Reader UI of the Week: Papalegba of Skullcrusher
by Sean Forsgren 
Jun 1st 2008 at 1:00PM
Allow me to present Papalegba, proud Troll Shaman of the Skullcrusher server. His UI has got to be one of the most unique I've seen, bearing only a passing resemblance to the default user interface. His approach is circular in nature, providing a different type of utility, one that "square-minded" players might struggle to grasp. If you've used Necrosis or Totemus, this might be right up your alley, so join us after the break for Papalegba's addons, description and biography.
With a spherical interface, complete with a circular HUD, this addon is sure to please many. Let's get to it, shall we?
"I've never seen a UI quite like mine, with the circles and lots of transparencies; I've seen a lot of UI compilations and they mostly seem to use atlas/fubar, have an ugly big blacked-out area at the bottom of the screen, or just be too square for my taste. I'm more of a round person, so when I found Trinity Bars i fell in love.
For an even cleaner UI you can easily get Trinity to hide the main bars and only show them in combat or on mouseover (like I do with my totem bar). I like to see the numbers on the bars though, so I keep them visible.
Here's my addon list with a brief description of each (total used addon memory is around 30MB):
- Altoholic - Keep track of your alts skills, posessions, money, rested state etc etc.
- AnkhCooldownTimer - I only use it for restocking ankhs automatically.
- ArcHUD2 - My preferred HUD.
- Buffet - Food/water/HP/MP macros.
- Butsu - Nicer loot frames.
- Cartographer - Better maps.
- Chatter - For a nicer looking chat log. Also has hovering tooltips for itemlinks.
- Chinchilla - Very configurable minimap.
- Clique - Click-casting made simple.
- DrDamage - Breaks down the damage coefficients and such for your spells.
- Eloquence - Speak like a troll!
- FishingBuddy - doubleclick casting and easy switching to fishing outfit.
- HealBot - I never could heal worth a damn without it.
- Historian - All the useless statistics about your toon you'll ever need.
- HoloFriends - Friendslist that lets you share friends across alts.
- InFlight - Tells how long taxi flights will take.
- ItemPriceTooltip - Prints vendor price in item tooltips.
- LightHeaded - Quest comments from wowhead.
- LootAlert - Nicely formatted loot messages.
- LynStats - Small, unobtrusive fps and latency meter.
- MikScrollingBattleText - My preferred SBT mod.
- MobHealth - Remembers mob health and displays in tooltip and HUD.
- NoxInformationBar - highly customizable xp and information bar.
- nQuestLog - The best questlog ever.
- Opium - Kill On Sight mod (I meet a lot of gankers, campers and griefers... Mostly gnomes...)
- ParanoiaRevived - Alerts when a member of the opposing faction is near.
- QuestHelper - Easymode questing plus quest route optimization.
- RatingBuster - Compare stats on gear easily.
- SharedMedia - To share some fonts, graphics and sounds.
- Skillet - Replacement tradeskill window, will buy reagents for items in queue.
- teksLoot - Much nicer looking group loot frame.
- TrinityBars2 - Amazingly configurable action bars.
- Vendor - Helps you sell your loot on AH to a reasonable price.
Since I'm still leveling I don't use any raid addons.
The font I'm using is called Tork and is a free download.
Any feedback, suggestions for improvements, alternative addons or just general expressions of admiration is greatly appreciated :)"
Papalegba also answered a few questions about himself and his UI, here are his answers:
Who are you?
- I'm a 38-year old IT worker from Sweden who's been playing WoW casually for the last year and a half. My first use of an addon was for coordinates about a year ago, and from there on it snowballed :) I played the first 6-7 months as alliance (on Outland, and mainly addon-free. Then I rolled horde and have never looked back! )
- (Solo, 5-man/Heroics/Raiding/PvP, all of the above) I use my UI for solo, group and 5-man instances, for all my toons (all 18!) and for both PVE and PVP. Since I play casually and I am an altoholic, I don't have a 70, which means no Heroics and no Raiding yet. I do have a troll shaman and an undead warlock both on 66 though, so there might be some raiding-related UI changes soon.
- As you can see from the screenshots, I think that WoW is a beautiful game and I want to see as much as possible of it, hence all the transparencies and mouse-overs. I also really don't like all the square UI:s that are out there and therefore I tend to choose addons that have round or transparent elements.
- I feel that some of the standard Blizzard UI elements - mainly the action bars and the quest log - are nigh on unusable, so those were the first to go. I started out with Doublewide for the questlog and Trinity for the action bars. I like round things, so I decided to use the "circle plus one" feature of Trinity to get the distinctive look of the UI. Also, I wanted a HUD instead of having to look up in the left corner all the time, so I added ArcHUD. With that, I decided I needed scrolling battle text, so I added Parrot, which I loved. However, that broke in 2.4 (even though it's fixed now), so I moved to MikScrollingBattleText instead and have grown quite fond of that. From there on it was a case of trying out new cool addons, checking www.wowinterface.com almost daily and reading your own Addon Spotlight to get tips. One of the major moments for me was when I decided to ditch DoubleWide for nQuestLog together with Lightheaded and Questhelper. Not only does nQuestLog look really nice compared to DoubleWide, with the other two it is easy-mode questing done right. Never spend time hunting for that quest mob or wonder where to go next again!
- The final touch, and what inspired me to submit my UI to Reader UI of the Week, was when I found this nice font, Tork, and replaced the standard fonts with that. I think it's just gorgeous!
- The UI is - of course - a work in progress, and at the moment I am trying out ShardAce as a replacement for the venerable Necrosis for my lock.
Why do you choose to use specific addons over others?
- At first I didn't much care about which addons I used, if it did what I wanted I'd use it. But over time my addon memory grew quite a bit so I've started to look for smaller, more lightweight replacements. I'm a Unix guy, so I'm really into addons that does one thing and does that great, just like the Unix system tools ;)
- I mostly use Ace addons and the Ace updater to keep them updated, but there are some exceptions mainly because I haven't found an Ace replacement for them.
Thank you for profiling my UI. For the Horde!"
That's it, folks! Quite a bit of information, but an absolutely gorgeous UI. Papalegba also shared a screenshot of his Warlock UI, which is as spartan as they come. I can only assume there are action bars (er.. spheres) hidden there, waiting for a mouse-over.
Papalegba uploaded his UI over at WoWInterface, so if you want to try his way of doing things, head on over to pick up his Round UI. Personally, I think this couldn't come at a better time, as I just finished filling up my actionbars on my shaman. Good luck with your UI, folks! Thanks again, for your UI, Papalegba!
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Add-Ons, Features, Reader UI of the Week
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Papalegba Jun 1st 2008 1:38PM
Thanks to the nice people in the forums over at www.wowinterface.com I've managed to take the last piece of squareness out of the ui since those screenshots were taken. With the help of Buffalo and ButtonFacade, my buff/debuff icons are now round. Bliss! :)
Badger Jul 1st 2008 4:02PM
This UI is terrific, and I'm going to work on building something very similar to it when I get home. Thanks a ton for sharing this, Papa. :P
Out of curiosity: Now that it's been exactly one month since this was originally posted, have you found a suitable Addon for Group or Raid Frames in the interim?
Luclan Jun 1st 2008 2:05PM
Personally just for looks its moderate, nothing too special just a compilation of addons. Functionality seems to me like it would be lacking, unless everything is hotkeyed the idea of needing the rare click on those tiny buttons just wouldn't work out to well.
The circular hud (the 3 circles at the bottom) are used in crylo/necrosis and are used almost exclusively for space conservation and using them in the heat of a battle would be.... less than efficient.
Papalegba Jun 1st 2008 2:35PM
Well yes, most everything needed in battle is mapped to keys. In fact, I sometimes hide the circles altogether, as you can see on the warlock screenshot.
The buttons are not *that* small, though, so even if I need to click them in battle it'll work fine.
And yes, it is a compilation of addons, nothing more.
MartinC Jun 1st 2008 2:53PM
I've never really understood the appeal of a Necrosis-like circular action button UI.
Most serious players have everything hotkeyed already, so why do you need all these buttons on the screen, that you are expected to click with a mouse??
Papalegba Jun 1st 2008 4:04PM
Here's the beautiful thing: If you don't like the round buttons, don't use them. I don't use them myself most of the time. But the point is they *look* nicer than the default UI for those who want them.
Every button, spell and macro can be bound to a key with Trinity, so if you want to hide the bars and play just with your keyboard, go right ahead. That's what I do.
Please check the last screenshot in the gallery for an example of how clean the UI can be if you hide the bars (or check out http://s.wowinterface.com/preview/pvw14017.jpg).
Fits Jun 1st 2008 8:21PM
Are the 3 circular bars at the bottom made with trinity? I love the circular interface but if they are made with trinity bars which is what I use, but I can't see myself spending time configuring 3 circular interfaces.
I use totemus for my shaman and necrosis (as outdated as it is) for my warlock because I respec a lot and the missing spells would create missing spell buttons which may pretty much ruin the circular shape.
i usually pre-set my totems with totemus and have 1 hotkey for each type of totem (air, water, fire, earth). If i have to totem twist I usually just click the totem itself. I don't have enough hotkeys to bind every single totem, and I doubt i'd een remember all of them.
agentaero Jun 1st 2008 9:38PM
I wanted to add, Fits, as long as the 3 cicular bars are he same, you can configure one, and clone it, and it keeps most of the adjustments, though I did notice an error when I told it to show a differnt button set while I hold crtl, and that didnt copy, so I had to set up that seperatly on each bar
Papalegba Jun 2nd 2008 8:11AM
Yes, they're made with Trinity. I made one and cloned it two times. It's not really that hard, the middle button is sized to 2.5 times the size of the others (I think).
As agentaero said, there is a slight problem with Trinity and stance shifts - when you shift stances first time, the button count is set to zero, so you'll have to increase that, and increase the middle buttons size again. After that it remembers the settings.
As you can see in one of the screenshots, I have a 4x8 button bar on the right-hand side of the screen with all totems that hides until moused-over. It works pretty well in conjuction with a couple of castsequence macros for solo and group play. I can use the macros most of the time and if something else is needed I can mouse-over the bar and get the totem I want.
agentaero Jun 1st 2008 9:36PM
I just set up my resto shamans ui with trinity, It did take me awhile to figure out how to use trinity( about 20 minutes) and then it took me another hour to get it all set up like I wanted, but I just wanted to say thanks, I love necrosis, and was excited to see something similar for my shaman. It is espically good becuse at lvl 65 I was almost out of buttons for spells on the default UI, and was dreading haveing to spend forever seting up bongos2 like I did on my hunter
Hugh "Nomad" Hancock Jun 2nd 2008 6:17AM
FANTASTIC UI. Really, really like it. I, too, hate the "hey, let's obscure a third of the screen with a big black bar" UIs, so this is a refreshing change.
One question - are the bars large enough to work with easily?
Papalegba Jun 2nd 2008 8:04AM
I must admit to using mostly the keyboard for things needed in battle, so I don't know what a mouse-heavy user would think. Out of combat they certainly are large enough.
One of the reason for having a big middle button (apart from aesthetics) is to maximize the clickable area. Put your "panic buttons" there :)
And thank you for the nice compliments :)
Zamboni Jun 2nd 2008 12:18PM
For those that don't want to take the Trinity Bars route, there is another spherical addon called LunarSphere that features a sphere with configurable button menus around the outside.
http://moongazeaddons.proboards79.com/index.cgi?board=lunarsphere
Sean Forsgren Jun 2nd 2008 12:21PM
I was playing with Lunar Sphere last week actually, it's going to get some Addon Spotlight love in the near future. Lots of great features!
Neil Jun 3rd 2008 12:54PM
How did you get the center button in the "circle+1" Trinity bars to be so much bigger than the rest? Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I couldn't find that option ...
Fantastic UI, though! It's inspired me to rework my own design to free up more open space :)
Papalegba Jun 4th 2008 5:55AM
Neil, enter Trinity's configuration mode, right click on the bar you want to modify, choose "button edit mode" in the tabs at the bottom of the configuration dialogue, select the middle button and choose the "button scale" option from the dropdown. Press "+" until the button is large enough (I think I used a value of 2.5).
(this is from memory, so exact details may vary).
Neil Jun 4th 2008 3:37PM
That worked great, thanks!
I have another question, this one is about nQuestLog. By default, there's a shaded rectangle behind the quest tracking text. You have it set up so that the text is still there but that shaded rectangle behind it is gone. I went through all the options and couldn't find one for this ... can you help me out?
alex.rushing Jun 5th 2008 12:32AM
I dig the layout. I'm a long-time totemus fan myself (alas that it is so out-dated!) but one addon I would desperately love to see would be to change how the unit frames themselves look - I would love circular unit frames ... especially raid frames.
Papalegba Jun 5th 2008 8:03AM
Neil, I think I just set the transparency to 100% on the background in nQuestLog (at work, so I can't check now).
Papalegba Jun 5th 2008 5:24PM
Neil, how to get rid of the nQuestLog background: In the options, select "Coloring", click on "Minion background color" and pull the right-hand slider down to 0%.