Friday, November 30, 2012

Looking for a new Look


I appreciate minimalistic design in general, use my laptop with 1366x768 screen resolution, and default UI eats too much space to the point where recently I decided it hurts my game because of the poor visibility of the game play field.  So I decided to give а try to some alternative UI add-ons, among them I installed and configured nUI, LUI, SpartanUI, and ShestakUI.  First, I have to say, and it goes for all of the above, even it says they all support horizontal resolution from 1280 and above - they don't.  On smaller resolutions UI elements are so small they are not usable, some add-ons allow you to scale it easily, others require you to manually adjust each and every element's position to the pixel.


First two (nUI, LUI) look great on screenshots, however, when I installed them I ran into some issues.  The major one is that even if I play World of Warcraft on laptop most of the times, there are times when I play on external monitor and naturally I want to use better resolution.  What I found out is that neither nUI nor LUI scale nicely.  They self-configure when they are installed (and, honestly, take too much time to get it to where I want them after initial install) and then sit there like bricks when resolution changes with frames slipping left and right like cows on ice rink.  And, for example, LUI on 1366 width looks nothing like the screenshots.  For example in my resolution right sidebar action buttons are so tiny they take only half of the default panel size.

SpartanUI looks way much nicer out of the box and anchors to the center so it scales much better.  What I couldn't get used to is the way action bars are split between left and right frames.  I feel more comfortable when all the buttons I use during an encounter are clamped together.  Another point is that I am so used to Titan Panel with it's FPS, Gold, Location and other information that I felt I still need to keep it with SpartanUI as it does not provide this type of information (or did I just miss it?) and the panel does not really blend well with this custom UI.  Map in the center looks very nice and overall look and feel of the add-on is just fantastic.

Also all three of the add-ons above use Bartender4 add-on which I started to hate with my guts after numerous attempts to configure it.  And I believe this add-on is the main reason for my UI scaling troubles as it works in absolute coordinates and every time resolution changes I need to adjust each and every toolbar position manually.

So finally what I did I went to World of Warcraft home folder, deleted Cache, Interface, and WTF (gotta love the name) folders and installed ShestakUI.  The changes I had made so far from OOTB config:
I changed bottom action bars number from 2 to 3 (it automatically decreases the side bars number from 3 to 2)
And I changed action bar icons size from 25 to 30
The result is not bad, remember, this is still almost OOTB configuration and scales nicely between laptop and external monitor:


I am still not sure if this what I want, and map feels out of place in the bottom right corner.  On the up side I feel it can replace Titan Panel and JSHB.  I am still playing with it, found a way to replace fonts (I prefer Tahoma over default Calibri and unreadable font they use for the stats bar at the bottom of the screen).

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