Reader UI of the Week: Coding, Lua, and Efn's UI

Dear Mat,

After reading your column for many months now, I too have decided to throw my UI into the "Ring of Public Scrutiny". Like a recent UI submitter, Skulldamage, I am a fan of minimalism.

I feel my UI is fairly unique in that the majority of it is a single custom-coded UI. I've only seen one other person in my five year WoW history who's done a similar thing, and that thing is to hand-code the majority of the UI.

For the 'typical' addons, I use Combuctor for the "single bag" display needs, and DBM for raid encounters. I also use RaidBuffStatus for monitoring the 'Well Fed' and 'Flasked' state of the raid (this will be disappearing shortly as I have almost finished the work to replace it). Finally, TidyPlates/ThreatPlates for nameplates is golden and I haven't figured out how to code my own equivalent (yet!). To be fair, I also switch some mods on and off on a per-encounter basis, such as the Atramedes mod to monitor sound levels (which I no longer need thanks to a DBM update). The rest is the result of my long-standing passion of programming. The motivation is that I've been able to code everything to use far less memory and CPU resources than even most unit frame mods alone. This yields a performance benefit that makes the whole thing very much worth the effort.

Before I explain the layout, I'll quite happily admit to drawing design inspiration from the addons that I used to use. I'm sure many of your observant readers will see shades of Pitbull, Grid and SexyCooldown to name a few. While I haven't used any of anyone else's code, I was more than happy with the way they presented themselves, so I didn't deviate too much from their style where I didn't feel there
was any benefit to be had.

I have my player unit frame just below center, with a cast bar of sorts (actually a 'radar' like the standard cooldown display). Above the player frame and to the left is a target frame, and to the left again is the target of target frame. As can be seen from the labels, the focus is laid out similarly on the right.

Each unit frame has a cast radar, health, power, buffs and debuffs. The buffs and debuffs behave a little bit smartly. If the frame represents an enemy, the debuffs it shows are mine alone, so they function as DoT timers effectively, eliminating the need to consume extra space. All buffs are displayed for frames showing the 'bad guys'. If the frame represents myself or a friend, all debuffs are shown, and short duration buffs (40 seconds or less) are displayed (I mean, you know you have Fort, MotW and so on, right? So why display them?).

Threat is displayed in a top-3 list for the target and the focus. As a tank, it is very useful to know how I'm tracking threat-wise on both mobs that I'm dealing with. I've yet to see another tank with a UI that tracks threat on multiple mobs simultaneously, so I feel this is fairly unique too.

In a similar display style to the threat meters, underneath the player unit frame can be found a custom damage meter readout. It's not interactive while in combat (mouse clicks are ignored and hence can be clicked through to select targets or spin the camera), out of combat a left click clears the meters, right click drops the meters to 'group' chat (party, or raid chat if in a raid) and the scroll-wheel lets you see more than the top five.

The raid frames are displayed bottom-middle, and they look very much like a Grid display. Some subtle differences exist, such as any player with a Curse or Poison effect (I'm a druid) has their square lit up like a Christmas tree so that they stand out like a sore thumb. Low mana (sub 30%) is shown my a blue border, and health is represented by the square's background, vertically oriented. Raid icons appear in the center of the square, sort of (just below the name, actually).

The major thing that is absent is any form of action bar equivalent. Everything I do is keybound or click-cast (again, part of my custom code). I use an N52TE for just about everything, and therefore keybinding is very easy and you seldom get mis-keys. Cooldowns are shown via the aforementioned cooldown bar, so action bars serve no purpose other than to consume precious pixels that could otherwise show me the fire I should be moving out of. All the keybinds are done as macros, taken from a simple configuration file. The click-casting actions are done similarly, and are mainly used for decursing and spot healing.

Another screenshot shows me in Moonkin form (my other spec) and contains a couple of new things of interest. Firstly, in the buffs section, you can see an icon of a mushroom and the number '3' over it - this means I have all three Wild Mushrooms placed down ready to detonate. In the thick of battle, amongst all the spell effects, it becomes easy to lose track of how many Mushies have been placed down - this solves that problem.

Also integrated into the power bar of the player unit frame is the Eclipse power number (center) and arrows for Eclipse direction. The direction and position of these arrows also lets me know which Eclipse I'm in, so there's little need to display that separately.

In the upper-left of the screen is a buff tracker, that shows me, category-by-category, which buffs I'm missing. If the icon for the category is dull and grey, I'm buffed with something in that category (for the stamina category, it means I have Fort, Blood Pact or Commanding Shout, for example). If the icon is coloured and fully opaque, I'm missing a buff. In this respect, it functions as a missing buff tracker. When the raid leader throws out a ready check, that bar triples in size and moves to just above the ready check dialog box, so I can easily see how I should respond. :) This bar disappears in combat.

I hope this wasn't too long-winded and that maybe someone can get an idea from UI that helps them in their day-to-day play. Thanks for the opportunity to share. Oh, and when someone notices the latency overlay on the Moonkin screenshot and worries about the value, spare a thought for me - this is why we want 'real' Oceanic servers!!!! :)