Borderlands Themed User Interface
 

Well, after a long break (Haha, one week) From World of Warcraft, I began playing the game 'Borderlands'. I noticed key things that could be used in World of Warcraft that could be used as a User Interface, such as the party frames. Now obviously, this requires a lot of work, so I'm presenting this to the community as more of a concept rather than a request, and seeing if anyone would pick it up.
Honestly, if you think about it, Borderlands is up there with one of the most popular games (at least for the Xbox 360). This User Interface would be well received by the community if made accurate.

Here's a few screenshots of the interface:



If anyone has any feedback or ideas, I'll update the OP as I get more ideas :D

That's possible with STUF or oUF. You would just need to make the statusbar textures.

Understood, i'm just not that great at LUA coding. Just enough to fix little kinks in my User Interfaces ><

There is no coding involved when you are setting up the Unitframes in STUF :) By the way lua is not an acronym.

The most difficult part is creating/extracting the textures (frames/fonts/etc) needed. Once the textures are in a WoW friendly format/dimensions (either Blizzard's .blp or .tga with an alpha channel, in a dimension that is any combo of powers of 2 such as 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512).

Then using existing mods such as Stuf or oUF (for the Unit Frames) and kgPanels (for other attaching to other frames) you can build your Borderlands themed UI. If you use Stuf you do not need any knowledge of Lua.

As the previous poster mentioned it's Lua not LUA. It's a word that is Brazilian in origin from the Portuguese word for "moon". It's not an acronym (like what NASA or the military loves to use).

Force of habit to capitalize LUA D:
I guess i'll give it a shot.

Bah, I need a place to start from.
Can't script a full LUA file on my own.

Pardon the double post.

I need help with making the textures.
I don't think it's possible in Photoshop, as I opened up a file of a texture and it wasn't what I figured it would look like, but perhaps I'm wrong. If anyone could make these textures, i'd appreciate it, as its one of the final steps in my designing process of this addon. I'm almost done :D

The textures I need are:
Class Frames
Health Bars
Mana Bars
Experience Bars

Class Frames-
These corespond with the top left corner of the screen shot with the car. You see the three different unit frames and how the squares next to those are.

Health Bars-
Bottom left corner health bar, and the health bars for each person in the party (though I think these are all the same so its no big deal.)

Mana bars-
Bottom right corner, where the ammunition is.

Experience Bar-
Bottom middle, that also needs to be copied

Thanks to anyone who decides to pick this up.

Should be very easy. But I can tell you this is very specific. Like that Fallout 3 theme available in oUF. Far to many people prefer "classic styled" frames over ones like that. Which makes it kinda unattractive to recreate such a look for WoW. :rolleyes:

OK, I have no idea how Borderline's files are formatted or what image formats are used, however you may want to see if you can crack the game files open and extract the image files. Otherwise someone will have build the textures from scratch based on your (and other) screenshots.

Where's the target? Where do you want to put it? Player bottom left and target bottom right? :rolleyes:

The target wouldn't have a stationary target bar, but instead would be much like Borderlands where it simply hovers over the enemy's head.

And I'm very poor at building textures :(
Or cracking games for that matter.

I don't think that will properly work with wow. Nameplates have a very short range. And I doubt that getting a targets position via lua and thus showing something over it's head is possible. Guess you need to find a place for the targets bar and auras. WoW is a little more complex. :rolleyes:

Think the mana bar should go where the shield bar is.. rather than the ammo. Then the ammo could be the target or something.

/ponders

this seems like it would be a really good community based project :D I'm just waiting to see if anyone wants to pick up the textures, then i'm going to do the rest.

You would need to create a target frame, however the "target bar" over the enemy's head can be done with a Nameplate mod like TidyPlates or Aloft (in fact this "bar" is an excellent candidate for TidyPlates). With the Nameplates changes in 3.3 (Nameplates can be seen further away, aka max targeting distance) this would be a good idea. Combine the completed plates with another mod (no work need for this combo once the TidyPlate/Aloft setup is complete) called _VirtualPlates (scales Nameplate size based on distance from you), you can fairly closely duplicate the "Target Bar" set up from Borderlands. Again the devil is getting the textures.

Agreed. I plan to have a friend send me over some of the game files to pop open, maybe that'll work. If not, i dread building them from scratch.

This whole idea sounds interesting.

I do a bit of illustrating and stuff on my spare time. If you end up having no luck obtaining the textures from the game itself, I could probably create some fairly decent quality replicates if you just tell me exactly what you want and how you want it.

Sounds good. I'll see about getting them today, i want this UI done before the end of november. ><

This sounds fun for me to do. Sure, it wouldn't be with Lua or anything cause I suck coding wise, but I will get back to you regarding this :)

Great, sounds like a deal.
If anyone wishes to contact me outside of WowInterface, in regaurds to this project, my email adress is [email protected]

I appreciate any contributions.
(And i'm also devoting all my time to learning enough Lua to code this myself ><)

The unit frames would be the easiest to code I think. Since there is no minimap, and only a compass, it would take some artistically minded work to get a theme that would match Borderlands.

I'd think that coding the whole thing from scratch would be the easiest thing to do, as you would most likely have to include another addon which does warping and addex textures to the generic customizable unit frame addons anyway. I like this idea though, sounds like a challenge.

Exactly my thoughts. I just need the textures. ><

My offer about the textures still stands open. Just tell me what you want and how you want it (the more details the better), and I can see about supplying you with it.

Well just look at the screenshots and do your best to mimic the textures. I'm not that picky, and i'll modify them if theres anything I see that could be tweaked.
By the way, what program do you use?

I work in Adobe Photoshop CS4, as well as a couple of other programs.

EDIT: Also, I'll be saving all the textures as TGA files; full opacity black and white with an alpha channel, so you can hopefully use them as easily as possible in whatever ways you want.


EDIT 2: Say, do you want the health/mana frames or whatnot tilted slightly upwards like they appear in the screenshots, or do you just want them straight and flat?

I think we should straighten them out, just so it looks a little neater. It shouldn't take away too much from the UI experience that much, if any.

As for the compass, I wonder how i'd work that in... The mini map will be worked in to match the borderlands theme, as well as any buttons and whatnot I may have to include.

This is turning out great guys. Thanks for all the good ideas and keep them coming! :D

As for the class pictures, I'm just going to black and white the default class pictures and make em look borderlands-ish in photoshop.

I'm going to bump/double post for the sole importance of the next request. If anyone at all has a great eye for font types, I could use someone to tell me which font is featured in the Borderlands UI. Thankya :D

I would stick to the theme and don't change that much... Especially not straight bars And especially not because it's "easier" to reproduce - which it is not, it makes no difference, it just looks wrong. :p

After all that's what makes this interface so nice and interesting, isn't it? This could be done fast and easy with oUF, but I still doubt more than a few people are interested in this... :rolleyes:

Well, I've finished the textures (which honestly weren't many or hard to do), so you can expect them in the e-mail account you posted soon enough. Provided both regular straight versions and 2% rotated versions just in case, so you can pretty much just pick what you prefer to use.

Thank you very much. Ill open em sunday night when I'm at my house, at this time i'm not home.

If you end up preferring to use the angled textures in the UI, but find the provided textures a bit choppy, don't hesitate to say so. Just gave them a quick tilt for the sake of providing them, and the process isn't completely lossless, but it shouldn't take that much time to just redraw them with an ideally smoother lining.

that and i'm not completley incompitent with Photoshop. I just dont know how to make textures >_< This is good motivation to figure it out. If you wish to redraw them, feel free, it takes off of my workload, but if your pressed with other things, don't worry about it, i'll get to it.

Well, now I just need another coder.
They must be competent and understanding. They have to have an in depth knowledge of the Lua and XML codings, as well as the API. If anyone is interested, please email me at [email protected]
Thank you very much.

Look into Tidy Plates, you can create your own custom textures and make your own nameplates.

Even better, you can look at my lightweight core code of ncNameplates. It shows a class icon over people's head and it is easily modifiable to remove that part and use the texture you want. I am willing to edit my addon for this UI, pm me if you are interested.

Nice to see we've caught the eyes of some addon authors. I'll see about both of these namplates, but to be honest, its not on of my big concerns right now, as it's not graphically key to this UI until we have the basic user interface se up first.

Do you have any "beta" screenshots already? :rolleyes:

Right now I've ran into some issues with the unit frames and am currently trying to work this out. I don't think beta-shots will be out for awhile.

UPDATE!



Unit Bars are almost finished.

Oh nice! That looks good :)

lookin good mang

Just curious, how did you manage to put the health bars at an angle? I've been searching around and haven't been able to find anything about it.

Its an illusion. It is just the textures that is slanted, not the actual unit frame.

Looks great!

So basicly you could be clicking next to the unit frame and still target that unit?

Yup. I don't think there is any way around that.

AFAIK, a frame is always square, no matter if it contains a round or whatever "non square shaped" texture. It's not a problem, however. :rolleyes:

exactly :P My unit frames on novel ui are different looking but the reality its just a big square

Ah, thank you for clearing that up :D

As for the compass, perhaps the HUD feature from Sexymap could be used to get the borderlands look? If you don't already know of a way.

I'm not a mod author (yet) but I spend 30 minutes most days scouring the addons for new niftiness. so for I have a few ideas.

The font in borderlands I believe is Bazooka, I'll check to make sure in sec.

Also for the compass, there is/was a flight hud mod that had placed a green compass hud over your view, it was huge at default but could be scaled. So I know it was possible, Maybe TomTom can be configured to be a compass rather than a huge green arrow...
*EDIT* yup its over on Curse- FlightHUD green compass with degrees and all that..

You know what would be nifty is a skin for the Talented mod that replicates borderlands skill interface. And I know you can emulate the backpack manager with some of the bag mods out there... hmm now I have a task.

I suppose if I'm gonna reskin the bag interface I should do the same for vendors and quest interface.

As for the minimap I think if you just retooled the Loc bar, made the map a paralellagram and changed the alpha that would fit the borderlands style.

I wonder if there is a way to reskin the buttons on the chat bar, prolly. And for combat damage you can use Mik's scrolling battle text. there may be a way to have the damage pop from the target thats taking it.

After all the UI elements I think to make it complete you would need some sound effects.

I love borderlands and to have a UI for wow that emulates it would be nice.

oh, thats awesome. The title song just started playing...
There ain't no rest for the Wicked...

i hate to double post.. but What unit frame did you use Sylvir? I tried to change the frames in StUF and have yet to come close to that. Maybe I should go learn some Lua.
I have Skinner addon installed and am trying to get the rest of the UI to emulate the borderlands menus, Its sorta close. The colors are not quite there, the textures are off a bit and the frames don't quite look the way I would like. If anyone can give me a good place to reference UI elements Lua and texture editing that would be awesome.

I would assume oUF. Pretty easy to learn if you take a look at some of the more simple layouts (my layout doesn't count for simplicity, but p3lim and haste both have excellent bases to work from in oUF_p3lim and oUF_Lily respectively).

I could probably lend some assistance Lua-wise for anything y'all need for this project. Toss me a PM, I don't check the forums often.

I really hope this thread isn't dead!!! This is such an amazing idea, I'd love to see this done!

I have some idea's on some aspects of this, as well as maybe some information that might be useful.

Font is Impact with a bit of shading behind it. Also maybe for the shield above the health in the game could be used to show if you have Power word: Shield up, Anti-Magic Shell, Ice Barrier etc. where it slowly depletes as the timer goes down. The ammo bar would be used for mana, rage etc. and the bar above it could be used as a cast bar possibly?

For party frames keep the setup already used (mana blue, health red obviously). Maybe thicken them a bit for healers who use the Clique add-on.

Now it will probably be WAY to difficult to make the bearing module and at Level Cap (with cat coming out you could add it below) the xp bar being almost useless, make it the targets frame. I know it kind of takes away from the borderlands feeling but i think its a worthy compromise.

As for the mini-map I don't know if there's anyways to give it that kind of feeling (where the unreachable areas are blue) but there may be some kind of converting you can do where you may be able to go through the map and shade it yourself (I know VERY time consuming).

I really hope these are fresh ideas, and that this project is still going on!
Good Luck!!!
-Drespar

Hey, nice start on the status bars! Really, good work and a very nice idea in the first place , I will be watching this thread.

Borderland's UI is pretty awesome, but I am worried about how well it can translate into the context of an MMORPG. The minimap issue would, of course, need to be fixed and I'd say just use a standard minimap, skinned to match the Borderlands theme and placed in a convenient part of the screen (i.e. top-right, I don't think Borderland uses this part of the screen for anything). There would also have to be many more features added, because an MMORPG's UI must give a lot more information - and much more precisely - than that of a game such as Borderlands.

However, luckily for you, Borderlands is very much influenced by RPGs like Diablo, so the foundations are pretty much there.

Was playing Borderlands and remembered someone was making this and then boredom struck... :p

Too bad both were at full health/mana
IMMA CHARGING MA LAZOR?!

Edit2: 2nd image just for the "funnies".
Edit3: 3rd image for lack of seriousness.
Edit4: 4th image is "srs bsns".

Looks fantastic!

Ignore the red and blue. Just colored the two slices to see that they handled properly :)

Attachment 4760 <-- click for larger

Edit1: Simple small map test.

Attachment 4761

this was posted in the screenshot of your UI thread figured id bring it to the party.

Experience bar now doubles as Rep bar whenever I track one

Attachment 4774

Screen of nameplates below

Attachment 4773

You probably thought this was dead by now. Well I don't blame ya. I don't have much spare time at the moment.

I was thinking of making some buff icons/bars examples but I think the way Borderlands show active buffs is just plain boring but it's understandable, they only last for roughly 12 seconds max. They just show up, blink or glow (can't remember which) when they're about to wear off and then disappear.. Hell, that's no fun!

So I was looking at the next best thing. Skill cooldowns. The skill cooldown in Borderlands works this way. When you can use the skill it's fully visible. When it's on cooldown the complete icon goes transparent while it fills up from the bottom to the top with a darker color until it becomes usable and turns white again.

This is what I was tinkering with (yes this is a screenshot but it actually does work ingame ;)