OPie menu
Minimap buttons. Unsightly pests thrust upon you by evil addon developers in a quest to uglify your minimap. Most of them can be disabled through the configuration menu for the addon in question, but often you still want quick access to that addon. One in particular I can think of is WebDKP — my guild’s DKP system — where it gets tedious to type a slash command every time loot drops. Luckily, I was struck with an idea.
Creating the ring
OPie is one of those addons with a simple concept and a thousand uses. Virtually anything that can be placed in an action bar can be placed in OPie, but OPie organises it all in a way that stresses selecting one component at a time. This shares a striking resemblance to menus. As such, my idea was to create an OPie ring and add macros for frequently used slash commands. There’s then no excuse for removing minimap buttons, and it compacts any awkward configuration or handy commands into one button.
Give it a try, you might like it.
As anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a week or two (I know you’re out there!), you’ll have noticed how undecided I am with the theme. As I’m looking to set up a separate, completely unrelated blog for Ninoa, I’m looking at themes and have seen some very nice concepts.
I’ll be switching around and breaking the blog up lots! If it’s unavailable, that’ll be why.
This blog has been moved to another server and picked up a domain name change as a result. It’s now located at http://rf.shkm.net. Any old links to valid posts should still work just fine, as will the old domain for the moment.
So far we have focused on the graphical user interface. That is, stuff that you see and interact with immediately on your screen. While certain points like layout apply most particularly to this subset of the UI, it is merely the tip of the iceberg.
The vast majority of my addon collection contributes smaller features with lower profiles. These may be tiny components which improve and further personalise the game to a player’s taste. Then there are the addons which you use only in certain situations, such as in a raid or on an auction house alt. I’ll be going through some of these addons in this part, though some may seem completely useless depending on your needs. read more…
Seeing as it’s that time of year, I thought I may as well post the two videos of fast ram racing runs that I recorded over the past two years. I believe the track this year is the same as last year, so that video is posted first. The 2007 video is included just for fun, as the track is completely different now. Do forgive the old, ugly UI — it was functional, just not very pretty.
On another note, people should be receiving their meta achievements for What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been along with a pretty Violet proto drake. Congratulations and have fun with Brewfest!
Yes, Strobe got his too :)
Unit frames are one of the major information sources in the game. They give you the status of your target, group, raid, self and focus target amongst other possibilities. Other information may be available, such as aura1 status, level, class, etc.
Achieving perfect unit frames is something I’ve been struggling with since the very beginning. It is comparable only with the strive towards enlightenment; or the ultimate goal in one’s life. Consequently, the unit frames can never be perfect: what works for one player typically does not work as well for others. This topic requires you to do some thinking.
Default player & target frames
- The word “auras” is often used as a general term for buffs and debuffs throughout addons. Though paladin auras are considered a buff too — and thus an aura using this term — they are not strictly related. ↩
The action bar is the set of buttons and widgets placed at the bottom of the screen by default. Skills, items and macros can be dropped onto this bar for quick access. This interface element serves as the default method for binding such actions, as well as displaying simple cooldowns and range checks.
Default Action Bar/Bottom Bar
The Addon
One of the most popular items on the interface developer’s agenda, the action bar can be modified through a plethora of addons. Many of these allow movement, resizing and creation of new action bars. Features that change on certain conditions — such as stance1 changes, entry to combat, on proc — are also widely available, which may help druids or similar classes in particular.
First look at your needs. Before I became such an exclusive user of BindPad, I required the use of many action bars. On a druid or other stance-enabled class, I would need multiple stance bars (where by default only one changes on stance switch). My needs then simplified greatly as I started using rActionBarStyler — an addon which could, at the time, simply move and rescale bars using a single, static Lua configuration — and those needs were three stacked and rescaled bars without any of the art or widgets found in the default bottom bar. Nowadays I have a similar setup but with slightly different profiles for pet-enabled classes.
In any case, one need I’m going to imply is simplicity. You simply do not need the bag bar, mini buttons (character pane, etc.), latency display or art. Anything useful here can be replaced through superior, less intrusive means. Next, you’ll want to move and stack at least a couple of bars together for centrality. The rest is up to you.
Now pick up an action bar addon and get to work. Listed below are a number of popular choices, so just take a look at the author’s description and see that it fits your needs. read more…
- Stance refers to druid forms, stealth, shadow form, etc. It is not just a term used for warriors. ↩
Customised or otherwise, we all require an interface to interact with the game. The basic WoW UI may be an easy introduction to the game — as the designers most likely held as the highest priority — but it is sorely lacking for high-performance gameplay. In this feature I will offer some rather specific advice to building a fully-functional UI from the ground up.
Quake 3 with non-default cg_viewsize.
I’m a sworn devotee to the principal of centrality. Centrality — at least, that’s what I call it — is the practice of compressing information into one main space of the screen in order to reduce eye movement and therefore lend easy access to all major information hubs. I originally picked up on this principal from playing Quake, where it is possible to press a button which will incrementally reduce screen size by reducing the effective gameplay area and placing large borders around it. Players often used this feature in order to see more of the screen at once and therefore take in more information.
Because we play a game where information is key, players often seem to think that more information they display, the better and more function their UI. While there is some truth in this, it can quite easily lead to redundancy. The UI may be overly cluttered with displays that are used rarely enough to warrant removal. Finding a critical piece of information becomes harder and harder in the clutter. Remember: minimalism is just as important — if not moreso — from a functionality standpoint as it is aesthetically.
A good UI should allow the player to see everything they need in heated combat with minimal eye movement and effort. Where on the screen this information is placed is up to the user, though I would recommend toward the center as it is where the majority of the in-game action takes place.
Another of my personal preferences is in keeping the UI as similar as possible between alts. Certain classes require one or two very specific addons, but other than this there should be no difference between a tank and healer UI. Raid frames should be unintrusive enough not to hinder your gameplay yet display enough information for full-blown healing. Threat meters should be displayed in combat no matter the role. This all helps to keep a better overall interface and reduce the time it takes to re-learn to play an alt.
I will begin to explain building a UI piece by piece in the next part.
I’m off to Germany for 10 days. This may allow me some time to do some writing for the blog, though it will probably be impacted by the meagre chance of an internet connection and thus the ability to play WoW.
Update: Holiday ended early, so I’m back.
There was an unfortunate, gaping hole in my key binding implementation which involved the use of OPie and vehicles. While I used some macro voodoo to get certain macros working with vehicle action bars, this could never work with OPie for one simple reason: you could not call an OPie ring from a macro. There is now a workaround.
The Fix
First off, you’ll need a version of OPie which supports macros. At the time of writing, Echo 1.39 is the latest available from WoWInterface. After having installed that, go into your Blizzard key bindings config and bind the default action bars to keys you’d like to use in a vehicle. I’m using the logical default: 1 to = (not recommended for normal skills, but for vehicles I deem it fine).
Now bounce along to the OPie bindings (Interface -> Addons -> OPie -> Ring Bindings) and find the ring you’d like to bind to a vehicle hotkey. In my example, I’m using button 4: — my “Special” totem ring. Alt-click the button under “Binding” and use the following code (thanks to Foxlit, OPie’s author, for suggesting the nobonusbar option):
/click [nobonusbar:5] 4
Hit enter and your OPie ring should now work fine if you’re not in a vehicle, with the corresponding vehicle button if otherwise.
The Not-So-Fix
This is what I typed up whilst waiting for the new version of OPie to work for me, and was a hopeful fix that unfortunately doesn’t actually work with the current implementation of macros in OPie. I’m leaving it here in case it’s of any use to any of you.
After updating OPie, pop over to the OPie Ring Bindings panel and click the arrow next to the ring you’d like to bind. Doing so will open up a small dialogue with a macro ready to be copied which will look something like this:
/click ORLOpen OPieEquipmentManager
Copy this text and scuttle along to BindPad. Choose the skill you’d like to convert into a vehicle binding and right-click on it to convert to a macro if necessary. The format, as I’ve detailed before, should be as follows:
/click [bonusbar:5] BonusActionButtonN
/stopmacro [bonusbar:5]
# Stuff to do if not in vehicle goes here
Thus if in the vehicle we want to press action button 1, but outside the vehicle open the Equipment Manager ring, we would use the following:
/click [bonusbar:5] BonusActionButton1
/stopmacro [bonusbar:5]
/click ORLOpen OPieEquipmentManager
I’d finally like to take the opportunity to mention that I found how to bind macros to vehicles thanks to someone (Phanx?) over at the WoWInterface forums quite some time ago. Credit all goes to whoever that person was.