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AddOn creation site needs your help
WoWAce is a set of libraries heavily used by developers to create many of those nifty AddOns we know and love like FuBar and Grid. Unfortunately, their Wiki site lost its data and the latest usable back up is over two months old. Everything since then has been lost.In an effort to reconstruct the lost pages, they have pulled HTML copies of those pages from Google Cache and now they need your assistance. You can go to their Rebuilding page and help them convert the HTML into Wiki format and repost it on the site.If you have some spare time, head on over and help them get back on their feet so they can continue to help developers create those AddOns we can't live without.
The Creamy GUI Center: HUDs
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.This week we'll look at Heads Up Display's or HUDs for short. These addons are an alternative to unit frames that show a variety of information about you and your target. They're displayed right in the middle of your playing field so your eye doesn't have to wander to get vital information. They accomplish this using non-traditional graphical elements like slices of rings representing health and mana bars. HUDs are used in real life jets to show the pilot information in such a way that their eyes don't have to wander to far from their field of vision. Many games use HUDs of varying types as well. In WoW, HUDs employ transparency effects so they can fade in and out so as not to obstruct the playing field. Let's get the show on the road with a look at Archud, MetaHud, and IceHud.
Reader UI of the Week: Taeo
Never fear, folks! We have heard your requests. Many folks figured since the Reader WoWspace column was back, it was time to check out some new Reader UI's too! So this week I've foraged through the spammy depths of the Reader UI mailbox, and returned to you with some screen shots, a story, and a rundown of the mods involved in this really fabulous, clean UI sent in by Taeo. So for those of you looking for cool new UI ideas, or who just appreciate lots of clutter-free screen real estate, check out this week's submission after the jump!
Addon Spotlight: QuestsFu
In previous weeks we've looked at Lightheaded, which helps you understand how to do your quests, and Fubar, which can present all sorts of information concisely. Today's addon is a Fubar plugin that can work with Lightheaded to show you everything you need to know about your quests without having to click a lot of buttons or obscure your screen with your entire quest log.QuestsFu presents you with a handy quest list in two ways. First of all, you can hover over its space on your Fubar and it'll give you a collapsable list of all the quests you're working on in a tooltip. In addition, you can have QuestsFu put up its own little quest tracker to replace Blizzard's standard tracker. The advantage to either of these color-coded quest lists is that you can just click on any of the quests themselves to open up a little window with all the quest information in it (pictured on the right). This is great for when you're in the middle of a quest and you don't want to stop moving, but you still forgot where exactly you were supposed to go or what the quest rewards are.If you have Lightheaded installed too, then you can arrange an additional Lightheaded comments popup on the other side of your screen, and get hints about your quest without opening the big old quest log. There are other quest managers out there, but this is my favorite because it feels so light weight, looks so attractive, works together with other addons so nicely, and also has such nice features, above and beyond what I've already mentioned: Edit the questlog on the fly, adding or removing quests with ease. Display quest levels, difficulty, zones, and objectives clearly. Put objective info into monster and item tooltips Show the quest level before you accept the quest Show other party members' completion of quest objectives (if they have the addon too) Optionally (I have this turned off) notify party members in /p chat when you complete a quest. Check out QuestsFu at WoW Interface.
Addon Spotlight: Prat (and PitBull_Prat)
The basic chat interface in WoW is pretty limited. It's easy to miss what's happening in the chat window while fighting, for example, and there are many other ways in which the chat windows are not very user-friendly. Prat helps solve a lot of these usability problems, and since it's modular, you can turn its features on or off easily. New functions are being added over time, too. Here are a few of the things it can do: Enable mouse scrolling in the chat window. Abbreviate the channel names (from [Guild] to [G], or just the green color, for example) Add keybindings for various chat channels. Add a slash command (or keybinding) to whisper to your current target. Add timestamps to the frame (so that you know when someone sent a message). Color player names according to their class, and add their level beside their names. Toggle the chat buttons on or off, or move them about. Turn on chat logging. Move the chat input box (the Editbox) to a different location. Copy text from the chat frame. Shorten existing commands to your own personal alias comands. (eg: "/say "Get ready, I'm pulling now!" could be shortened to "/pull". This is like a macro, except that it is executed with your own shortened command instead of a button to click on, which is handy for things you say or do often, while out of combat.) As for that problem many of us have, where, in the thick of battle, someone will say something like, "WAIT! DON'T PULL!" or "Help me! I'm being attacked!" and you miss it because you were looking at the fight, not at the chat window: a recently developed addon, blandly named "PitBull_Prat", helps solve this problem by working in conjunction with PitBull and Prat together, by adding the text of what you and others say to a colored speech bubble right next to that player's unit frame in your interface (as you can see in the screenshot above). Since you're more likely to be looking at your friends' health bars to keep aware of how the battle is going, hopefully this will help you to see what their saying in time to help them too. Click here to download Prat and PitBull_Prat from files.wowace.com, and remember, PitBull_Prat will only work if you have both PitBull and Prat installed.
Shifting Perspectives: Some handy addons for your druid
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them, brought to you by Dan O'Halloran and David Bowers.Two weeks ago we had a look at how macros could make your druid lifestyle a little easier, and today we're going to look at some addons which were specially made for druids. These addons help you solve a couple problems that many druids are likely to face, helping you get at important druid information that isn't easily available in the standard interface. First is the problem of druid mana while in feral forms. It's tricky to keep track of this without any addons; you have to remember your mana in your mind while you look at your rage or energy bar and do other things. Sometimes you might shift out of a feral form to cast a heal only to find yourself without enough mana to do what you had planned. There are actually several addons which can help you with this, and we'll take a brief look at each of them so that you can choose which is best for you. The second problem has to do with comparing the best druid gear without having to shift out of World-of-Warcraft form and into Browse-the-internet-for-15-minutes form. Several addons are out there which can give you the lowdown on gear quality right in your item tooltips.
The Creamy GUI Center: MazzleUI
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play. Welcome readers! Right off the bat let me thank you all for putting up with my sick on the 4th post, and for the well wishing. I really appreciate the kind words. Luckily this week I'm feeling much better, and even got to see the new Harry Potter movie. (Spoiler Alert, unlike last week's Nyquil induced hallucination, John McLane was nowhere to be found.) Anyways onward and upwards as we explore part 3 of my 4 part series on addon compilations with Mazzle UI. To paraphrase Optimus Prime, "a user friendly interface is the right of all sentient beings." Is Mazzle's unique blend of functionality and eye candy more than meets the eye? Let's find out!
The Creamy GUI Center: Sick on the 4th edition
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.Howdy addon and UI fanatics. To our American readers I hope you all had a great and safe 4th of July. Mine was spent on the couch with a bottle of Nyquil and jug of Gatorade as I've come down with a dreadful summer cold. My day was spent re-watching the Die Hard and Harry Potter DVDs while clouded in a sneezing and Nyquil haze. Right as John McClane is about to finally get Voldemort (as I remember it), I suddenly sat up and exclaimed "oh crap, this week's column!" For those of you coming here to read my review of MazzleUI as I mentioned last week, I apologize. As with my 4th of July plans, so too did my plans for this week's article take an unexpected turn due to my cold. The review of MazzleUI will have to wait till next week, as under my current condition I don't feel I could do it justice. After using it for a few days the MazzleUI compilation demands I be at my best so I can fully articulate what this UI package has to offer. So instead, I'm present you a week in review of addon and interface news.
A faster, better, stronger threatmeter
KLHThreatMeter (more commonly known as KTM) is definitely one of the most required addons out there for raiding guilds. With the addon installed on every member of the raid, the threatmeter can give a heads up to both tanks and DPS when aggro is getting unbalanced. But KTM is an older addon, and as a result, it's gotten a little shaky-- it's a bit of a resource hog, and some readings from it (especially when not everyone has it installed) can be a little off.Enter Omen, a relatively new addon (part of the Ace set) that the hype says is a KTM-killer. The author says it's fast and clean and it seems much more customizable than KTM-- you can even pull out specific threat bars to watch. It'll also hook up to KTM, so if everyone else in your raid is using KTM, Omen will still work for you-- and probably better. One big drawback is that it won't distinguish threat between same-named mobs, but KTM doesn't do that either (it's a failure of the addon API), and there's not too many situations where you'd need something like that.Lots of guilds have already switched over to Omen, and apparently more all the time. Have you used it yet? Does it match up to the hype? I haven't had a chance to get it running in a raid, but the next time my guild heads into Karazhan, I'll be watching to see how it works. If KTM hasn't been running as quickly as you've wanted lately (and you're looking for something harder, faster, better, and stronger), Omen might be worth checking out as a new way to handle threat.
Addon Spotlight: PitBull
I've been putting off writing about this addon, mainly because it's one of the greatest addons out there, so it's hard to do it justice -- what doesn't PitBull do? Well it won't win the game for you by itself, and its name doesn't really describe anything about it, but other than that it does pretty much anything and everything you could expect from a unit-frames replacement and then some. You can, of course, personalize your unit frames to your heart's content, more than any other unit frames mod I've seen, and that in itself is worth the download. On top of that, though, you get a ton of other features, all of which can be enabled for functionality or disabled for performance, whichever you like. Here are a few of my favorites:
The Creamy GUI Center: Cosmos
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.This week I continue our look at addon compilations with a breakdown of Cosmos. Like last week's CTMod, Cosmos has been a part of the addon scene since WoW's early days and as such many comparisons between the two have been made. CTMod and Cosmos enhances the default WoW interface, but Cosmos bundles addons that stand on their own to provide an assortment of features. Does this compilation hold up to today's addon environment or is it an aging dinosaur? Let's find out!
Addon Spotlight: Aloft
The addon known as Aloft solves many of the problems I've had with nameplates in World of Warcraft. Nameplates, or names and health bars floating above the heads of all characters within a few yards, were great at first for letting me see at a glance the status of a battle, but they quickly got too confusing and frustrating to be useful anymore. (Some people may have never known they could turn nameplates on -- by default they are toggled on and off with the "V" key.) The main problem I experienced with the default nameplates was that they kept jumping about as characters moved in a tight space, and there just wasn't room for all the entities' names and healthbars floating above their heads. Some nameplates inevitably got pushed off to the side, far away from the characters they were supposed to represent only to bounce up to the top or the right or the middle unpredictably as the character ran along. Furthermore, the default nameplates are largely the same and it was difficult to tell which ones belonged to whom.Aloft, though, lets you modify the nameplates and their presentation of the information you need. You can, for example, make the nameplates relatively small to fit more nicely together in crowds, and then assign different health bar colors to various types of characters, from hostile, neutral, or friendly NPCs -- to players (friendly or hostile) of different classes -- or even to distinctions as fine as pets within your group or not if you want. You can set up all sorts of textual information too, such as name, health or guild affiliation, and make everything appear just as you want it so that it means the most to you at a glance. You can even make the nameplates of friends who are being attacked appear in a special warning color for as long as they are under attack, or add combat text to health bars just like that which normally appears scrolling up above characters' heads or over their portrait on the unit frame.Aloft is the addon that makes nameplates actually usable for me, and I highly recommend giving it a try if you have any interest in nameplates at all. You can get it at Curse, or download the frequently updated version directly from wowace.com
The Creamy GUI Center: CTMod
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play. Collecting and updating addons can be a time consuming hassle. Wouldn't it be great if you could install a collection of addons that's all packaged together to eliminate the hunting and updating of each addon individually? Well there is an answer to this problem, addon compilations. What are they? What are the pros and cons of using a compilation? What options do I have when looking for a compilation that's right for me? This week I'll answer all of these questions and more as we begin a multi-part series on addon compilations. Over the course of the next few weeks we'll be taking a look at CTMod, Cosmos, MazzleUI, and Mirage UI (formerly Insomniax Recompilation). Let's get started!
Addon Spotlight: SuperInspect
Nowadays you can inspect someone's items from a full 30 yards away, but back in the day, you had to be within 10 yards in order to do it. And if someone moved out of that range while you were inspecting them, then the window showing all their items would go away. I got fed up trying to catch up to people all the time when I wanted to inspect them, so as soon as I realized that an addon could help with this, I adopted it and never went back. SuperInspect has truly been the super hero addon of player inspection because not only does it preserve the inspecting window no matter how far away your target gets, it also gives you a good view of the target's graphical model, whether a player or an NPC. This feature lets you rotate or zoom in on the target model to your heart's content. Just love the look of that monster or enemy player in front of you but can't get close enough without getting attacked? Just use SuperInspect and zoom in!There are several more features which make SuperInspect feel fleshed out and useful, such as colored borders for displayed items that indicate their quality, and total item bonuses added up from all your target's gear. It can also save the various characters you've looked at in each session so that you can look them up later. Mainly, though, SuperInspect just looks good, with a movable, scalable window, and even a pretty background behind each character that adds that certain flair that all good addons should have.
Addon Spotlight: Fubar
Fubar is one of those addons that I didn't know I needed until I tried it out. It lets you display information in a bar at the top and/or bottom of the screen -- all the numbers and meters that you want to always have handy, without having to click on anything or hover your mouse for tooltips. Fubar itself provides a framework for the Fubar modules (downloaded seperately) to display this information for you -- anything from your durability to your current experience (with rest) to the time of day (both in your time zone and on your server). I personally find one of its most useful features to be that it can show you how many of your guild mates and friends are online at any given moment, then let you hover your mouse over the number to see a tooltip list, with clickable names for whispers or invitations, just like a regular IM program. To be honest, I actually tried out its competitor, Titan Panel, long before I had heard of Fubar, and then switched to Fubar because it feels more flexible and lighter on my system. Fubar is made with Ace, which usually helps addons feel smoother somehow; the difference between Fubar and Titan is what made me go looking for other Ace addons. Also, the other thing I love about it... is that it's called "Fubar!" and most of its companion module addons end in "fu", as in "QuestsFu" and "MoneyFu!" I just love my addons with a extra helping of humor sauce.
The Creamy GUI Center: Addon basics
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.Howdy folks and welcome to this week's edition of The Creamy GUI Center. I know last week I mentioned I was going to write about addon compilations; however some advice from my editors and comments left by readers got my attention. So instead, this week I'm going to take a step back and cover the basics of WoW interface customization and addons. I believe I should have covered this topic sooner and I appreciate my editors and readers for pointing it out to me. Much like the eager party member who pulls that group of mobs without warning, I dived into addon reviews and interface mumbo jumbo without covering the basics. Let's remedy that with a breakdown of WoW interface terminology as well as how to safely find, download, and install addons.
Baggy McBaggerbag would be fine, too
Hot on the heels of that trinket chain suggestion from the other day, I've got another easily-implementable suggestion for inventory management: I want to name my bags.Not necessarily "Jonah" or "Sally" or "Tricia," although those are all very acceptable names for bags. No, I want to be able to label the bag that I keep all of my healing gear in my "Healing Gear Bag." And I want to label the bag that I keep all my quest items in "Quest Item Bag." Clear labels that help me organize exactly how things get laid out in my inventory.Now, there's already a little bit of that going on-- "special" bags like Enchanting or Soul bags are already labeled, not to mention that you can't put anything in them that doesn't belong there. And obviously the same thing applies to quivers (Related: where on your bag bar do your hunters put your quivers? I always put mine just to the left of my backpack, but I just realized it didn't have to go there all the time).But I want to put custom labels on all of my bags, so that if I happen to take a vacation (either out of town or to an alt), I can come back and know exactly what's where. There are lots of bag-related addons out there, and for all I know, one of them lets me do exactly this. But I'd like to see a nice and easy implementation in the normal interface.
Reader UI: Chronnick
Finally! A UI that some of you may have been waiting for - I know I was. It's frequent commenter Chronnick and his UI! I'll get out of the way and let Chronnick explain:Here it is! After a month of delays due to nitpicking every single element of the UI, I hereby humbly present my interface. My focus here was to leave as much of the world visible as possible, while still showing a ton of information, and not using a ton of memory or cpu time. So I've thrown it all towards the bottom of the screen and made it as pretty as possible using Skinner and Clearfont. Clearfont anti-aliases all my fonts, and Skinner gives me a pretty, uniform background on all my windows. I'm still working on making Damage Meters and KTM a little less ugly and I think there is a way to do that with Skinner, but that's still a work in progress. For the unit frames I've got ag_UnitFrames using the ABF skin that i modified a bit for to hide the background of the target's caster bar. My buffs are shown using Buffalo, which allows me to place them to the right of my health/mana bars the same way my party member's buffs are shown. But by using Buffalo instead of agUnitFrames' own buff display, i can right-click my buffs to remove them.
The Creamy GUI Center: Group Buttons
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.To finish my series on action bars and buttons, this week I'm looking at "Group Button" style addons. Group Buttons was an addon made by the venerable Lozareth of Discord Mods fame. Group Buttons attached action bars directly to an unit frame, making the frame the default target for the action or spell placed in the bar. A look at the original addon can be seen in this Addon Spotlight. Unfortunately Lozareth hasn't updated the addon for WoW 2.0 compatibility. However multiple other authors have stepped in with their own take on a group buttons style addon which has provided the community with several options ranging in complexity. Let's find out which suits your needs!
The Creamy GUI Center: Click casting
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.First off thank you for the feedback and encouragement I received from last week's column, I really appreciate it. I wanted to take a minute to discuss my background and the scope of The Creamy GUI Center so that people know what to expect. I'm a player of WoW just like you who happens to have a great interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs, pronounced "gooey"), particularly when it comes to games. I was born with a disfiguring disability and my curiosity in UIs grew as I became more adept at computers and gaming. I found that a customizable interface like the one found in WoW goes a long way in allowing everyone the ability to play through a tailor made experience, within the guidelines setup by Blizzard of course. While our individual challenges and goals may be different, it is my hope through this column to share the tools and addons that helped me so that your WoW experience is the best possible. While the main focus of my column is addons, I intend to cover macros, and other tools ranging from Team Speak to game pads; as well as commentary on topics affecting how we play such as the decursive nerf. However I am hardly perfect and I am just one guy, so if I left something out or miss communicated (sorry Ace guys, I now know it's not an acronym) please send me feedback. (Or if you think I'm doing a good job too!) I hope this helps you get a better understand on what to expect. I thank you for reading and WoW Insider's editors for taking a chance on me. Without further to-do let's get to today's topic, click casting!
