nUI -- A full feature standalone UI replacement

[Kailef]

Originally Posted by spiel2001 So, I encourage everyone to hit me with all your thoughts with regard to unit frames... what you like, what you don't like, features you want, etc. and I'll see how much of it I can do.

First - I'll be sending in a donation on Friday. :-) You're working hard on this, and you deserve it.

On to the point: I uploaded my new modset (with nUI the centerpiece) to my officers and other staffers for beta testing recently. The general response was an almost "panicked" level of concern over the lack of health and mana bars on the unit frames themselves. After I settled them down a bit, they seemed to be a little more accepting of the idea, but they weren't really happy about it. I've been thinking about it, trying to come with some sort of reasonable idea.

I guess most of the trouble is with the available real estate in the dashboard itself. I play on a widescreen monitor, but many do not - With a standard 4:3 ratio, you'd run out of space quite swiftly.

In a way it seems redundant, because you can see your health and mana on the HUD, but a the same time, I've played with a HUD and highly configurable unit frames for years, and I never once considered getting rid of my health and mana bars on my unit frames. So - Perhaps it's not a bad idea, if it can be made to fit.

Okay, I appear to be blathering on without getting to a point. Right, then; here's what I'd like to see:

A - Horizontal health and mana bars for self, pet, pet target, player target, tot, and totot. (I advise against vertical health/mana bars, unless you change ALL the bars on ALL the frames to vertical. 'Full' and 'Empty' should always be pointing the same direction on a dashboard)

B - Uniform appearance in the main player and target frames. What I mean is something like this:

1111 22 33
1111 22 33

Where:

1 = Player (left of minimap) or Player Target (right of minimap)
2 = Pet (left of minimap) or ToT (right of minimap)
3 = Pet Target (left of minimap) or ToToT (right of minimap)

The buff icons that appear above the dashboard can then be arranged in the same order, to reduce confusion. I think I'd dispense entirely with animated portraits for anything but the Player frame and the Player's Target frame, and just use a name instead.

I think a uniform appearance like (or similar) to that would (unfortuantely) take up a little more room, but would do a lot to helping the frames look less "busy" and more clean. New nUI users would be much more likely to stick to using the system that way, as they'd have a much more intuitive understanding of what they were looking at.

This also give you the ability to let people remove the HUD arcs and mana/health displays without their losing too much functionality.

--- One more thing:

By far, the loudest complaints I heard was from my healers. When raiding, they didn't have much of a problem, because their own toon appears in the raid frames. However, when in a party, they keep their eyes on the party frames most of the time, and those frames don't contain their own health and mana bars. As such, they reported to me that found themselves dying without knowing they were taking damage, because they were so focused on healing others and not paying attention to the HUD. This makes sense - the HUD works great for a DPS toon who's eyes are focused in the middle of the screen, because all the information they need is right there. For a healer, though, it's a little tough.

I messed around with SpartanUI for a short while, just for comparative purposes; It's the only mod I've found that has "drop in" functionality where you don't need to load custom WTF files depending on resolution and such. It doesn't compare to nUI at all, mind you - It adds virtually no functionality at all besides a dashboard (with no useful information, it just looks pretty) and custom unit frames.

Anyhow, the point is, the party unit frames in SpartanUI populate above the dashboard, right by the player's unit frame (which of course displays health and mana). This solves the problem of healers not being able to see their own health clearly, since the frames appear above (but connected) to the dashboard. Overall, the concept looks nice pretty, but they didn't lay it out very well. A modification of how it works (more linear) would probably work at least somewhat nicely. Not sure if you want to go that direction, though.

I don't have a really good solution for this one other than how SpartanUI does it. I really like the nice, compact party frames on the right of the dashboard, but, they're already quite small - Adding space for a 5th unit frame and pet frame would make it too hard to even make out the buff icons, I suspect.

It's possible that a general reorganization of the frames would yield more usable room, but as one of the worst Tetris players ever to walk the Earth, I'm the wrong person to ask. Spacial orientation is not my forte. Heh.

Anyhow, I'll put my brain to work on the subject and see if I can think of anything that'll work well.

In closing - I'm personally satisfied with the frames as they stand. I think it's great, and I've definitely gotten used to the "frame in a frame in a frame" layout of the main unit frames. Although I do miss health bars sometimes.