Thursday, October 8, 2009

Some action shots of the new design




The first picture is my UI soloing on my Death Knight with a pet out. The layout should basically be familiar.

The second pic is my UI on my Death Knight in Ulduar in a vehicle. Check out how the layout of the buttons works on the main console area.

The third is my healing 10-man raid UI, with focus frame shown. (The one with the magnifying glass on it.)

Let me know what you think.

7 comments:

Trunks2560 said...

Hmmm,

I have to admit that it looks pretty slick. I"m still a little on the fence with the amount of space it takes up. It's probably just me, but it seems more obtrusive than the old UI. Probably just because I haven't played with it.

I like where you've put the vehicle buttons and the pet stuff. very nice.

Where did class timers go? Did you get rid of them? As a Resto druid, or just a druid in general, I've really enjoyed having those timers around.

I'm still not convinced that having the menu bar and bags bar on the bottom is worth it. It just seems to be tacked on. You're raising the profile of the main UI by that bar height just to put those items there and the entire middle isn't used. Honestly, I think those items were better in the top coner by the map. Most of the things can be activated by hotkey and an add-on like Bagfu can open all your stuff in one click so you never deal with individual bags much.

With all that said, it is very sleek. It looks amazing. Totally fits in with the Blizz art. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about this version. What is working and what is not? what are you shooting for and what does the last version of the UI lack.

Trunks2560 said...

The more I look at it, the more I think it might just be me in regards to the whole size of the UI. The more I compare the more I think it's very close to the old set up. It was just easier for the eye to pass along the old UI because there weren't so many shiney graphics.

This verision contiunes to grow on me. Very impressive.

Daedhir said...

The ClassTimers are now on the right. They attach to the combat frame similarly to where the pet action bar is on the other side.

At the moment, they conflict with the tooltip, which I'm still working on.

The bags and menu do add some space at the bottom. I'd actually like to have more information in that blank spot, like some of the FuBar addons at the top.. Things like currency, durability, etc. Right now I can't do this because the FuBar gets in the way. I have thought about making some artwork for the menu bar and bags to put up in e.g. the upper left-hand corner. I may mess with this at some point.

So far everything works, no major issues. I think the main thing that bugged me about the previous version was just the lack of consistency with the rest of the UI. Some UIs (like Caith's for instance) do a very good job of reinventing the way the UI should look. But Blizzard's art style is really quite fitting, and using it sort of makes the UI feel more like it fits with the game world. And when you open the bags, it doesn't make everything else look like it doesn't belong.

You're right about the "shiny graphics.." I find myself occasionally just staring at the UI. Partially to decide if something needs changing, and partially because I just like it. :)

ZifnabDR said...

Any idea when you might put this out there for us to try?

Im curious :-)

Daedhir said...

I'm still tweaking things. I ended up moving the bag and menu bars to the upper-left corner of the UI, which brings the profile of the central console area down to about where it was before.

I decided to roll a pally recently, though, and I'm finding that the class Dominos bar is getting larger than the area designed to hold it. Not sure what I'm going to do about that.

I'd really like to get this thing fully polished before I release it. I think the design is pretty much locked down at this point, but I'm still ironing out a couple of things.

ZifnabDR said...

No worries. We wow players are a patient lot.

Trunks2560 said...

Gotta ask how the new version of the UI is going. Seems like with patch 3.3 you could slim down the UI even more. Hope everything is going well.