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WoW Interface Design for Beginners
来自 Piratepoots
[Last Updated]:
2018/04/10
变更日志
补丁:7.3.5
目录
评分:
Introduction
It has been 13 years since World of Warcraft’s release. 13 years is a long time and the game is still attracting new players. New and returning players may be looking to the internet for advice and there is a plethora of advice on how to play your character, but designing a
useful
interface is usually the last thing a player learns. It is easy to just slap together some AddOns and call it a day, but what factors should go into choosing your AddOns so that your interface will work for you?
"What makes you qualified to give this advice," some may be asking. Simply put, I have been playing WoW since Vanilla and I was introduced to AddOns through a very helpful individual. Unfortunately, being so new to it, I developed a lot of bad habits in designing my UI, some of which I struggle with today and find myself going back and correcting. At the end of the day, I know that everyone will have their own design philosophy and ideas for what works for them, but I am hoping that in writing this, I can pay forward the advice I was given when I first started.
If you find this guide helpful (or not), please let me know! Give me a rating and let me know in the comments where I can improve!
Memory Consumption
First of all, you need to determine what your primary focus will be in the game. Will it be PvP, PvE or just throwing on your finest transmog and RPing in Goldshire? Thinking about things like this can help you determine what AddOns are for you. Believe it or not, a game that has been out for 13 years can still bog down a somewhat average computer after all of the updates in graphics it has received.
Despite your choice of focus in-game, you still have the option of disabling AddOns in-game if you need to free up some memory to get an FPS boost or to load up a different set of AddOns, so strictly focusing on your primary interest isn’t as important as it once may have been.
So, how can you make the best use of your memory while still packing a ton of functionality into your interface? The answer actually comes in the form of Suites. There are many out there, but the best ones tend to be entire re-writes of the default UI. Addons like TukUI or ElvUI are some of the best for a fully functional interface without a whole lot of configuration and very minimal system resource requirements. There are other suites available as well, with some even being essentially a pack of stripped down AddOns that are freely available, but make sure to do your research before settling if memory consumption is a major factor for you!
A Custom UI
So, memory consumption isn’t an issue for you and you want to customize the entire UI? This is where having an idea of what you want comes in handy because it is very easy to throw a bunch of AddOns in your Interface/Addons folder and have trouble configuring it and organizing things in a way that isn’t cluttered. Your goal to getting a leg up on your competition, be it PvP or PvE, is to give yourself an informative, yet clean play-space. I’ll go over some AddOns later, but let’s focus on the fundamentals. This section will be pretty lengthy however, so feel free to skip if you don’t care.
Some players like to draw out a sketch of the interface as they would like it to appear, to give them a rough idea of how they need to lay everything out. This is actually a pretty helpful step in almost every facet of design, but if you don’t feel like this is something you want to do, it isn’t something that will make or break your custom UI.
Typically, the best design practice is to give you as much view of what is in front, behind and around your character. Depending on how far away you have your camera zoomed out while playing, you can determine what is necessary. I personally like to play close up unless I am in a Raid or Battleground environment. Additionally, I play on a 27 inch monitor, so this tells me that I need to have most of my information below my character, not too far away so that I have to risk situational awareness, but just far enough away allow me to quickly glance at it.
So how would you lay this out? Well, that is a matter of opinion, but my interface looks a bit like the picture to the right. I like to keep my Unit Frames (the health bars) just a little below my character so that I can keep an eye on my health and mana (or energy, runic power, etc.) as well as how much health my target has and the time left on the debuffs (or buffs) I have applied to my current target.
Just below that, you will see my action bars. As you see, my action bar setup isn’t like most. I play with a Razer Naga and a Corsair Scimitar, so I prefer to see my action bar buttons to be laid out much like the side buttons on my mouse. Since quick reactions are at times the matter of life or death in-game, I also space out the action bars and lower the scale of the secondary bars so that the differences will send a signal to my brain to let me know which button or combination I need to press to react.
Next to the action bars, I tend to place my chat, the damage meter and my Map. With everything nested neatly down below, this whole bottom half of my screen gives me all of the information I will ever need on a regular basis. Of course, that’s not to say that your quest log and party Unit Frames don’t need a home. Just like everything else, however, this is a matter of preference. You can shift them up the screen, down the screen, below the player’s health bar or even in the blank space between the action bars and the map. The top of the screen on my UI is reserved for information that I could find in other ways, such as how much gold I have, how much bag space I have, location info and other details that a Data Broker addon will let me know (again, more on those kinds of things later).
I find that layouts like this help tremendously in my performance, but after I initially started playing with this interface, I felt slightly handicapped. Unless I zoomed further out than I enjoy, I had some trouble with seeing what was behind me easily without constantly rotating my camera to keep an eye out. This was remedied with a viewport AddOn.
Viewport AddOns allow you to basically change the Field of View by applying a bar to the top and bottom of the screen, not too different from how a 16:9 movie would look on a 4:3 television screen, if you can remember the times of the VHS and “Widescreen edition” tapes. These bars effectively resize the “play space” of the game world, allowing you to see much more around your character to the sides, but will also shift the center of the viewport. This allowed me to have each of my Action Bars and other parts of my interface at the bottom and not hinder my view of what was going on behind my character.
Of course how you lay out your custom interface is up to you. Part of the fun of building a custom interface is the trial and error and finding what designs work for you. It isn’t uncommon for players to tweak their interface constantly while they are playing to fix little things they didn’t think to do before or to even start from scratch when they found a new AddOn they want to try out.
How do I install AddOns?
The manual way involves downloading a zip file that contains your addon and unzip it to your WoW’s Addon Directory. That directory typically appears as “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons\” but your install directory may vary.
The easy way is to use a program like the Twitch app or Minion to manage the AddOns for you. More details on that follows.
Where do I Download AddOns?
Firstly, be careful where you download anything on the internet. What may appear to be a trustworthy source can be the source of your next virus. With this warning out of the way, there are a few trustworthy sources for you to download from. This is not a master-list in any way and there are many more sites out there, but here some of the places that I currently trust.
CurseForge/Twitch:
https://www.curseforge.com
- Recently, Twitch acquired Curse, which was a very popular place to download AddOns for many games. The Curse download manager app has now been replaced with with the Twitch app, which is wonderful as it merges all of the functionality of the Twitch website with the Curse App and also adds chat rooms. It is a very safe option for downloading AddOns for any of your games and allows you to queue up updates and downloads all at once.
WoW Interface:
http://www.wowinterface.com/
- Another safe bet for downloading AddOns. They have their own AddOn manager called Minion as well. It has less functionality than the Twitch app, but if you’re looking for a no-frills solution, it works very well. Many of the AddOns you can find on here can be found on Curse, but there are a few that can only be downloaded here (and vice versa).
Tukui:
https://www.tukui.org
- You can download Tukui and ElvUI, as well any additional modules for it, here. In addition to this, they have also built a handy client that you can use to update the interface.
TradeSkillMaster:
https://www.tradeskillmaster.com/
- Mastering the economy in-game is important if you want to be able to make money and I trust this website. Here, you can download the addon as well as the client that runs in the background to keep up-to-date information for the prices on the Auction House. You will want to watch a few videos on YouTube to understand how to use this one, but once you get it configured, you will be able to make gold a little easier.
What AddOns do you Suggest?
I make my suggestion for AddOns strictly on a Custom UI basis. Tukui and ElvUI provide a very high level of customization as well and you could basically ignore most of this list if you went with those, but if you choose to not use those suites, here is what I suggest. I will avoid using links in the event something changes, but the majority of these can be found through the previously mentioned Curse or Wow Interface websites.
Bartender:
This is your basic Action Bar AddOn. It will replace the entire bottom portion of the UI, basically. Menu buttons, bags, experience bar, etc. You can also choose to hide any of those or add more Action Bars than you will probably know what to do with to your screen.
PitBul:
A complete Unit-Frame replacement. Highly customizable.
Deadly Boss Mods:
This is important if you plan on raiding. It will provide you with detailed timers and alerts to let you know what a Boss or a tough enemy is about to do. There are also modules you can install for Dungeons and previous expansions.
AdiBags:
Organizing your bags can be time consuming, so rather than sorting your bags, AdiBags will display your items based on what type of item it is and you can also configure how they are sorted manually. It isn’t without some of it’s bugs, but it is a highly usable and I highly suggest it.
Quartz:
This AddOn has some of the best cast bars that I have used. You can resize the bars and place them wherever you like on the screen. I personally appreciate this because I can keep an eye out for any casts that need to be interrupted much easier with it.
SexyMap:
A highly customizable mini-map addon which will allow you to change the shape, size and location of your mini-map. It also comes with a bunch of awesome looking presets to give your interface a little extra style.
Sunn Viewport Art:
This is my viewport addon of choice. In addition to resizing the viewport, you can add additional graphics to disguise the fact that you have a black border surrounding your screen.
TipTac:
With this, you can change how your ToolTips are anchored. You can place an anchor anywhere around the screen and you can also choose to anchor ToolTips to your mouse cursor. You can do both, if you choose.
Skada Damage Meter:
This is a pretty good damage meter and pretty easy on the system resources.
Recount:
This is another damage meter, but it has a whole host of extras such as pie charts and graphs for the folks who like to analyze the entire fight. It uses a little more resources than Skada does from my experience, but the differences are minimal on most machines.
Auctioneer:
A full suite can be found that will scan the auction house and keep track of average prices for items to help you sell and buy from the auction house effectively. It can be resource intensive due to the size of the database it stores on your machine.
TradeSkillMaster:
As mentioned previously, this AddOn will help you master the economy (with a little guidance). If you are looking to jump in and out with ease, this may not be the one for you, but if you are committed, you can earn a lot of gold with this AddOn.
Prat:
A chat replacement. Includes many modules and even allows you to choose where the edit box is located so that it doesn’t just show up at the bottom of the chat window by default.
HandyNotes:
If there is anything important to keep track of, this addon will help you do so. There are additional modules you can download that will help you track down treasures in the more recent expansions or even the location of spawns for herbalism and mining.
TomTom:
paired with HandyNotes, this addon puts a little arrow on your screen that will point you in which direction your chosen objective is from your current location.
WeakAuras 2:
When keeping informed, Weak Auras is wonderful. This AddOn will allow you to configure graphical and textual notifications based on different triggers such as how much Rage your Warrior has or when you get a certain proc, which may let you know that you need to use a particular spell. The default Blizzard UI has a very basic version of this, but if you find it hard to keep track of certain triggers, this may be your go-to. Additionally, WoWhead include WeakAuras scripts on their spells pages to help you set things up.
In Conclusion…
I hope this guide helps you get started. I know it is a lot of information to read through, but in an effort to be helpful without throwing you to the wolves, I felt it necessary to at least give you my view on the process. As mentioned, it is very important to make sure you make the most out of your UI if you aren’t going to use the default one. All it takes is a quick Google Image search of “Worst WoW UI” to see that there are some very interesting interface choices, so if this guide helped you in any way, even if it’s just to remember “the name of that one AddOn that I used that one time for that thing,” then I am happy to have helped.
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评论
评论来自
Fartacus
Great Post...Would you have some suggestions for Graphical interface set up...
Thxs again
Fartacus
评论来自
ZhaunRong
good information, thanks for spending it time.
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