Venatia

Quite some time and development further, there now is a beta of v2.0
Some things added are: shape of runes has 'happy mouth' 'sad mouth' 'straight line' options, the frame fades out when out of combat and all cooldowns are over.

Brand new in the latest version though is the graphical configuration ui.
All this configuration requires text, so I still need some help with localizations.
If you want to help, don't hesitate to contact me.

 

Dayn

One thing that I think we can do better is to display the 2.5-second grace period after a rune is ready when it should be used in order to ensure maximum rune production and use. I created a simple rune bar mod to demonstrate this:

SnowfallRune

I've been using the mod for several weeks, and now that I have this information available, I don't ever want to be without it again. The mod really helps in knowing whether my rotation is optimal.

The mod won't appeal to a wide audience, because it has minimal configuration and what configuration it does have requires lua editing. I do think it would be great if the highly-configurable mainstream rune bar mods would incorporate this type of feature, which is the main reason I'm sharing the mod.

 

Nefiir

The ideal mod gives you only what you need to know in a way that is quickly and easily visually digestible. We should be get back to asking ourselves, "What is necessary (only) and what method of visual delivery will take the least time to digest?"

Using a bar to track the cooldown time on runes doesn't make the cut of something that is quick and easy to digest/assess. It takes more time -for me at least- to look at a bar and gauge the remaining duration. While something is clearly important about the life cycle of a rune, I don't need to know where every rune is in the entire 10/8 second cycle. More on that below. Lastly, bars take up more visual real estate (finite) than simple icons do.

Looking closer at the question of, "What is necessary (only)?" clearly, there are some critical bits of information beyond: what rune is it? is the rune up? is the rune on cooldown? I want to know something about the cooldown, but not necessarily everything about it. So, what are the important milestones or other bits of information that are helpful in the lifecycle of a rune? Knowing whether or not it will be up in less than the span of a GCD is important in knowing that your next move may delay the use of the next runic ability. I'd argue, that aside from the 1 GCD away milestone, fading or numeric text (or both) sufficiently convey remaining duration in an easily digestible format, with an acceptable level of precision.

The overly flashy or animated mods suffer from similar problems. An animated orb floating through space across some line takes even more time to assess than a clearly defined bar. While it is relatively easy to ready on a clean white background, when superimposed over actual gameplay it if often a problem. These solutions also often suffer from the problem of taking up far more real estate on the screen than is necessary.

In short:
-show rune type clearly (w/ the option to manually order)
-show "active" status clearly
-show "on cooldown" status clearly
-convey general sense of cooldown duration when cd >= 1.5 seconds (number of seconds and/or fading. note: this is non-critical information), *but not at the expense of being able to see what rune it is.*
-indicate when cd is <= 1.5 seconds (i.e., whether or not your next move will push back the use of the rune)
-no unnecessarily wasted visual real estate (i.e., no bars, big animations, etc.)
-clear, regardless of imagery behind the addon (i.e., no heavy reliance on semi-transparent animations)
-easily visually digestible for all critical information (i.e., numeric text > bar length)


I've been using MagicRunes with a setup consisting of 6-icons plus cooldown number and icon fade, which for me is close to perfect. Really, the only thing that is missing is some indication that a rune is within a GCD of becoming active.

 

• Asphyxialol

Just in case anyone out there is still working on a DK rune mod... in full honesty the best one I have found to use is the default one in STUF. The flat, horizontal bars that are highly customizable and have a high refresh rate (no choppy fill bar like a lot of the mods have now). There is 1 mod which acts similar (Simple Runes Bar), however I receive countless errors when I use it now, and in addition to that the spacing is off and there isn't one of the key options I was hoping for - the ability to assign an overall width instead of individually per bar (where then you have to change your UF to be the adequate width for symmetry purposes.

I am currently using Acherus Runes to achieve a similar result, however the bars fill slowly and it is quite resource heavy for doing such a small job (usually over 2mb, close to Pitbull if not more than Pitbull) and it has similar issues to above - spacing doesn't work entirely accurately, slow refresh rate - mine can even jump about 10% if not more of the space in any given update.

 

Wodahs

Its an ace mod, and is being attributed ace lib modules as alphabetically it loads first. That doesnt mean its resource heavy.

 

• Asphyxialol

Ah yes, I forgot that was how the libraries worked.

Either way, my other points still stand, it refreshes slowly, and the spacing system does not function as it should (imo) when using the command. On my client, for instance, it is impossible to achieve a 1px spacing on the vertical bar layout, as there is always at least one bar overlapping the other one or not spacing correctly, forcing you to 2-3px space it to make the bars separate correctly (and aesthetically). The same issue exists with the other mod I mentioned above (Simple Runes Bar), where you cannot space the bars 1px apart from one another, there is always 1-2 bars overlapping and thus you need to space them even more. The only mod I know of which can space them correctly is STUF, but I choose to not use that because of the configuration involved (I find it much easier and convenient to use Pitbull over STUF).

 

Dayn

Regarding the inability of mods to have pixel-perfect layouts, this is more a limitation of the Blizzard UI than it is of the individual mods. What mods think of as "pixels" are actually scaled by the Blizzard UI, and they're scaled differently depending upon what resolution you're playing at. There is no way for a mod to know for sure what the true pixel dimensions of the WoW display are, so most mods don't even make an effort to guess. Scanning through STUF, it looks like it's relying on a combination of GetScreenHeight and GetScale to make an educated guess, but even this will be wrong sometimes. Try playing with STUF in windowed non-fullscreen mode and I think you'll find that STUF in this scenario has the same difficulty with pixel-perfect positioning that other mods do.

There are some ways to work around this, though, with any mod.

1. If your mod's scale is 1.0 with no means for adjustment, then you can adjust your overall UI Scale to

uiScale = 768 / verticalResolution

by typing

/console UseUIScale 1
/console UIScale uiScale

in game, where you substitute the appropriate number for uiScale you've calculated, above. Depending upon your tastes, you might find that this makes your UI elements a bit small, but at least they're perfect.

2. Or, you can adjust the mod's individual scale, setting it to

modScale = 768 / verticalResolution / uiScale

where verticalResolution is the vertical screen resolution at which you play WoW, and uiScale can be gotten in game by typing

/script print(UIParent:GetScale())

How you set the modScale is going to be dependent upon the individual mod--maybe it has a configuration GUI for that purpose.

Either of the above methods should give you pixel-perfect positioning. The second method is how I get pixel-perfect positioning in the SnowfallRune mod.

 

• Asphyxialol

Very interesting, thank you for that bit of info. I will play around with it a bit later after my raid tonight. Can you think of any reason as to why Acherus lags behind in updates? I tried to check the .lua but I'm not the best when it comes to editing that stuff. I am generally able to see what a line generally does but I couldn't find anything regarding the update speed for Acherus. I will also state it seemed to work well for a certain period of time, but for some reason (I want to think it was around 3.1) the mod started updating very slowly (as I said, sometimes skipping 10% of the full bar's width in one go).

 

Nephthys

I finally finished Engraved (Curse, WoWInterface), which solves most of the problems I've had with the rune UI. It's icon based, so there's no distracting extraneous movement. It can be set up so that rune visibility, from most to least, is:

1. usable now
2. usable the next GCD
3. on cooldown >1 GCD away
4. information about the paired rune with a longer cooldown

Thanks for all the ideas.

1/5 15:55:46.001 UNIT_DIED, 0x0000000000000000, nil, 0x80000000, 0xF130001942161FB7, "Gamon", 0xa28

 

clemsonfire

does anyone know if there is an up to date rotation addon for a DK? i've seen rotate for pallys and was wondering if there was one for a dk....

 

Kelthuryon

I'd second that question. Been looking for something along the lines of FaceMauler/FaceShooter/Watcher for my DK.

I couldn't config Watcher for my DK. It gives tons of errors and I can't see how I could make it manage RP+Runes+Diseases diseases anyway.

Is there anything out there? All I could find on wowinterface is numerous mods that display runes/diseases/rp in different fashion.

Thanks

 

blitzseed

 

galidalvia

I actually like this one the best. This has the capability of being a really nice addon. I know in your first post you mentioned this; however, I think it is a really good idea to implement some kind of rp meter in with it. Maybe you could just simply have a number meter in the middle of it, or you could even go with a more graphical approach and actually fill up the center with rp.

 

boysailor

You could have the runic power filling up the orb/circle/ring. Like the Diablo graphics.

 

Facebreaker

I simply use Magic Runes to make these six bars. When I use a rune, the opacity lowers, and builds back up like a thermometer when it is resetting. When death runes proc, the original rune gets replaced with a purple one.

 

Mild Confusion

Does anyone know how to fix magic runes? It hasn't been saving my settings since 3.2.2

 

Facebreaker

Try deleting your cache folder. If that doesn't work, try to make a custom profile. And if that doesn't work, reinstall and delete your WTF folder.

 

Wtfitzandy

If you can manage something like that for an addon, that'd be awesome