "me" part of that is important in terms of looks and design.
2. Functionality: Having a low memory footprint, a symmetric UI, or a stylish UI is much less important to me than having a functional UI. For example, right now I cruise around with a 50-55 mb addon memory usage. I could bring that all the way down to 35-40 mb by only removing 3 addons (questhelper, omen and swstats), but functionally I would lose a huge help for leveling or questing for money, a 2 almost necessities for raiding.
3. Customizable: Self explanatory.
4. Ease of use: Ditto
5. Looks: If you can have an ugly UI or a nice looking UI with the same functionality, customization, and ease of use, take the one that looks better to you. That being said I wouldn't sacrifice looks for any of the above.
For me, my main is a rogue, and as such I don't have any special differences between how my UI functions when solo, partied,or while raiding except in that I have omen set to not track while soloing.
This is what my UI looks like. For me, space is not a particular issue because I have a widescreen laptop with 1440x900 (all the screenies are a lower res because I took all the pics in windowed mode), but I like the widescreen aspect because it allows me to centralize most of the things I want in a certain location without having to size them down. Though not necessary I prefer to have spaces in my action bars because it allows me to drag in and out things like warlocks healthstones or daily quest items like bombs for skyguard quests at whim. While raiding the buff list can get unwieldy, but it has never gotten to the point where I actually get annoyed by where it's at, so I've left it there for now.
My party frames look like this, and I don't use any sort of grid system because as a rogue I have no real need. For the most part a single focus is all I need, and as such my current focus is very basic and small. The only time I pay much attention to the focus frame is during 5 mans, and even then all I really pay attention to is the tanks target through raid marks (skull x circle etc.).
In terms of functionally enhancing solo and raid play I have scrolling combat text, omen, cooldown count, and the elk buff bars that show my dots against targets (in my case rupture and deadly poison). SCT is nice in that it allows me to see my combat potency + relentless strikes and sword specialization + windfury proc's without watching my energy bar for each tick or keeping track of my combat chat text. Not to mention that its fun to watch while playing with blade fury or haste pots in a raid and such. Omen is in somewhat of an awkward position, but I don't mind it much since usually I will only have to keep track of it for 30 seconds to a minute, after which I can vanish to clear my own threat and just DPS to my hearts content. Cooldown count (the numbers on the spell buttons as seconds or minutes remaining) and the EBB bars (in this case the stun kidney shot, but it is more useful for keeping track of the last few seconds of rupture) can be seen here, as well as a nice feature of SCT that shows when specific cooldowns are up. In addition to those the last major thing I have is the target cast bar part of what I believe is quartz, which is extremely useful for knowing when to kick to spell interupt against a raid boss like shade of aran or blindeye the seer.
Despite what I have now, there are still some minor things I dislike about my UI. One is that when I mouse over things, it shows my target on top of where my combat chat is, when I would prefer it to show above where it is instead. I would also prefer my combat chat text to be right justified, since it is on the right side of the screen. The last change I would make is that when I skip to the next song in iTunes using my keybindings, it shows the name of the new song on top of my stealth bar. If i knew how to move it up like a quarter inch or half inch that would be huge.
So yea, for me functionality for what you need is king, with looks a secondary concern.
I can definitely understand and agree with functionality>all but you can have looks and functionality in a UI. Some things in your UI could look better without losing any functionality.
You don't need class or name text on your player frame, you know what your name is and you know what class you are not to mention it's already class colored.
I can understand having empty buttons on your bars but I doubt you need that many. You have upwards of 10 empty buttons when I would say you would probably be good with 3-4 (3 healthstones and a fight specific item (IE najentus's spine) or a quest item).
There is no point to having your buff anchor showing.
Your party frames are kind of redundant- they are class colored and show class names. I'd also probably hide the mana bars and make them smaller as there isn't really anything you can do about that information anyways.
There is probably more but you get the idea.
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
It is my understanding that runtime memory footprint is next to irrelevant on a system with 2GB ram when not dualboxing. So I'm probably missing something here. What exactly is the motivation of bringing runtime memory usage down that is so sexy that people kick out config dialogs and force themselves to hack lua code in order to customize the slim addons ?
I don't think there's a specific reason, it all boils down to the human desire to a) be efficient, accomplish the most with the least (in this case, memory) and b) to know how things work; normally while tweaking something we end up learning how said object, or in this case, code, works and what we should and shouldn't do.
For example, there are several addons out there currently that have (unnecessarily) clunky UIs for configuring 2 or 3 options instead of just a command line config.
And more often than not, due to a lower addon amount and higher efficiency overall, loading times are also improved.
This is what I was talking about; the health bar drains from left to right instead of right to left. I ended up having to set AG unit frames to 'Show Health as Deficit' and then set the health bar color to a darker black. Then I put a colored eepanel over the health bar. So when I take damage, the black deficit covers the colored eepanel health bar.
It's a bandaid fix, but I couldn't find any other way within AG to accomplish what I wanted.
It might be possible editing aUF lua script but it can be hard if you've never done this before. You can also try to ask aUF author to add this feature in his addon.
It is my understanding that runtime memory footprint is next to irrelevant on a system with 2GB ram when not dualboxing. So I'm probably missing something here. What exactly is the motivation of bringing runtime memory usage down that is so sexy that people kick out config dialogs and force themselves to hack lua code in order to customize the slim addons ?
It's partly everything, wanting to be the most efficient, part following the crowd, and part wanting to be an elitist. Also, generally, these addons use less CPU. Which no one really seems to talk about or benchmark yet is the biggest reason anyone should ever go this path. CPU usage has noticeable effects, whereas memory usage doesn't unless you have 1byte of ram or something. I've gone the route of, smaller addons etc, in order to increase my raid preformance. Now, addons that use less memory do absolutely nothing for me, and I've found the bigest contributors to lower FPS in raids are combat text scrollers and dmg meters, which even when using the smallest memory footprint choices like violation and parrot still seem to cut 10fps from me, due to CPU usage only.
I have no freakin' idea why people obsess over memory rather then cpu, I've honestly been waiting for them to realize how stupid it is, but whatever. We'll wait and see.
The focus on memory might also just be lead by the authors of these addons, who benefit from lower footprints in memory to show off the efficiency and see how things are working on their end. users might just have picked up on this as the be all and end all benchmark or something.
my current UI focuses on low CPU for myself, since I tend to FRAPs a lot and raid a lot. The by product is I use all these addons that happen to have lower memory footprints, because I guess when authors focus on making more efficient addons everything gets better regardless of if they are just aiming for lower memory or not.
That looks like the tiny bars for the Buffs section of Quartz. Alternatively it could be EBB. But try /quartz and look under buffs. Disable the various forms there.
this is my current UI anyone suggestion any improvements? im using i think its sunn view art but the theme on bottom doesnt fill it up whole bottom frame only hlaf i would say:
Awesome UI really. I've been trying to fit damage and threat meters, raid unit-frames, bars, chat frame, etc like you have in your interface.
One thing I'd change though it's the buff bars to something more simple like Buffalo2, but that's my personal taste.
Apart from that I loved it, nice work.
I've been playing around with some ideas for a simple high visibility (of screen and elements) UI. My goal is to have everything clearly seen when compressed in quality and resolution after fraps'd, and so far the only ways I've thought of to do this is use simple thick fonts and a larger than normal size and use the outline feature. I've also used flat textures and outlined many of the other elements. I didn't want to clutter the screen up too much or block out much of the rendered world either like many other layouts do with their black bars only partially filled but taking up the bottom fifth of the screen.
And aside from the tooltip, which doesn't match at the moment, any ideas as to how I can push this a little further or make it any cleaner?
Last edited by Eph : 03/16/08 at 3:33 AM.
Reason: large pic linked instead
I've always wanted to sit down and do something where I could easily crop or leave be when frapped to have the most screen real estate shown, like... cause almost every UI is ugly when watching a movie of any kind. You're heading in the right direction, my ideas started with wanting to have most things very low in the frame so I could easily insert a small black bar and crop the bottom, thus having a nice widescreen (thinner then usual I guess) effect while still being able to play fine normally without having to alt-z and play gimped to get good footage. I have most things keybound anyways but still, there are some things you just like to see while playing and that look dumb when watching.
So my advice is arrange things so they can be cropped uniformly, maybe.
I have worked my ui to work well in PVE and PVP however I still have some trouble with my castbar and dot bar. But I don't find a place for them ;(.
When I'm in raid the minimap is hidden and the bgminimap is replaced by violation (thanks to a macro it could be easily switch). I have also removed the bar above the chatframe and reworked the layout for the bar underneath player bar (with something like dreamlayout). I also applied this layout to the buff
In fact my major problem is that I don't have a widescreen ;(
Whatwould you're advised, to shrink the castbar and put below the player frame aswell for the dot bar ?
Whatwould you're advised, to shrink the castbar and put below the player frame aswell for the dot bar ?
I'd shrink all of your frames width-wise by about 25%, give them coherent text and make the DoT Timer equal length to the "block" of frames there. Just set the frames to show percentile HP and names, and then other details (exact figures, level) on mouse over with custom DogTags. The display of Auras on the two bottom frames (Target and Focus?) is also silly, make them both on the bottom (like the right one) and small (like the left one) if you really want to keep them.
The actual POSITIONING of everything is mostly fine, though moving the cast bar and DoT Timer down a bit would be a good idea.
On the functionality front I'd also move the MiniMap closer in to the side and get CowTip, TinyTip or something to move that ugly default tooltip in the corner.
On a looks basis, it's quite nice-looking. CyCircled for the action bars you have showing would be good, as would picking one font and sticking with it: there's YellowJacket, the default font, your chat box font, your MSBT font... There are instructions on the ClearFont2 site on how to do this (set the font on your AddOns to Arial Narrow after you've made your Fonts folder and put the files in). I'm also not too keen on the texture you've chosen for your bars, but that's a matter of personal taste.
I've been playing around with some ideas for a simple high visibility (of screen and elements) UI. My goal is to have everything clearly seen when compressed in quality and resolution after fraps'd...
And aside from the tooltip, which doesn't match at the moment, any ideas as to how I can push this a little further or make it any cleaner?
I'm really into this; I would definitely download this. (So, upload it!) I'd love to see a raid shot, though; that's the hardest part, especially if you want to make a video of a boss like Kalec, when range checks and debuffs are super important (not to mention boss mod timer bars). Making all that business at least partially visible in low-res video form is a major task, I would think.
I'm really into this; I would definitely download this. (So, upload it!) I'd love to see a raid shot, though; that's the hardest part, especially if you want to make a video of a boss like Kalec, when range checks and debuffs are super important (not to mention boss mod timer bars). Making all that business at least partially visible in low-res video form is a major task, I would think.
I made this available a while back in the other UI thread, and a working version for 2.4 can be found in a thread on my guild forums OOMM's UI 2
I made a few changes since the original shot linked here and went with a layout similar to my last UI, a much simpler and more intuitive positioning of the frames and omen.
03/08/08, 11:48 AM
Delete me please.
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