a question about raid frames

[Linchen]

tldr: I'm not an addon author, so I don't know if what I am suggesting is even possible, if you do know if it can be done please point me in the right direction.

I am wondering if raid frames can be split up into individual health bars for each person in your raid. I will say that two or three different ways just so it is as clear as it can be. Most raid frames populate from a certain anchor point, which is movable, but doing so only moves the entire frame, not the individual health bars. What I am looking for is a way to split up and position all ten health bars for my raid individually just like i would with my personal health bar or target health bar, or focus health bar for that matter. This would really open up completely new possibilities for my ui layout especially in ten mans where i have less bars to deal with.

If that was still clear as mud I could try and phrase it another way but I am hoping you guys will get a visual picture of what I am imagining here.

[Fizzlemizz]

Do you mean an addon that is made up of just health bars, no name text, health text etc. and/or being able to place frames for individual raid units wherever you like on the screen?

Both should be tecnically possible but I'm not aware of any addon that does. How would you want it to handle assigning/removing units from each frame when joining/leaving the raid like in Battlegrounds?

[Linchen]

i was able to get tidy plates to have just health bars with some very very basic lua editing. But I only use it for target health bars in battlegrounds on my rogue. What I am trying to design now is for a holy priest alt, and yeah, more like the second thing you mentioned. To try to explain better imagine the old old old blizzard raid frames where you could drag a certain person out of the raid and have them somewhere else on your screen. What I am thinking is that you could have ten bars on your screen set up in any pattern you want, and similar to most raid frames, they would be invisible until you were in a ten man raid. So in essence, I was sort of hoping for a grid or vuduh type addon that I can move the player frames individually as opposed to the entire frame. Sorry that got long winded, sometimes explaining things is hard.

[Fizzlemizz]

I know sRaidFrames has bars of 5 units, each bar can be moved individually anywhere on the screen but I don't know of any raid addon that does individually movable units, sorry.

[Linchen]

I will check it out, thank you for taking the time to reply. And who knows, if it can be done, maybe I can tackle the problem myself. In theory I shouldn't need to be poked and prodded before learning a new skill set, but ooh well.

to answer your edited question, I dont have a clue. It would certainly need to have a way to save alternate layouts for different raid or battleground sizes. As to populating the bars when you are in a ten man raid or bg, how do most bar addons do it? Does it simply fill it up as people join your raid? And if so what if you are the last to join, how does it sort them, or is that something the addon author can define?

[Malsomnus]

Funny, I just had this idea last night after doing ToT as resto for the first time and causing a few wipes on Iron Qon ^^

The idea is possible, definitely.
As a basic solution, I reckon it would be possible to simply make the current raid frames movable (I use the default UI). I imagine the default behaviour would be to fill up a default container, like now, except that you can take individual frames out of it at will and put them elsewhere, so when new people join the raid their frames will go to the default container until you choose to take them out, and when people leave it won't matter.
It should be possible to design that default container to be customized, in some way, like you said, although I'm not sure in what cases this would be useful.

... and then you'd want a cute little anchoring system like the windows in Visual Studio 2010 to allow you to put the frames you want in nice organized groups... sorry, it's 08:30 in the morning and my brain is in overdrive until it realizes it's exhausted :P

[Fizzlemizz]

SRF grows a bar (adds units) as people are added to the raid and shrinks it when they leave, removing the unit and moving the rest of the units back one to fill the empty hole (the bars will appear to resize). Once a bar is full the next one activates.

You can organise the units on bars by class, group (the order they join) or role (I think it has extra bars if you find you have way more of one particular class in a 40 person BG).

Originally Posted by Linchen I will check it out, thank you for taking the time to reply. And who knows, if it can be done, maybe I can tackle the problem myself. In theory I shouldn't need to be poked and prodded before learning a new skill set, but ooh well. to answer your edited question, I dont have a clue. It would certainly need to have a way to save alternate layouts for different raid or battleground sizes. As to populating the bars when you are in a ten man raid or bg, how do most bar addons do it? Does it simply fill it up as people join your raid? And if so what if you are the last to join, how does it sort them, or is that something the addon author can define?

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Malsomnus As a basic solution, I reckon it would be possible to simply make the current raid frames movable (I use the default UI).

That actually would not work, as the default raid frames are automatically placed inside the container -- just like Grid, VuhDo, and other raid frame addons -- and it's not possible to override that automatic placement without breaking the frames with taint.

What would be possible would be to use oUF to spawn a separate frame for each unit instead of spawning a header. I'm not aware of any addons like PitBull or Stuf that will let you do this with an in-game config UI, so it would require writing your own code.

[Unkn]

I miss the drag out frames we used to have for raids. For this very reason. Making it easy to focus on someone without actually having them targeted and still leaving the actual focus frame for other useful things.

Definitely commenting on this just to keep up with it. I don't have a suggestion to help you out but I wish you luck!

[Malsomnus]

Hmmm, I had not considered the tainting. This might be beyond my level

[Linchen]

I am trying the sRaidFrames that were suggested, and although not perfect they will get me through, so thank you all for the help. That being said, I would still really like to see individual bars at some point. So if anybody happens to stumble across an addon that does it, and you remember this thread, come tell us about it.


Side not: I am a math major with only a couple courses in programming under my belt (in short, im clueless), but I always felt it was something worth learning. So this fall once I'm set up in my new apartment and whatnot I will be undertaking this project to force myself to finally learn some basic programming. So if any of you fine addon authors would be willing to perhaps help me with some of the basics in a few months, say so now, and when I run into a wall of my own confusion I will know who I can pm begging for help. Especially if your willing to hop on skype to explain something, why type when you can yell amiright?

[Malsomnus]

If you ever need programming help, I'm generally up for it... and this is probably a pretty good environment to get deeper into programming, too.

[Fizzlemizz]

Originally Posted by Linchen So if any of you fine addon authors would be willing to perhaps help me with some of the basics in a few months, say so now, and when I run into a wall of my own confusion I will know who I can pm begging for help. Especially if your willing to hop on skype to explain something, why type when you can yell amiright?

While you're getting ready to start, have a good think about how you want to assign units as they join/leave the raid group to individual frames once you've got them positioned where you want and how you might want to change them (and maybe save the changes).

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Fizzlemizz While you're getting ready to start, have a good think about how you want to assign units as they join/leave the raid group to individual frames once you've got them positioned where you want and how you might want to change them (and maybe save the changes).

You don't "assign units" -- the game does that automatically. If there are 10 players in your raid group, and you invite an 11th player, when they join the raid, they are automatically assigned the "raid11" unit token. If you swap players around in your raid, the game automatically reassigns all the "raidN" unit tokens as it sees fit.

For unit frames, you would simply create a unit frame for "raid4" and the game will automatically show the frame when the "raid4" unit exists, and hide it otherwise. Unit tokens are used sequentially, so if there are 4 players in your raid, they will always be raid1, raid2, raid3, and raid4 -- you will never be in a situation where raid1, raid2, raid3, and raid5 are assigned, but raid4 is empty. If you wanted your 10-player raid to appear in a circle around the middle of your screen, you'd just put them there, with raid2 next to raid1, raid3 next to raid2, etc. and as your raid filled, the circle would fill in too.

[Linchen]

Originally Posted by Phanx You don't "assign units" -- the game does that automatically. If there are 10 players in your raid group, and you invite an 11th player, when they join the raid, they are automatically assigned the "raid11" unit token. If you swap players around in your raid, the game automatically reassigns all the "raidN" unit tokens as it sees fit. For unit frames, you would simply create a unit frame for "raid4" and the game will automatically show the frame when the "raid4" unit exists, and hide it otherwise. Unit tokens are used sequentially, so if there are 4 players in your raid, they will always be raid1, raid2, raid3, and raid4 -- you will never be in a situation where raid1, raid2, raid3, and raid5 are assigned, but raid4 is empty. If you wanted your 10-player raid to appear in a circle around the middle of your screen, you'd just put them there, with raid2 next to raid1, raid3 next to raid2, etc. and as your raid filled, the circle would fill in too.

Now could you use the role check system to sort those in some way, for a random example, so that the highest two health bars in the circle config you mentioned would always be the tanks?

highest as in the two at the top of the circle, not highest in terms of current health, obviously, just in case anyone was thinking that sounded weird

[Rainrider]

Originally Posted by Linchen Now could you use the role check system to sort those in some way, for a random example, so that the highest two health bars in the circle config you mentioned would always be the tanks? highest as in the two at the top of the circle, not highest in terms of current health, obviously, just in case anyone was thinking that sounded weird

You could spawn frames for main tanks and position them where you want in your circle. This has an advantage over the other methods because what you would pull to the side is a frame holding a player by raid index, not name. So if the given player's position in the raid group changes, the frame you pulled would hold another player.

Something that would serve your needs would be an addon with oRA3 custom MT support. http://www.wowace.com/addons/wtf/ is one of them but not supported any more and probably broken.