ui-mod
Latest
The Tattered Notebook: Celebrating the search for the perfect UI
EQInterface and EQ2Interface have been stalwart sidekicks for me through the years, and it's great to see them expand into other games. They now have a library of UIs for several MMOs and have really helped put player-made UIs on the map. EverQuest II's site had a news article announcing that the collective UI site, now called MMOUI.com, is celebrating its 10th birthday this week, so I thought I'd get in the celebratory spirit by highlighting a few iconic favorites and taking a brief look at the state of the user interface in MMOs. I've included picks from three SOE MMOs: EverQuest, Vanguard, and of course, EverQuest II. In this week's Tattered Notebook, we'll put down our macros, take a break from resizing windows, and look at the quest for the perfect UI.
Lichborne: A guide to death knight spell alerts
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. One pretty cool change coming to Cataclysm is the advent of spell alerts, on-screen notifications that direct you to a button you really should be pushing when you get some sort of class-specific proc or buff. Of course, many high-level players have had this for a long time in the form of player-made UI mods, but now newbies, UI minimalists, and people who just get confused by UI mods get a chance to have them, too. This week in Lichborne, we'll discover what spell alerts death knights get and discuss how best to apply them in battle. Generally, when a spell alert goes off, you'll hear a sound and see a certain graphic envelop your character on screen. If you have scrolling combat text turned on, you'll also see green or yellow text describing the buff. Finally, the button for the affected ability or abilities will light up on your action bar, telling you exactly what you need to push. Once you understand all this, it's pretty easy to anticipate the effects, but let's take a quick look at what you'll see so you know exactly what to expect and what to do.
MMOs get an in-game web browser: GotGame's Rogue
Let's say that, like most folks, you only have one monitor. Let's also assume that you either prefer to enjoy games in all their full-screen glory, or your one monitor doesn't run at a resolution high enough to make multitasking while running a game in a window practical -- also probably true of most folks. But you're playing World of Warcraft and you want to check Thottbot, or your e-mail. Well, very-specific-user, GotGame has a solution for you: Rogue, a browser that runs as a transparent overlay while you're playing games.Rogue's visibility can be toggled on and off by pressing the F12 key, and it has customizable transparency settings. It doesn't work with all games, but World of Warcraft and Age of Conan are the two MMOs that have been tested by the folks at GotGame and confirmed to be Rogue-friendly. No word on, say, Warhammer Online or The Lord of the Rings Online (EVE Online already has a built-in browser, so no need there), but feel free to try and let us know how it goes.Note that for the moment, Rogue only runs in Windows. Mac users are out of luck, though to be honest, we're a bit surprised that neither Vista nor Leopard supports this kind of thing natively. Maybe next time, eh? [Via WoW Insider]
Breakfast Topic: To Addon or Not to Addon?
I spent a while on the test realms yesterday checking out all of the new goodies in the 1.12 client. Some of these, like the new floating combat text feature, have come directly from popular community-created addons. I think, in may ways, I prefer the addons that are integrated game - that way, come patch day, the features I use regularly simply work, without need to tinker or download new code. However, custom addons provide a level of flexibility that's not present in Blizzard's own UI. With floating combat text, specifically, I may continue to use the original addon - Scrolling Combat Text - because I prefer being able to customize a little more than Blizzard's addition allows me to. And what about all of you? Do you like to use addons - or even the sort that can't play when their addons aren't working right? Or do you prefer the low-maintenance of the default UI? And, whichever side you're on, do you like or dislike these new additions to the default UI?
