Hotkey layouts

[Icebird]

A couple of tips for configuring GypsyMod:

- Selecting (or unselecting) the "invert party display" option (I forget the exact terminology) from the GypsyMod interface configuration pane will put the character and party information in their default UI positions (ie Character at the top of the screen, with party members listed below).

- There is a padlock icon on the mini map. When this is unlocked, clicking on just about any UI element will display a name tab. Clicking and holding (or maybe right-clicking) will allow you to drag the element almost anywhere on the screen. When you're done, just set the padlock to the "locked position"

- The chat panes are exceptions, since they're controlled by WoW and not by GypsyMod, so you have to do a separate unlock-move-lock operation (the locking and unlocking is done from the chat pane menu).

Chris

[mjdoom]

Of course, within hours of posting this thread I had gotten restless and went over to the Blizzard boards to look up some UI stuff. Most pressing to me was an issue I had where I usually lost track of my own health while healing in parties because my health bar was not similar in size and position to those of my party members. In the end I did a complete overhaul of my UI that you can see here. For anyone interested I will discuss briefly what I added but I want to make a quick comment first:

- Selecting (or unselecting) the "invert party display" option (I forget the exact terminology) from the GypsyMod interface configuration pane will put the character and party information in their default UI positions (ie Character at the top of the screen, with party members listed below).

Also note here that there is an option in Gypsy to keep your portrait, party portraits, and target portraits linked. If you want to move these separately you will want to unlink them first. The option should be easy enough to find but I don't remember what it is called offhand.

Gypsy is actually one of the mods I used in my new setup. I mostly used it to give me the ability to move a few UI elements (like portraits around).

The two mods that I used that are most interesting though are mini group and flex bar.

Mini group gave me the functionality of having a group box that includes my own name along with the rest of my party. This makes it easier to just look at everyone's health the exact same way so I no longer die because I don't realize my health is so low. Mini group also gives you the ability to hide or show the basic UI portrait, party, and target boxes. The only thing that took some getting used to on the Maraudon run that we finished here is that debuffs do not show up as little icons. Instead, player names are modified as seen here by coloring the name and displaying a configurable character before and after the name. You can set colors for magic, disease, curse, poison, and other debuffs. In the picture above you can see that my name is red with an 'M' before and after to indicate that I am affected by a magic spell (mind vision in this case). This is a little strange as you can't see the actual debuffs in this box so I'm still getting used to it.

Flexbar is a neat little add on that allows you to place buttons anywhere on the screen at your discretion. This takes a little bit of effort to set up nicely but in the end I think it was worth it. There are options to group buttons together and you can use up to 96 buttons for different spells or macros! I highly suggest reading through the readme for this first if you are interested as you have to set most of it up using the command line. It also includes a handy option to "lock" spells into their hotbar slots so that you can't drag them off during battle.

That's the basics of my latest redesign. I actually laid out the buttons on the left a little differently after the run last night but I don't have any screenshots and haven't tested the new layout yet. If anyone has any questions about these feel free to ask.

- mjdoom

[LochnarITB]

here
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I think I see a problem there. There's a whole chunk of screen right there in the middle that doesn't have any icons so it's going to waste just showing you what is actually going on. :P Very nice. I can see how it helps you do your excellent job of Priesting.

[vor_lord]

I tried out a GypsyMod ++. I added all of Telo's (except bottom bar, using Gypsy hotbar), Gatherer (awesome for a miner like me), Bankstatement, and CT_PetHealth (have yet to really test that one).

Gypsy is very cool simply due to the movability.

Three things I'm missing from Cosmos, have to get them working:

1. A decent DPS calculator
2. Removal of the ?? level markers--just tell me the level darn it!
3. Thottbot profile collection (I want to link to my character profile from our web page)

[Treesh]

Instead, player names are modified as seen here
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Holy crap. I'd never be able to actually see what's going on with all that stuff on there. If you can play with that, more power to ya, but that'd kill me.

[Xanthix]

Since the topic of UI mods has come up, I wanted to post to let you all know of some good ones that may save you some hotkey troubles. I am a UI mod nut, so I have tried tons of them.

First, CastParty. If you are a healer or regularly cast spells on partymates, this is THE mod for you. Basically, you get healthbars in a cluster for your partymates. You define what happens when you click, right-click, shift-click, etc on each name. For example for me, left click a name = Flash Heal that person. Shift left click = Greater Heal them. Middle click = Renew them, right click is Shield them. Alt-click is Cure Disease, and so on. This saves tons of clicks and keypresses. No more "press button for spell, click on portrait." No more "select party member, press button." No more casting Dispel on an enemy when you wanted to cast it on a friend, or failing to shield yourself because an enemy is targeted. Pure gold.

Second, I recommend any of several mods for extra toolbars. Cosmos and GypsyMod are good. Gypsy has the advantage of letting you choose which components you want; in Cosmos it is harder to turn off un-wanted items but it does have a lot of other nice tools. FlexBar is also good, and extremely customizable, but with a steep learning curve. (You can make buttons appear and disappear based on triggers such as being in combat and having enough mana, but it may take a few hours to set up:)

Third, bc_TrackingMenu. If you have tracking skills, this changes the icon for them by the minimap into a menu that lets you choose which to activate. Removes the need for keeping tracking skills on hotkeys.

Those are all the mods I have that help with hotkeys, but here are some more great ones in general:
- Gatherer - icons for herb and ore nodes you've found, in the minimap and main map. Invaluable for gatherers.
- MobHealth - shows the estimated health of mobs you attack.
- SunderThis - shows how much a target's armor has been sundered. Awesome for warriors.
- UseByName - adds a function that a macro can call to use any item by name (instead of by inventory spot).
- WeaponQuickSwap - uses UseByName to provide easy weapon swapping macros.


I have found all of these mods to be very helpful. I hope they help others as well. I think that the default interface is good, these are all excellent tools to extend it, to allow us to achieve our true ability in-game.

[Kevin]

First, CastParty. If you are a healer or regularly cast spells on partymates, this is THE mod for you. Basically, you get healthbars in a cluster for your partymates. You define what happens when you click, right-click, shift-click, etc on each name. For example for me, left click a name = Flash Heal that person. Shift left click = Greater Heal them. Middle click = Renew them, right click is Shield them. Alt-click is Cure Disease, and so on. This saves tons of clicks and keypresses. No more "press button for spell, click on portrait." No more "select party member, press button." No more casting Dispel on an enemy when you wanted to cast it on a friend, or failing to shield yourself because an enemy is targeted. Pure gold.
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Cast party dropped my FPS by about 5 and caused a half second pause every 8 seconds. It is very nice but it didn't play well with my system (Athlon XP 2000+, GeForce 4 Ti4200, 512MB DDR 266 RAM) so I went with MiniGroup to fix my few issues with healing people. Just a heads up. I also use Cosmos and that is it for UI mods right now so maybe it just doesn't like cosmos.

[Xanthix]

Good point about MiniGroup. It has some nice features I hope make it into CastParty too. I was going to mention it but couldn't find the forum thread. :)

About CastParty hitting your fps, I run the game on an 800MHz dinosaur with only 256MB of RAM. It's a miracle the game even runs, but I didn't notice any hits from CastParty. Maybe it's a conflict with something in Cosmos - I disable 2/3 of Cosmos from the AddOn manager screen to help my performance so maybe that's a possible fix.