Changes for changes' sake

kaelindel · 06-27-17, 10:22 AM

I'm sorry. I know literally all of my posts thus far have been to complain about something or ask for help. I don't want it to be that way. I also recognize the author's right to craft RealUI however they see fit to do so. You're welcome to tell me to stuff it; I just have to ask this question.

Is there a particular reason why every recent new build of RealUI has some obvious visual change that seemingly no one asked for? Last time it was player/target frames being huge. The time before that it was the gutting of timers. This time it's fonts that actually have a negative effect on the conveyance of information through the UI. I'm not updating today because I don't want to yet again sift through RealUI's gigantic array of options to find the thing that lets me go back to playing what worked just fine to begin with. I'd rather live with Lua error vomit in my chat box.

I don't want you to change your creation at the whims of users who voluntarily install your work. I just want to understand why you feel the need to make these changes, if that isn't asking too much?

Gethe · 06-27-17, 08:31 PM

I don't make any change just for the sake of making a change. Every update I strive to make RealUI better. If you look at the change log most of the changes in the past two updates were aimed at fixing things. If a change is not in the log, it's likely to be one of two things: 1) something that at the time I didn't think warranted a note, or 2) An unintended side effect of another change.

For example, in r20a I made a slight change to the UI Scale code because it was causing some forms of map taint. The change didn't affect my own UI, so I didn't think much of it; however, because of some erroneous conditions (that my profile didn't trigger) there were some people that ended up with a larger than intended interface. In this same update I also added a new option that would scale the size of the Infobar. One might have gone into the UI Scale options, after seeing this larger UI, and readjusted both the UI scale and the new Mod Scale to get things to a more comfortable size.

In r20b I found the bug causing the larger UI and did a fair amount of testing to make sure it's fixed. If a person had adjusted their UI for the previously bugged scale, their UI will now be smaller that it should be. Of course I might have reset their settings to be more appropriate for the fixed UI, but there is no way to know if their current settings are a result of that.

On your point about the large number of options in RealUI. I totally agree, and I try to pair those down whenever I can. The problem though, is finding a good default such that there aren't people going around saying "hey you can just go to this file, edit this line and you're gtg". And since there isn't any real way to get usage statistics I can't just remove the least used options, because I don't have any way to know what those are.