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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