Posts with tag UserInterface

One of my favorite user interface changes in Cataclysm are the new level up features. A huge complaint over WoW's lifetime has been that players must go back to a trainer to see if they had learned any new skills or ranks of skills, or check a website such as WoWhead to find out their skills. Not anymore!

We previously gave you a peek at the new changes to the level up notifications. The new level up interface announces bold and clear your level, and then gives a list above your character of the new skills, talent points and other relevant information. Since skill ranks are gone, you won't have to worry about training those over your leveling experience, and new abilities will come more spaced out.

Take a look at the video we have captured for you guys, and marvel at how a nice, neat, new UI change can make all the difference in the leveling game. Notice how the game now alerts you to your new level, abilities gained at that level, features unlocked like battlegrounds and your new talent points. Cataclysm is really shaping up to be an awesome expansion, and adding even more polish to an already smooth experience.

If you're looking for more content like the video above, WoW.com has an ever-growing YouTube channel with lots of great content from Cataclysm and more! Subscribe for all of the latest videos. It's getting exciting around here with tons of information about the new expansion all over the place, and we don't want you to miss a minute of it!

Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.

Let's face it, WoW without chatting to your party, guild, or friends would be pretty boring. One of the major reasons we log in sometimes is to see what everyone's up to. So when you stop and think about it, that little chat box is a cornerstone to the user interface. We spend a good chunk of the time when logged in looking at it. We might as well try to make it as functionally and aesthetically pleasing as we can. This week we'll look at addons that spruce up our chat box and help us communicate better. We'll also check out addons that help keep track of our whispers to other players, and addons that grab our attention when there's activity in the chat window. Let's get to it!

Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play.

I'm back this week to finish our look at inventory manager addons. In the last two parts we looked at addons that helped you organize and sort your inventory. Now we know exactly where to find that nifty new doodad you just got but how do you quickly equip it when you need it? We'll solve that question this week with a look at addons that help you swap equipment around in the thick of adventuring. With so many items that have a particular use,, the addons reviewed this week will hopefully take some of the hassle out of using them. And for those classes that have different sets of gear for different occasions, these addons will help you out the most. So let's get right into it with a look at outfit and gear managers.

Welcome readers to this week's The Creamy GUI Center. It looks like I stumbled upon an addon topic that, judging from your comments, a lot of people view as a cornerstone of their UI and addon experience. This week, thanks to reader feedback, I'm going to extend our look at inventory addons to three parts instead of two so that we can take a look at a couple of fan favorite bag addons that I missed. I did indeed hear your cries of wanting more in the comments, so let's get down to it with a look at ArkInventory and TBag.

Welcome folks to this week's The Creamy GUI Center. This week I tackle one of the great suggestions left by you the reader in the comment's section. We're gunna examine bag replacements and inventory managers in a special two part series. This week we'll see how to organize your inventory with bag replacement addons. And in the following week we'll look at which addons help you change gear around for different situations. But let's not put the cart ahead of the horse, first we have to organize all that equipment, so let's get to it!

Courtesy of the excellent Daily Blue feature of World of Raids comes this tidbit about possible changes to the user interface for Wrath of the Lich King, posted originally on the European forums, where a lot of the good blue responses seem to reside.

Blizzard poster Salthem cautions, as is often the case, that it's too soon to expect much in the way of details but that there's not likely to be a radical change in the UI. "I doubt we'll see a dramatic completely new User Interface, generally we prefer to implement more gradual changes or options to the existing interface." While this sounds like a safe and generally correct way to go, it does leave us with some wiggle room for speculation. What gradual changes should they be working on for WoTLK? I'm personally pretty content with the UI as it stands, I don't fiddle much with it or use a lot of addons, but I'm sure more advanced modders have ideas. A built-in threat meter would be kind of cool, or the long-promised shaman totem UI.

What changes would you like to see?

There's one little mostly unseen note in the 2.1 patch notes that has quietly been making players' lives easier for the past few weeks. Hidden way down inside the "User Interface" section, we find this: "Active corpses or objects (ones with loot on them) now can be selected and looted, even if they are underneath another corpse that does not have loot on it."

We've all been in that situation before 2.1, where we were fighting, and had to deal with adds that died in almost exactly the same place, and then had to slowly move your looting cursor over the whole area, looking for that tiny little section in which it went from black and white to color, just so you could look that few silver and bit of trash from it. Nowadays, in these enlightened 2.1 times, we can simply loot at will, and life is good.

Of course, it's not perfect-- I still can't target anything through walls, and that's a known bug. But it is very nice to see that one simple sentence in the patch notes, and know that I never again have to hunt around for a tiny point of contact just to loot a piece of junk.

There's been many a time when I have been tempted by the lure of a larger monitor. I just never seem to have enough room on the screen in WoW, between all my toolbars and chat windows and party member icons and such. The actual window into the world seems to get more crowded the more I play. Now, since I am ultimately a geek, what would be better for me than one big monitor? Two monitors. Yessir, I've been planning to dual-head my system for a while now, and when Bill wrote WoW Insider asking for help on this, I jumped at the chance. I know it's been a long time coming Bill, but here it is.

First, some caveats. I run a nVidia graphics card, so these steps are using their drivers and control panel. I don't have access to an ATI card since they are not allowed within 100 yards of my house, so I cannot give any advice with that side of things. However, the setup within World of Warcraft should pretty much be the same. For the purpose of this article I set up my system using two 18-inch monitors: a Samsung and a Sony, so it doesn't matter what brand of monitor you use. Being left-handed I configured the left-hand monitor as my main game space, and the right-hand monitor as my toolbar/bag/chat window space.

Also, in order to complete this dual-heading setup within WoW you'll need to download CT Mod 2. I used the CT_Viewport feature within the mod to configure the play space within the game. There might very well be some other options out there, but this seemed the simplest since I already had the mod running on my system.

Today I would like to take a look at WoW's UI -- not any of those newfangled mods, but the default UI, the one that Blizzard wrote. We'll start at the top-right corner: everybody, say hi to the minimap!

As far as I've been able to determine, the minimap hasn't changed since I've started playing the game (circa patch 1.4 or so) -- until now! Yes, as I'm sure you've all noticed by this point, patch 2.0.1 introduced a new minimap button, one to open the world map (it's the one in the top-left corner of the minimap pic to the right, all looking like the Atlas button). I was rather confused about this for quite some time, until I realized that they had to take the world map button off the micro-buttons at the bottom of the screen to make room for one for the new LFG interface. But the micro-buttons are a topic for another post.

The new patch is coming this Tuesday to a realm near you, and when you run off to find updated versions of your latest addons, you may be in for a surprise -- because favorite addon site Curse Gaming has undergone a complete redesign. (If you're trying to find the addon section of the site from the main page, it's a big purple button on the right.) Their addons section looks quite a bit different and no longer sorts addons by familiar categories -- instead, there appears to be one giant list of addons, which is searchable by labels attached to the addon. For better or for worse, the new layout is going to take some getting used to -- and I can only again encourage everyone to go and download addon updates in advance of Tuesday's patch!