UI I'm working on since coming back to MoP
Latest image of UI:
Updated list of (visual) addons used: - WoW Icons - Crisp - Bartender 4 - Masque - Diablo III - dMinimap - Stuf Unit Frames - ShinyBuffs - WeakAuras - BasicChatMod - Kong UIHider - TipTac - ChatLoot - TinyDPS - BagNon - TidyPlates Threat Plates - Cursor Castbar The UI's aim: Something functional for WoW players with small resolution screens (mine is 1366x768). Reduce clutter, yet make things easily readable. Only tested with Monk class currently, and most definitely not ready/made for raid usage. Or healers as there's no proper buff/debuff filtration and indicators yet. It's best used as a pure levelling UI. Quote:
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An even smaller castbar is one that goes about 2pixel around (behind) the icon of the casted spell.
Like this It would probably be easy to do that with a cursor castbar, too. Just an idea. :) I'd also remove the chat background, but that's personal preference, I guess. Looks nice so far, like the status bars. What about target, boss and raid frames? |
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I know Phanx, but they are just used so much for PvP and PVE. So I figured some "pressure" might help. ;)
Not going with a target frame at all might work, though. As long as the nameplates hold that information. |
That UI looks fanstic! And not just a bits and pieces of it either, the whole thing looks good so far!
I know your resolution is small, but if and when you release it - I will be willing to help you get it set up for 1920x1080 and possible other screen sizes below that (since that's as large as my monitor size is). I will be watching this thread. |
Thanks for all the suggestions and comments :d
@ Dawn: That style of castbar is cool, ultra minimalist! I'm going to go with the integrated cast bars for Threatplates I think, since it shrinks for some threat levels and it gets pretty small even as a full length bar. @ Phanx: Those chat addons look like exactly what I wanted, but both look too outdated to work anymore :S None of the popular chat addons have a 'minimize' on idle feature? This seems close to what I want: http://www.wowinterface.com/download...hatButton.html But it looks like it doesn't give much options to modify the chat box itself (remove scroll buttons, move the editbox etc.) Wonder if it can work with something like rChat hms. Will see when I try it out later. Also about the portraits, Stuf's 2D portraits don't seem well-cropped, or since it's based on the Blizzard default portraits, they're all circle-cropped with some black residue around the edges. 3D can't be set to static, but I think they just look overall at a better angle and fills a square box better. Too bad can't pan or scale the portraits though. And Cursor Castbars use the default original icons with no skinning applied, unfortunately. Tried setting to a circle skin while keeping a Caith on the actionbars, doesn't change the square base icon used on the castbar. Real shame, that square in the circle is going to get to me :S One way is I could try seeing if it's possible to substitute spell icons with WeakAuras but I doubt it... @Rammoth: Aw, thanks for the comment! This UI isn't quite ready for use yet, maybe for a while heh. Minor update: I got my party frames to look prettier and kinda match ShinyBuffs! And darker colored border: Another quirk of Stuf. Guessing because the Party frames are linked, how the bottom power bars are skinned by the border texture choice changes depending on which Party frame it is. So the top two frames look like how I want them, but the bottom two don't, with the power bar overlaying instead of being under. I don't know how to fix this, I got lucky fiddling with frame levels and opacity to get the top two looking just right, but can't get the bottom to follow :S Also added borders around my health and power bar, and used a flatter texture so the colors don't get too darkened. I have an idea about how to put in a pet and a target/boss frame, but prolly get to that later. PS: Does anyone know why my screenshots don't get saved at full resolution when I printscreen with WoW? PS2: Oh, it's imgur being weird and downsizing my images o.0 |
@Byakko
damn! that's a lovely UI. Any chance that you will upload it for the world? ;) |
At this point my only suggestion would be to work on making your alignment and spacing more consistent.
For example, the top edge of the minimap is closer to the edge of the screen than the right edge. The bottom edges of your party frames, action bars, and chat frames are all different distances from the nearest edge of the screen. No horzontal edge in your action bars lines up with any horizontal edge in your party frames. I'd suggest lining up the bottom edges of both, and scaling up the action bars a little bit so that their top edge also lines up with the top edge of the lower party frames. The top of your buffs doesn't line up with the top of your player/target frames or the top of TinyDPS. Your tooltip seems randomly placed. Try anchoring it by the bottom-right corner to the top-right corner of TinyDPS. |
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Okay attached is the latest set-up with *drumroll* Target Frame and Pet Frame (because my main's a Hunter so I have to prep to move back :p)
Not sure how readable they are too other people though. Pet Frame is on top of player health bar (left side), shows pet health + focus. Target is mirrored on the right, above player power bar, and is class color coded. I might overlay enemy castbar over the power bar. Two examples targetting different classes. No debuff/buff icons for target frame, I rely on WeakAuras to detect my own debuffs and other things I look on-screen. (I don't know where the number 30 stuck on the pet frame is from, I tried disabling everything but couldn't find why it came from...also the little loot icon below my power bar is just something I forgot to disable on the target frame) Also trying out the Diablo III Spiked Masque skin because the square icons look boring. It looks amazing for the stance bar icon, but the default is a little dark and not fully matching for the normal bars... Tried pure circle icons but it doesn't fit well, and I don't like pure simple circles for action buttons. Using BasicExperienceBar for the EXPbar at screen top. And replaced rChat with BasicChatMod Also my tooltips are attached to my cursor so that I don't have to look away from something for info. But maybe anchoring it just to the left of the quest tracker would work well too (at least for unit tooltips). Figured out a way to get the party frames' borders to work after doing the target/pet frames (turns out just scaling down instead of setting a small height for the bars would make the borders scale down properly too), so still going to fix that. Aaand hopefully got everything aligned nicely. I'm eyeballing with Align mostly, and nudging when I can. Any suggestions for a good Masque skin for the actionbars? I can fallback to Caith for square style, but I'm hoping to find something a little snazzier. New Addons used: - BasicExperienceBar -> might change to using XPBarNone instead - BasicChatMod - Masque Diablo III skin PS: Full resolution pics this time. No more silly Imgur limits <.< |
Well, for starters, if you like the Caithe borders so much on the Masque skin, but rather have a rounded effect, this particular masque skin has a rounded design, while still has that color of Caithe. I would recommend it instead, since it's probably going to be what you want - since you keep wanting to go back to Caithe but want a rounded style: http://www.wowinterface.com/download...ueTrinity.html
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I actually kinda want the 'circle in a square' look like the Diablo III Spiked buttons, but they're too dark somehow and blend too much into each other. I might just lighten them myself to match what I want better.
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Oh okay. Well, if you have Photoshop you could edit the image in there. Change it to match what you would like out of it. From what I gather, you're talking about a circle on top of a square, but the center of where the square is be transparent (gone), so that the icons in game can be stretched a bit and fit into that spot? That should be relatively easy to do. Open it in photoshop, create a square behind it, then select the area in the center of the circle, but do it with the selection tool and do it while you're on the square layer, and then "edit" and "clear", then you should be good to go.
You can make it the color you want easily too. Might also be a good idea to make the design aspect of it flat, since most of the UI is flat, it would match better. What I mean by that is take the art from it. To do that, paste an entire color over top of it, the 3D aspect of it will be gone, then it'll be flat. If you don't want it flat, then it would make more sense to update the rest of the UI to not be flat as well, by creating a 3D design to it, using the 3D section on Photoshop, but Illustrator is going to get you nicer edges on design, so I'd recommend that but not a lot of folks have it or know how to use it. I used illustrator to help me create my icon I use here on my account. The skull viking thing. I did that. When I started it took a long time. So if you put a lot of effort into it, and you know what you're doing and have the skill set to make it what you want, then you're gonna get there. When you think you're done, sit there and stare at every aspect of the UI for about an hour or 2, while listening to music that you like - that will help you find anything you may have missed, or something that isn't just quite right. That's how I do it, I'm a designer and I went to school to learn my skill set, then I taught myself everything else. You don't have to go to school to learn that -- there are tutorials online that will help you learn how to use every feature of every software you want to learn. Good luck. Quote:
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Also, from that screenshot, it looks like the skin includes lighter textures for the highlight layer. Before you spend time modifying the texture files, try just changing the path in the skin's Lua file to use the highlight texture for the normal layer. |
Yes I was an idiot and completely ignored, oh, all the color options for Masque <.<||||
Took the UI out for an actual testrun now...aaand got couple of errors that overflowed the bugsack, to the point it didn't open for me to check exactly what was causing the problem >_< Yet I didn't experience any actual crash and all my status windows were working fine...odd. Anyway Phanx, any opinion on the target windows being like that? I think they're kinda superficial (except maybe for the pet frame), I'm considering replacing that target frame area with a proper chi bar (that hopefully Stuf would support soon). |
ThreatPlates is actually pretty much sufficing to show everything about my target currently, including debuffs on the nameplate itself (it's a bit squished though, I haven't tried to edit ThreatPlate's main look yet) and a target highlight. I'm still not sure if I truly need a target frame proper anymore (except a boss target frame for instances because they're so huge the nameplate goes through the roof).
I dunno, I guess because I'm so used on my Hunter and using mouse-over macros, I value mobility and target-switching over needing to keep an eye over a single target's info. So I might rip out both the pet/target frames and use that location for my Chi Bar in the same shape instead. Seems to fit much better (but I really wish Stuf had it now, I'm relying on 'mimicking' it with WeakAuras currently) Debuffs/buffs for targets and myself are currently on relying on WeakAuras. I might use NeedToKnow if I want old-fashion buffbars again but I'm trying to keep the addon count to as minimum as possible. Plus I'm only monitoring my own debuffs on targets so I'm not using any major buffbar addons except ShinyBuffs to move and reskin the default buffs icons. Tooltip, yeah I just kept the default configuration after finding the style I wanted. Not sure what to do with that, might just take out the power bar and keep the health bar, take out the buff icons on top, and probably the guild titles since I have that enabled on friendly names anyway. Not sure of the faction text, doesn't serve any purpose, but mostly I keep it because of opposing Pandas that I try to talk to at the Monk HQ only to find out they're ally Pandas >_>;;; Also, because of super clutter from having a cursor castbar and a tooltip stuck to the cursor, I've anchored the tooltip to the top of TinyDPS. The exp bar is just a personal thing. I can't understand exp in terms of data text so I need the bar to visualize. I wish I could hide it and have it show only on mouseover though (I switched to using XpBarNone now, and it has a border, because there was no option to skin it with a border for BEB). |
What about making the XP bar smaller and putting it between the minimap and infobox?
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I just discovered Kong UI hider works on addon frames. I always thought it only could affect the default Blizzard frames.
First screenshot, I didn't move the chatbox, TinyDPS, the QuestTracker window, so they still align like in the previous screenshots. But they are now set to hide until I mouseover them (and combat TinyDPS appears). Expbar minimized and aligned with the bottom of the minimap too. Actionbars faded out when out of combat or not moused over too. I'm not sure whether to hide the buff icons or not, or how far to fade them out. They're also set to reappear at full alpha on mouseover. Second screenshot, fixed the scaling on the borders of party windows. Haven't adjusted the scaling on the icons yet. Placed tooltip anchor right next to the minimap, and simplified it down. |
Looking better. Your party frames seem too big now, though.
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Party windows were enlarged to help move the scaling around, back to normal now.
Here's some shots of a target frame I'm testing out. Name, level, not sure yet how to place the health values but they are probably going to be in there. Might put int a Targets Target frame too, depending. |
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