Pimpin' the Interface, WAR Style: Part II

I figured it was about time for a followup to my initial post about altering the UI for WAR. Unfortunately, Mythic hasn't done much of anything to address UI issues and make their default UI more acceptable (in fact they made it worse by introducing an annoying global cooldown flash that appears on ALL your buttons EVERYTIME you use an ability. I had to download an addon just to disable that 'feature').

So, I am now up 19 addons! Much more than I generally want to maintain, but every one feels needed and or useful at the moment. Click the link below to read all the details and see the screenshots (click on the images to see larger versions of the screenshots).

Here is a basic screenshot of what my UI looks like when I'm not doing anything in particular.



The square mini-map in the corner is provided by Custom Map. In addition to being more compact than the default mini-map, it also allows you to zoom out to region map feature, and displays info about your current influence level for the area you're in.

Simplified group and warband health displays provided by Squared. Has a ton of settings available. I have modified the class colors, the bar size, the text, disabled showing buffs for others and chosen a texture to give the display some pizazz.

Vertigo allows for creation of action bars. You are still limited to the six that the game comes with, but you can define how many buttons they have, and how many rows and columns each bar has as well. Excellent addon for those who like to customize their action bar layouts.

I have a four action bar setup. You can see my main action bar at the bottom. It uses three pages and is controlled by PlanB, which makes it auto change pages based on the progression of my Plan (Black Orc mechanic). Though this hasn't been updated in a while, it still works like a charm. Highly recommended for all Black Orcs and Swordmasters.

The bar on the right hand side has various potions and miscellaneous abilities. Most of my other abilities are on the other two bars which are hidden using Phantom, which is an addon that lets you hide all sorts of basic UI windows and parts that the default UI doesn't allow for. I have run into some issues where it won't reshow previously hidden bars. Something to do with configuring it on a different character. I'm not sure of the details, and it hasn't bothered me enough yet to look for a fix. But the author for it is one of the most respected and active modders for Warhammer Online, so I feel confident the issue will be fixed sometime soon.

War Effort is the little graphical display at the top, center-right of the screen. This addon shows the current status of all T4 zones, including current victory points for the contested zones. The display can be toggled on and off with the little 'W' icon next to it.



In this second screenshot, you'll notice that my current target has red vertical bars around them. These graphics are courtesy of Target Ring. This addon makes it much easier to keep an eye on your targets in a crowd. It uses green bars to denote your friendly target (unfortunately, I didn't have one at the time of this screenshot).

Clean Unit Frames are used to show health for myself, my target and my friendly target. Just a simple layout, without any unneeded fancy borders or graphics.

Duff Timer gets rid of the annoying cluster of buff icons (the number of buffs, debuffs and DoTs in this game is insane) that are constantly shifting and changing during battle, and puts them into a nice, timed display that includes the name of the effect. You can configure, move and size buffs and debuffs separately for yourself, your target and your friendly target.

The black boxes in the bottom corners are courtesy of SNT Panel. Pretty simple mod. It lets you create background panels that can be moved, resized and made transparent via the default UI configuration options. I use this for my chat windows, because the fade-out really bothered me and made it hard to see the text depending on the brightness and color of the terrain I was in. It took some careful resizing and placement, as well as help from a chat mod called Chatty Cathy to get the chat windows looking good in relation to the panels. Chatty Cathy allows you to remove the fluff from the chat windows, including the tabs and scrollbars. A simple slash command redisplays these items if you need to resize or change settings for your chat tabs.

Dammaz Kron is THE must-have mod for anyone that wants to track their PvP kills and deaths. It's very full featured and even integrates directly with your Tome of Knowledge. I'm so impressed by this mod, that I've included a screenshot of it, just to try and encourage others to check it out.




Then there are the addons that can't be seen in the screenshots.

alertMod - This mod allows you to change the size, vertical location, and duration of the text for the alert messages that pop-up in the middle of your screen, for example, the notification you receive when gaining a level. The default text is rather large and can be annoying when it appears in the middle of a fight.

Aura - Lets you configure pop-up icons and/or text messages that appear when certain events occur. As one example, I have an icon that pops up over my character's head when my health drops below 40%. Helps me quickly and easily know when I need to fall back or drink a healing potion.

Think Out Loud - Another mod that wouldn't be required if Mythic allowed you to put more than one action into a macro. This mod simply allows you to say configurable text when using abilities. You can even set the percentage chance that the text will fire.

Global Cooldown Remover - The flash appearing on ALL of your icons is especially annoying when you have multiple action bars. This mod simply removes the global flahs for that 1 sec global cooldown. This is one of those mods that I never should have needed to begin with. But when I had 4 visible action bars on my screen, seeing all of the buttons light up everytime I used any ability was driving me insane.

Realm Status - This is another RvR mod. This one has a couple of different features. One is that it shows you a summary of all victory points for all zones. This display can be shown and hidden with a simple slash command. But, the feature that I find most interesting is a pop-up window that informs you of any change in VPs for any T4 zone. Mythic isn't very good about accurately updating the status of keeps (and since the RvR addons rely on information that Mythic provides, they are generally slow to update as well), but when I see a popup window telling me that the victory points for a zone have changed by 15+ points, I know that a keep has just been taken.

Lib Slash - Required mod for slash commands.

Clean Cast Bar - Simple but sexy looking cast bar.

So there you have it. I actually consider this post a sort of mid-term update. The modding community for WAR is getting better at what they do, and the addons are becoming much more versatile and slick. I already have a couple of new ones that I'm keeping an eye on. Look for another WAR UI post in a month or so, hopefully with better screenshots as well!

Pimpin' the Interface, WAR Style

After a month of getting by with the default UI options, I finally broke down and looked into installing some player made addons.

My general goal when looking at addons is giving myself more empty screen real estate and a cleaner, more streamlined UI. I like to do as much as I can with the built-in interface options and find addons that are simple and to the point, without a lot of extra fluff that I don't use. I also try to keep the number of addons I'm running to a minimum. The more you have, the more you have to worry about conflicts, updates, etc. Five or Six addons at most would be ideal for me.

I did quite a bit of interface tweaking in WoW via addons, and its obvious that the WAR addon community (as well as the WAR API that allows addons) is still in its infancy. So while the addons themselves are generally easy to install (simply copy the folder into your Interface -> Addons folder), they all use a variety of slash commands to change options in-game and there are a number of minor issues with a lot of them.

One of the first addons you will likely need is Libslash. This is a dependency that many other addons require. It allows the addon authors to easily incorporate slash commands to allow users to control the addon settings.

First off, a quick note about what I changed with the default UI options. Looking at this first screenshot you can see that I have hidden both my experience and renown bars. It's not overly important to me to know exactly how far along in rank I am, so out they went. I decreased the size of the game options bar and the zone control bar, putting both in the center. I've also broken my chat into three tabs and removed the combat tab altogether. One chat tab is the basic default tab, the other is for all guild and alliance chat as well as tells, while the third is for say, emotes, party, warband and scenario. General and guild chat tabs are on the left and the local chat tab is on the tight. I also moved around a number of screen elements to try and keep everything compact and near the edges of the screen.

Click on the images below to see a larger version.



In the bottom right you can see my minimap, provided by Custom Map. Not only does it remove the extra graphic fluff around the mini-map, but it makes it into a nice square shape (which is great for fitting it into a corner) and also allows me to zoom out to the zone level, which is nice for getting a quick view of the local battlefield objective and keep status. Current location is displayed above the map, and at the bottom of the map, it gives your percentage influence for the current area.

Warband and party healthbars are controlled by Squared. Makes everything nice and simple and also has numerous commands for changing the shape, size, layout, colors, etc. It has an option for displaying buffs/debuffs on players in your warband, but I have that disabled to try and improve my system performance. You can move the Squared display around by going into the Layout Editor and moving the Squared Anchor box.

The only issue I've had with this addon so far is that every game session, I have to go into the warband UI and manually tell it to not display the default warband healthbars. There doesnt seem to be a way in Mythic's UI options to just not display this. Apparently there are are other addons that will take care of hiding the default warband interface, but so far I've just been manually disabling it every time rather than adding in yet another addon.

Healthbars for myself, pet, target and friendly target are all controlled by Clean Unit Frames, I've never really understood why MMOS force me to look at photos of myself and those I have targeted. It would seem like this would be an obvious option to add in from the beginning. There is a little bit of weirdness with this addon in that each UI element has a small sliver of black space on the left side, and to get mouseover info on buffs and debuffs, you have to hover over a very precise, tiny area at the top of the buff icon, but otherwise it works great and has a compact, sleek look that I appreciate. Character rank and renown rank are both displayed on my healthbar. Champion, hero and lord level mobs are noted by the + signs next to their names on the target healthbars.

Vertigo is used to control the layout of the action bars. You can change the number of buttons each bar has as well as how many columns the buttons are arranged in. The bars can be moved and sized as normal via the layout editor. I have Action Bar 1 reduced to 6 buttons and use it for storing all of my attacks (it switched pages based on my current 'plan'. See the PlanB info below). Action Bars 2 and 3 are below that along the bottom of the screen and I altered the hotkeys for one of them to use the F1 through F8 keys. And then, over on the right next to the mini-map, I have a smaller, vertical bar where I store consumable items for quick usage.

MinChat is a simple chat mod to remove the scrollbar from the side of the chat windows and also removes the extra graphics fluff. The mousewheel is used to scroll through the text in the chat windows.



Note: It looks like I hadn't yet installed MinChat when I took the above screenshot as you can see the scrollbars on the chat windows.


On top of those I also have two mods that cant really be presented in pictures.

PlanB - This mod is a godsend for Black Orcs and Swordmasters. It sets things up so that your first action bar will change pages based on your current Career status. This way you can reduce icon clutter on your screen. Unfortunately, Mythic has it setup so that page 2 of action bar 1 is the same as action bar 2, which makes it kind of useless for people who want more than one action bar on the screen. Luckily, PlanB has ways to handle this. First off, I used the /planb pagemax slash command to increase the number of pages available. Then I used the /planb pages command to make it scroll through pages 1, 5 and 6 on action bar 1, so that those buttons wouldn't overlap with my other action bars. Very handy. I held off on installing this mod for a while, but as soon as I got it setup and configured, I kicked myself for not installing it earlier. It makes combat as a Black Orc much easier to deal with.

Buff Throttle - Controls how often buffs and debuffs refresh. Given the extreme number of these seen during RvR, this addon seems to be pretty much required if you are interested in engaging in large RvR battles. It definitely put a dent in the amount of lag I was having to deal with.

So that comes out to 8 mods total. One is simply a library for some of the other mods, and another is only in place due to WAR's poorly optimized client. I'm sure there are lots of other mods out there that many people would find useful. I don't do crafting and I also don't get a lot of emails, so I haven't looked into any mods that help out with those two features.

So this is just Round One. I expect to continue tweaking my interface (and in fact, I've already made some modifications since taking these screenshots). Look for another post on tweaking the WAR interface soon.

Dwarf Fortress Update

So the latest version of Dwarf Fortress has finally been release. You can find it here. It has been in development for quite a while and includes a z-axis, alterations to temperature exchange and water flow and more!

Unfortunately, the game's interface is still pretty horrid. But for those who are put off by the ASCII graphics, there is hope! First of all, take a look at this mockup! Pretty sweet! Here's a link to a thread about the development of these isometric graphics. I recommend that any Dwarf Fortress fan lend their support to those efforts!

I haven't had a chance to delve into the new gameplay yet, but I expect to have some commentary on the subject soon!

The Good: Warcraft's Customizable Interface

Since my last post was about the horrible interface of Seed, I wanted to look in the other direction and talk about an MMO that really did things rights with their interface. That would be World of Warcraft.

Their default interface is slick, well-organized and very pretty. But, by far the best thing they have ever done with it was to build an API so that creative users could make their own mods and tweak the interface to their liking. This has led to an astounding number of addons which do everything from simply changing the look of the interface to adding in completely new functionality. And, in what I consider a stroke of genius, the programmers at Blizzard often take parts from the some of the more popular addons and integrate them into the default interface. That little button on the crafting menu that lets you make multiple items with one click? That was originally a user-created mod back in the beta test. The floating damage text? That was also a mod. Quick looting, visible buff timers, extra action bars just to name a few more.

The concept of facilitating easy access to the interface via various API options, hooks and slash commands, giving the users free reign and then studying what the users create to plug potentially game-breaking gaps and to further improve your own interface is just brilliant. There are still a lot of things I think that Blizzard should include in the default interface (moveable windows!? Hellooo!!!), but their controlled open-ness and willingness to change their game has led to the best MMOPW game interface I've ever seen. And I hope future companies look at this feature as one thing that Blizzard did incredibly-right, and plan on incorporating something similar in their own games.

Post-Mortem: Seed

This news is a little old, but the MMO called Seed (their website is already gone, but you can read some info at the out of date Unofficial Seed Wiki) has been shut down after just a few months in operation. Even though the basic concepts for Seed were very creative and unique, there were several factors that led to its unavoidable demise (lack of content and stability being the main two). But the part that really turned me off and resulted in two cancelled accounts (myself and my girlfriend) not even halfway through the 7-day free trial, was the absolutely horrific interface!

Unfortunately, since my playing time was so short and it was nearly 5 months ago, I don’t have a lot of details to list, I just remember it being unwieldy, confusing and awkward. I do remember one specific issue: the in-game help/tutorial. I couldn't figure out how to use it! And this comment is coming from someone who usually dives right into any program and only uses manuals as a reference guide.

When your game needs a help file for the help file, something is horrible wrong. I've done a lot of QA myself over the years, so knowing what it's like behind the scense, I'm generally a lot more forgiving than most MMO gamers, but this game made me seriously question if they had ever had someone who wasn’t a developer for the game look at it prior to release!?

I'm really amazed at how often interface takes a back seat in software development. The interface is the first thing a user sees, and it's their window into your product and their tool for interacting with it. You can have the most awesome code ever written, but if you just slap a half-assed, crappy interface on top of it, then you're showing the world a half-assed, crappy product.

Dwarf Fortress: Interface Suggestions

So I've been playing this game for a couple of weeks now and while I love it's crazy variety and think it has a lot of potential, it also has an extremely clunky interface. So, I've compiled a list of suggestions and issues.


Note: This notes were made based on an old version (~2 weeks ago).

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The first issue appears when choosing extra equipment for your initial dwarf party. It's extremely awkward to scroll through a list of every single possible item. How about dividing it up by item type? If I don't want to take leather armor, I shouldn't have to look at all the the leather armor variations. I suggest having an option to view items by category. Give the users a list that they can drill down into via the +/- keys.

Once the game starts, the first thought that I (and many others I've spoken to) had was, 'My God this is an extremely cluttered mess'! The complex grass option should default to off. It just makes everything more confusing. And the player certainly doesnt need extra confusion when they're first starting.

Easy location option for items. When 'v'iewing an item, there should be a 'z'oom to option for easy location of that item (this would mainly be useful for artifacts). Same for the Room listings.

The option to turn off engravings should be an all or nothing setting. The 2nd level engravings are confusing, considering that they use the same symbols that are used for everything else. The 1st level engravings look great. 2nd level engravings simply add to the cluttered feel.

Text hangs off the edge of the screen in many places (inventory, when viewing items using 'k', etc, etc). Add in some word-wrap functionality or otherwise alter the layout so that this doesnt happen.

Dwarves gather refuse even when gather outside is set to off. Seems to be related to the chasm (at least I've noticed it more when I have chasm items turned on)

A simple option to page through all dwarves when examing a dwarf. (IE, when I have a dwarf selected, I can simply hit a key that will take me to the next dwarf)

Ability to easily see quality of furniture when looking at it after its been placed. If you hover over a placed furniture item with the 'k' or 'q' option, there is no way to tell what the quality is for that item.

The biggest problem I had with the interface was lack of consistency. Some menus use the arrow keys, some use +/-, some use both! Storage areas and harvest areas are designated by marking the opposite corners while bridges, farm plots and roads are created via a clunky square system. Pick one menu navigation method and stick with it.

Way to set butcher commands via the 'v' menu. There were times were I had a severly wounded animal that was worse than useless, but finding it through the 'u'nit menu is a slow, painful process.

I would really appreciate an option in the room ('q') menu that allowed me to set that room as one to be detailed. I would limit this to the user defined rooms (bedrooms, barracks, dining, etc) and it should detail all the floors and the walls that are considered part of the room.

On the pets submenu for dwarves, show how many pets they already have. It would be nice to know if I'm assigning dogs to someone that already has 5 of them!

The 'U'nit screen displays every mobile in the game, even if they've passed away and been chunked into the chasm! While it's nice that all of this information is saved, some options to filter the info on the unit screen would be great.

Injured status should be seen on the 'u'nit screen.

Animals gathered during hunting are rarely butchered immediately. Corpses get thrown into a refuse pile or worse, the chasm! Animals placed into butcher shop should be flagged for butchering and so that the corpse doesnt get picked up as refuse. If the corpse becomes rotten, then the butcher flag should be removed.

Along similar lines, materials that are taken to a workshop for a job, then left there because the worker dwarf decided to take a break, often get placed back into the stockpiles.

The ability to designate an ore stockpile as smeltable. IE, any ore in that stockpile will be auto-queued at the nearest smelter. This option would only be available if you have a Manager.

Ability to change ini settings from within the game.

An option to temporarily turn off all objects and mobiles so I can work on the layout without the distraction of hundreds of symbols, many of them flashing.


And last, but certainly not least, we need Orc Fortress!!