Building a UI: Part IIa - UI and Action Bar Overhauls (May 30th, 2008 // 12:52pm)

(Note: This is part two of a four part series, if you arrived here directly, why not check out Part I first?)

Welcome back! In this section of the guide we’ll be going over all the add-ons that we’ll be downloading, installing, and setting up in Part III. If you’re on the lookout for new add-ons, or want to replace a few of your own, or even if we’re just curious as to which add-ons I use, keep reading!

For the sake of organization, and ease of browsing, this’ll be split up into several sections. If you’re looking for a specific type of add-on, skip right down there and have a blast! We’re going to start with general overall add-ons, and slowly work to more purpose-specific ones. This was a really long list (I am an addon-aholic after all), so I’ve gone ahead and split up Part II into multiple posts, with each one covering a different part of your UI, this part will cover overall UI and action bar overhauls. Without any further ado, let’s get going!

WowAce and WowAceUpdater

While reading this article, you’ll probably notice that I tend to pick add-ons that are available on WowAce over ones that are not. There are two reasons for this, and they are both reasons I think you should consider when picking and choosing your add-ons. Before I explain these two reasons, let me explain what Ace is (source):

Ace is a lightweight and powerful system for building World of Warcraft addons. Ace provides developers with the tools needed by most addons, freeing them from repeating common tasks and allowing them to jump right into the creative part of building their addons. New and experienced addon coders alike can benefit from Ace’s features.

Now, first of all, if installed, used, and updated correctly, all your Ace add-ons will share the libraries that they have in common. Ace is a system where libraries are built to aid add-on developers in doing common tasks that may be shared among many add-ons. These could include drawing bars on the screen, querying another player for information, or calculating threat. If you were to go and install two add-ons that were not built with Ace libraries, and they did similar things, there would be a lot of redundancy in the coding. Each add-on would increase the time it takes to load into the game, and the memory imprint of all your add-ons once you’re in the game. By having add-ons share common libraries, you not only reduce the game’s load time, but the memory imprint of your add-ons in-game. For example, I have 350 add-ons activated on my Mage while I play. I can load into the game in under 60 seconds, and my total memory imprint from add-ons is around 39mb. My brother, who currently has about 100 add-ons (most of which are not Ace, and do not share libraries), takes about three times as long to load into the game, and has about the same memory imprint. Before you ask, our computers are more or less identical in terms of hardware.

Second, thanks to WowAceUpdater, you can update ALL your WowAce add-ons with one click! This means you never have to worry about your add-ons being out of date and having to constantly search for where you downloaded them from and updating them all. You just open up WAU, click F10 (or File -> Update All Installed Addons) and it will go through and automatically update all the add-ons you have installed (that are on the WowAce SVN)! Additionally, you can install and uninstall add-ons right from the client itself! My settings are as follows:

One more small benefit to having an add-on come from WowAce is that it will most likely have support for FuBar! This keeps your minimap nice and clean, and yet still allows you to easily customize your add-ons as you like. We’ll go into this one more in depth in Part III.

Overall UI Overhauls

Let’s start with the biggest overhaul your UI will ever have, a UI replacement. This is something most people usually start with, and it’s something that wholeheartedly replaces the default Blizzard UI that many are so used to seeing. There are quite a lot of these out there in the wild, but there’s one that seems to be the most popular, and one that is so rich with features I absolutely have to recommend it. It’s an add-on I personally use and love, and it’s none other than Zeksie’s X-Perl. With everything from status highlighting (a cursed raid member will have a purple portrait), to HoT monitors, to ready checks being built in, this add-on absolutely has it all. Additionally, it’s updated regularly by its author! It’s options screen is chock-full of options, and you can customize it exactly how you want it. Unlike many other UI replacements, it doesn’t assume you want things to appear a certain way, it let’s YOU chose how and where you want things. For those who are hardcore raiders, it comes with built in support for CTRA and oRA2 (including MT Targets, and durability/item checks). This one will take you a little bit to customize how you want it, but it’s well worth the time invested, and won’t let you down. X-Perl will replace your player frame, target frame, target’s target frame, and raid frame. It’s split up into modules, each of which can be disabled individually (so if you have other raid frames, you can use those instead). I personally disable XPerl_GrimReaper, though some may like it. (Update: Zeksie has ported X-Perl onto the WowAce SVN, meaning you can updated it through WowAceUpdater! Yay!)

A relatively popular alternative to X-Perl is none other than ckknight’s PitBull. PitBull is a WowAce addon and relies on WowAce libraries to work, but provides a uniquely different interface from X-Perl. This add-on prides itself in its modular structure and, like X-Perl, you can enable/disable things individually without removing the whole add-on. PitBull, while it has a few preset configurations, relies on Dog Tags for customization, which can easily confuse non-technical people. If you have a technical friend, or are technical yourself, you can easily and quickly customize Dog Tags to show you a wide variety of information, exactly how and where you want it. Otherwise, you may be better off copying a setup from the WowAce forums or the Elitist Jerks forums.

The third most popular UI overhaul is another WowAce addon called AgUF (Ag UnitFrames). This uses a tag system, similar to PitBull, but relies on Watchdog as opposed to Dog Tags. It was the first unit frame to be created with the WowAce framework, and was created with the object oriented development techniques from Ace2 in mind. It has a low memory imprint, which may be beneficial to slower/older computers. It also tries being “smart” in many ways to help the user, such as not showing the Target of Target frame when you’re targeting yourself. However, the add-on is not as polished as the previous two, and is missing common features such as party targets, pet targets, and tracking main tanks. It prides itself in using a theme table to allow its users to fully customize their unit frames.

There is no easy way to pick the best add-on for you, and they’re all going to feel weird, strange, and unusual at first (especially if you’re used to a different one). What you’re going to want to do is to pick one of them, try it out for a while, and then see how you feel. Find things you like, things you don’t like, features you’d like, and so on. Then try a different one and compare them. There is no one UI replacement that works for everyone, it’s a personal choice, so pick the one that works best for YOU.

Action Bar Replacements

Next up we have add-ons that will help (or complement) your Blizzard action bars. These are the buttons along the bottom (and optionally the right) of your screen, where you put all your spells, items, and macros. They give you quick access to abilities without needing to open up your spell book, macro window, or your bags. Some will do nothing more than allow you to have more buttons than what Blizzard provides, while others will allow you to rearrange them on your screen, change how they look (sometimes depending on the situation), and provide other cool features.

Let’s go ahead and start with the big boy of action bar replacements, and one that I personally use and love, Bartender3. Bartender does everything you could ever want from an action bar, outside of automation. It allows you to setup custom paging options (different bars for bear/cat/tree/moonkin/caster form, or different bars when you’re stealthed, but have them use the same hotkeys and the same bar on the screen), it allows you to color unavailable spells (due to mana/range) red, it allows you to hide the macro and keybind text, it allows you to scale, size, pad, and relocate all your bars, and even hide bars you don’t use! Recent versions even include the ability to make frames “sticky,” allowing you to rearrange your bars in a way that looks fantastic without any trouble. On top of that, it’s really lightweight as it reuses default Blizzard buttons to increase performance and save memory. It’s a very popular add-on, and for good reason, it does everything you need it to do, and does it well. Plus, it has full support for CyCircled, which I’ll cover in a bit. The only downside to this add-on is it’s limited to 12 bars with 12 buttons each (although you can customize the number of rows and columns in each bar), which means you only have 144 slots total. However, both on my Mage and my Druid which are very button-demanding classes, I’ve had multiple bars spare,even after being generous with my use of the action bars.

Next up, we have FlexBar2. What’s interesting about FlexBar2 is that rather than allowing you to manipulate action bars like similar add-ons, this add-on focuses on allowing you to manipulate action buttons instead, including the ability to group them together as a bar. It allows you to have an unlimited number of buttons, and an unlimited number of bars (groups of buttons). It also allows you to have button paging (by group or by button), and allows you to chagne the texture, alpha, and scale (by group or by button). This is a relatively popular add-on, and it may be what you’re looking for. If you like the idea of having full control over each individual button, give it a shot!

Another popular action bar replacement is InfiniBar-2.0. InfiniBar boasts it’s tremendous power when it comes to button paging (even allowing bars to change depending on your target!), fully customizable use of up to five text areas per button, and many other popular features. It’s ability to be customized is ridiculously powerful, and for all those who want a little more power from their action bar, look no further than InfiniBar.

We also have AutoBar. AutoBar is not an action bar replacement, but rather a supplement for it, that uses automation to assist the player. Autobar automatically adds potions, water, food, quest and other items you specify into buttons for easy use. It is a very useful add-ons, and allows you to save valuable button space. It’s simplistic in nature, and if it sounds like something you’d like, why not check it out?

Finally, we have a fun little add-on called CyCircled. CyCircled is not an action bar replacement, but just allows you to skin any action bar (that’s supported). This is supported by all the addon’s mentioned above. I’m personally a huge fan of Serenity Glossy, but it has everything from circles to squares to hexagons and gears. If you want to change the way your action bar looks, this is the add-on for you. You can see an example of Square Glossy in the InfiniBar picture above.

Next Up: Inventory Addons

That’s all for this installment, next time I’ll be talking about various add-ons that will help you manage and maintain your Inventory.