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12-27-13, 04:52 AM   #13
bonytony
A Fallenroot Satyr
 
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Join Date: Dec 2013
Posts: 22
Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
Clearly you never raided with me... or maybe you were that guy who really liked when I yelled at the raid.

Anyway, my overall impression is that you are paying too much attention to "what looks cool when I sit here and stare at it from real close" instead of "what will work well in actual gameplay when spells are flying and things are moving all over the screen and I'm trying to watch out for void zones while also keeping an eye on all my procs and cooldowns and listening to the raid leader's instructions". Here are some specific problems I see:

(1) Tiny pixel font. If your target audience is strictly "people with perfect vision" and/or "people playing on huge monitors with low resolutions", go for it. However, that text is literally unreadable to me at a normal viewing distance. It's much too small, for one, and pixel fonts are really horrible for readability. I saw someone playing DotA 2 today, and had to stop and remark on the fact that the game's UI designer(s) actually used a readable font at a readable size. I understand that some people (including you, apparently) like the "pixel font" look, but it's really really hard to read, especially at a glance, and for people with less-than-perfect vision. There are a huge variety of readable fonts. I'm sure you could find one you liked if you looked around.

(2) Too many bars in one place, with not enough separation between them. Are those XP and rep bars right next to the rune bars? Why are some of the rune bars aligned with the player frame, but some with the target frame? Why do the rune bars fill sideways (compared to their shape)? The whole "bar block" looks weird, and I think it would be very easy to get confused about which bar is which in the middle of combat unless you're actively staring at it.

(3) Too many action buttons. Are you clicking? Stop that right now. If you're keybinding, there's no reason to have that many buttons shown at once. You're obviously not using them to remind you what's bound to what, since there are no visible keybind labels. Pull those long cooldowns and situational utilities off your bars. Bind them directly to keys or stick them in OPie.

Combine some of those other things using modifier keys -- one button can cast up to 4 different spells with single modifiers (X, Alt-X, Ctrl-X, Shift-X) or up to 7 if you're willing to combine modifiers (Alt-Ctrl-X, Alt-Shift-X, Ctrl-Shift-X). I'm not super familiar with death knight abilities, but if you have two abilities that both use blood runes, for example, you're probably casting one or the other, not both, so you can combine them. Or, if you have two related abilities, one with a cooldown and one without, you can combine them.

(4) Minimap and damage meter are too prominent. The unit frames would be less "buried" if you moved these things -- which are generally not important to see in combat -- off to the side. Put them on the right to balance the chat frame on the left. Hide the damge meter in combat; you'll be a better player and more valuable to your raid if you're focused on playing your character correctly and performing your raid duties correctly instead of focused on padding your bar on the meter. The minimap is generally not terribly useful in PVE combat either; set it to hide or fade to a lower opacity, with a temporary fade-in if someone pings.

(5) Do you really need to see anything on your Broker bar all the time? Set that thing to show only on mouseover. The less "interesting but basically useless" stuff you have taking up space, the easier it will be to see the things that actually matter.

(6) Randomly placed objectives tracker is randomly placed.
1. Good point, I tried to stick with a more RealUI-ish font because I love pixel font, even have most of my desktop on my pc changed over to pixel font. I could look around for an alternative font, but im picky haha.

2. The rune bars are actually just spaced evenly and line up with the player/target frames that way on purpose. The bars beside them are disease trackers. Ive actually had a bar block like this for almost all of my UIs I guess im just personally used to it. Ill play around with some alternative layouts for it and see if i can come up with something less confusing I guess. they disappear OOC so its less cluttered normally

3. No Im not clicking haha, its mostly to watch CDs. Had three bars personally for a long time and its been just enough because I utilize every button on my naga as well. But 2 bars may be better since a lot of people prolly dont use a mouse like that. Ill try that out because it can downsize the hub a bit.

4. Yeah this is definitely where my looks over function side comes in, like you said earlier. The only reason i started on this project at all was to make a UI similar to SnailUI. The central hub thing seemed cool to me. Ill experiment with faders to try and get to a happy median. And as a note I only ever keep my damage meter up to make sure im on top of my damage while doing what I need to do. I dont neglect any raid duties even if it means dps loss, but I like to push my damage while being active to improve my overall game.

5. personal preference , ill get on fading it though

6. Agreed, havent tried moving it yet though
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