Hotkey layouts

[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