Demo movie!

This addon was created because of the improving timer bars thread.

The addon is now in a state where I think that I can show it to the public.

Download it here!


CompactBars - General

CompactBars is an addon that is designed to create bars for nearly everything. The difference to the other bar addons is that it does not eat up your screen space. It displays the bars in a very compact way as you can see in the following screenshots.

Cooldowns:



Internal Cooldowns:



AOE (Hurricane):



Everything combined (has bossmods included):



Explanation: (starting with the bar next to the scale)

• First bar: Shows the duration of buffs
• Second bar: Shows the cooldowns
• Third bar: Shows bossmods
• Bars that come after the first three: Show negative effects on different targets

It is possible to display the following things:

• DoTs
• Debuffs
• CCs
• Short buffs (short means that it is not designed for things like Power Word: F.)
• Cooldowns
• Internal cooldowns (like Eclipse or from items)
• Bossmods (needs BigWigs or Deadly Bossmods (the first one is the better option because it uses icons for nearly every bar!)

DoTs
The addon is able to display dots from multiple targets. This means that is able to show a bar for rain of fire on every target!

What is so special?
You may ask yourself why you should choose this addon over another bar addon. A few points which are different to other bar addons:

• You are able to compare everything with only a short look at the bars, because they all use the same size for one second.
• Time your abilities exactly to match boss abilities.
• Easily compare your cooldowns with your buffs.
• Uses very little space on your screen (only one bar per target and a maximum of three bars for yourself).
• Possibility to use a logarithmic scale and a normal scale (if you don't know what a logarithmic scale is you can find a good description here.)
• Vertical bars are possible!

Vertical bars:



IMPORTANT NOTE
The addon does NOT use a logarithmic scale by default (because of a user request) but it has now nearly EVERY spell included. So for example the deathknight has Army of the Dead which has a 20 minute cooldown. If the addon uses the default value it will create very very long bar! So go in the options to the logartihmic scale option and type in the time of your longtest spell.
You can also split it up in more segments and type 100, 200 (if you want to add 300 seconds at the end of the bar).
You can find a tutorial here!


EDIT: If you have suggestions or bug reports please post them at wowinterface. It is ok to post them here and I will notice it but I can't guarantee that I won't forget the request and so it is the best to post them at wowi.

Kudos. Looks very promising.
Keep up the good work

I have only had time to test on a dummy for now but it looks ok.
But if it shows all bars the same size for one second then can it show enerage timer on bossmode ?

It is not so realistical that you have so many bosstimer events that they are all the same size (so that they all have exactly the same duration), but it would be no problem to add some kind of highlight for special bars (which will be introduced when I have finished the animations for the icons).

This looks promising- just a few questions to get my mind moving before I get home and try this out.

Can we choose a different texture for the bars? Can the scale numbers be hidden? I think the time remaining could easily be intuited from the speed of the moving icon. Can the icon scale be adjusted?

Yes to all of your questions.

WoW AddOns - Tutorial - CurseForge.com < Should show a bit more clear what is possible at the moment.

I followed the development of this addon for quite a while now, and it looks pretty interesting by now.
One request though: is it possible to enable the tracking of Hots and effects like Shamans' Ancestral Fortitude or Healing Way, even if I didn't target the recipient at any point in the fight?

There are no positive effects implemented at the moment as it needs a change in the structure of the addon. At the moment I display negative effects in the way that one mob has one bar (with all the dots/debuffs... ) on it.
For HoTs this approach sucks as it could lead to 25 bars in a raid... which somehow destroys the concept of compact bars .

So I have to change the way so that I display the people who have a HoT active as bar so that the maximum number of HoT bars is limited to the HoTs that you can cast.

I see like this could be a problem. For Riptide and similar spells it would work, as there are a maximum of 3 people eligible due to spell cooldown. An implementation of a hot/beneficial-spell-tracking (Prayer of Mending comes to mind) would be great, if you find a way of integrating it into the concept.

Another small detail: if two spells share the same space, it is quite hard to see both of them because of overlapping. I don't want to encourage you to copy from other addons as you do a great job creating something new, but Forte solves this problem by alternating display of the two icons.

After a first glimpse at CompactBars in use however, I am quite impressed.

This "alternating" is already happening when ther bars have exactly the same time (but not by design ).
But it is not a bad idea to do this by design once every second or so.

Another proposition (inspired by a very capable warlock): you already implemented a negative, dimmed out space on the CompactBar, which is visible till the dot-timer reaches zero. For the simpler reapplication of dots it would be great if the bar and the icon would stay visible till the icon reaches the specified negative boundary of the timeframe, thus displaying the buff/dot that just ran out.

And yet another one, though that was already proposed on Curse: a numerical timer next the respective bar of the buff/dot/cc, displaying the rest-time of the buff/dot with the least duration for better timing.

I've tried Compact Bars and I must say I love it. It's something I've been meaning to make myself for a very long time.

There are a few things I'd do differently though:

- Minor thing: I wouldn't include bossmod functionality into it, I know its modular but still ... I doubt anyone will ever use it to compare his boss timers to his spells/buffs/CDs?

- Major thing: I'd add a possibility to draw dynamic vertical lines ontop of the bars. For example a line that indicates the duration of my GCD (adjusted by haste), a line that indicates my cast time of spell X and one for spell Y and one for both of them together.
I believe this would be very helpful so spells can be planned ahead to be finished before a dot needs to be refreshed or a cooldown ends.

As an elemental shaman, it could indicate wether you can squeeze in 2x Lightning Bolt before Lava Burst comes of CD, or if you should go for 1 Lightning Bolt and 1 Chain Lightning.
Or if you know you need to refresh Flameshock right before your Lava Burst CD ends, it could indicate if you'd best use a LB or CL before that for an optimal rotation.
These are just minor examples of what could be done to try and make it clear what I mean.

In terms of visualisation ... a vertical line is enough really, if possible it would be nice to be able to add icon(s) to the top/bottom of each line. Preferably multiple icons per line, so you can indicate 2x Lightning Bolt line with 2 LB icons or 1x LB & 1x CL with one of each icon.

Should be no problem to add that. The GCD thing should be ready before 3.1 but I don't know if I will have enough time for your second request ... and when 3.1 hits I won't have time to add something until Ulduar is cleared.

Edit:

I will probably add this as a own bar so that you can set up some spells that will be shown as icons.

Can this be used to display PVP trinket cooldowns for both yourself and your enemies in arenas?

I'm having trouble adding it to show even my personal trinket cooldowns. I tried adding the spell ID for the PVP Trinket spell that wowhead claims is used when I use my trinket, to no avail.

Your own trinkets should work ... maybe it is a bug with items. I will check that later and tell you how to add it.

You could also try to add PvP Trinket - Spell - World of Warcraft as an internal cooldown but I'm not sure if it works. I have also planned to add a category where you can add spells that do not create a buff or a debuff on yourself/your target. So that it should be possible to track things like the duration of kick on a target.

Enemy gains/cooldowns are not possible atm but this is something I will add to my todo list.

Edit: There seems to be a bug with item cooldowns. I will fix this asap.

Love the addon but have a comment/question.

Is it possible for it to track dot ticks/debuffs when you are attacking a target you don't have targeted? Currently if I start a scorch cast and switch targets before it lands it won't track it.

You can now (RC7) add static lines to the bars. You find the option under View -> Markers. Input format is <time>, <time>, ..

I've used this addon for a while and I enjoy it. While using it I've encountered a few things I found mildly annoying at first as well as a few things that would be really awesome to have in it.

-If you use a small scale (say 20 seconds) and then add a logarithmic scale of 5 minutes the icons stack heavily. If there were a way to stack the icons like a hand of cards that would be awesome, maybe make the area configurable and instead of having maxBarLength->logMax be actual time just have it show icons in a visible manner.

-Bar height and Icon height should be independent of each other. [ It would be very interesting if the bars did not overlap unless neccesary, or you could split them by spell (or spell school, as you seem to color them), but this would take tons of work and is more of a "what if" type of side idea ]

-You have spell school colors for active short buffs but no colors for cooldowns. It would be nice if the functionality were shared or duplicated.

-Trinket support by default and full class skill support by default. For mage Icy Veins doesn't show with the stock version.

-Support (better support? You can kind of cheat it in right now) for more "rows" with special, user defined skills in them.


With all that said, it really is a straight and to the point addon and I love it.

1. Point: I'm already changing the alpha value when they overlap. I don't like the idea of spliting the bars and the icons only to show that there is something. It is really not that hard to set it up in a way that the overlapping is not a big problem. Just increase the size of the bar.

2. I don't understand what the advantag of big bars/little icons (or the other way around) should be

3. I don't have schools for cooldowns. So if you want colors you have to define them on your own as I would have to do the same for every spell (it was already a lot of work to add all the spells from every class)

4. I think there is a bug with items in general. To your suggestion: Sounds like a good idea to add support for the 2 trinket slots.

5. More rows won't happen soon but it is something I will maybe add in the distant future

Just an option to set a different default color for cooldowns would be nice.

Also the way the "logarithmic" bars work could be changed. I would prefer if I could chose the width of those extra scaled-up portions myself instead of having them be the same size as the normal bar.

(I say "logarithmic" because there is really nothing logarithmic about it.)

Also, I would suggest setting a lower alpha and different texture as default as the ugliness of the mod out of the box turns some people away quickly.

EDIT: Sorry, I had simply not understood how the "logarithmic" thing worked since I had allready first set the time scale to only have one step. I then had hid the scale since I found it extremely ugly unfortunately.

Other than that I absolutely love this addon.

(Feign Death should be added as default to the spells list. And the default spell cooldown color really should be changeable.)