W.I.P.

* sorting out visuals
* creating animations
...

Looks very promising thus far!

Maybe a dumb question, but are you going to have it so the names are abbreviated?

looks nice ingame :D
bit of feedback (mostly taste or matter of preferance though I guess):
-I feel its a bit too big, especially when its in the middle of the screen.
-Either always show the "Lv:" prefix or don't show it at all, but just from the looks of it there should be enough room there untill the level rises into the 3 digit territory
-I know its just a demo sofar but i think the target frame should be mirrored on the vertical axis, though I don't think they ever really showed target unitframes in the anime (all they ever showed was player and party frames and a rounded frame at other units, probably comparable to WoW's nameplates) so it'll ultimatly be up to the developers...

looking forward to more :)

abbrieviating names might be a good idea and probably should go on the todo list for when the basic unitframe functions are realised

They will be abbreviated but I hate it when there are names with ... at the end. WoW allows max. 12 letters for players and you can't take the 3 same letters consecutively so longest name woud be "Mwmwmwmwmwmw" so I thought about making the space for the name the unitframe in this length.
I'm still not very happy with it since it will look odd if your name is realy short or realy long.
Also tryed to use rounded combopoints (Just have made the 4x Combopints yet to test them out).
This is the new one

and this was the old one


What combopoints do you like better?

You can get names longer than that by abusing Æ and æ.

Nope its still 12 letters and you cant use 3x æ in a row

I was unaware that you meant character length; I thought you meant (as it is most relevant to allocating space) the actual width of the string (in pixels). I don't know what font you are using, but fonts that don't allocate the same space for each character will produce a wider stringer by using double characters.

hmmm i think you are 'wasting' quite a bit of space beneath the manabar there, would it be possible to have the combopoints in that area and attach the party frames (assuming there will be some ;)) right beneath the playerframe as they showed it in the series.
I agree with what you said about too short or too long names that might be look odd, especially since for a targetframe the name area would have to accomodate even longer names
something for when the basic functionality is done would be to have the alternative power bar (I assume thats what the pink bar is) have the same margin on its left as it has on top, should look better then more symetrically

Will its not a super small unitframe anyway there are many UF that have minimal use of space so I don't see any reason to make this happen with an art unitframe like this one is.

I think names in 2 lines woud look bad too.

Well thats impossible since you can only margin the left OR the right side of the unitframe.
Also we are trying to stay as close to the Original SaO unitframes as possible.
Can anyone post a pic of the original group frames in SaO?

here you go, not sure if they ever showed a partyframe with more than 2 players but i'll go through the first half of the series just to check, its reasonably fun to watch anyways
was hoping to find something with more than just kirito and one more but I don't think there are any anyway attached another example for low health...
additionally there is a few short scenes where there is a yellow or red blinking around the black border of the unit frame, I think they used that to highlight a debuff as the color was the same as the debuff icon shown next to the unitframe (not that that is practical for WoW considering the amount of debuffs some boss fights grace us with)
I think the + in the second image denotes the partyleader, though i have no idea why it wasn't there in the earlier episode which I took the first 2 examples from

Thanks for the Partyframes pics. We'll look into them as soon as the normal frames are done.

We decieded that putting the name on the top is the best solution. Its not looking exactly like the original any more anyway ;)



Top: Name / Alt power bar
Center: Mana and HP are now separated and have a gardient. It was looking odd if your HP or mana was low so I separated them.
Bottom: Going to use a combination of the rounded/oblique combopoints.
Left side: Role icons will be attached here
Bottom right: I think about adding indicators for Lootmaster/Raidleader/Raid icons (Color of them only)

Still looks amazing! Can't wait till it's ready ;D

That does indeed look quite nice :) and is I think a better use of the room available.
At least for me it was fairly obvious that making a 1 to 1 translation of the SAO unitframes wasn't really a possibility considering all the differences.
but so far you made a very nice and clean looking unitframe inspired by SAO

Role icons
 

DD icon (I love it!)



Healer icon (ok what else did you expect :D)



Tank icon (Brrr this one was hard!)



Group frames will be next!

What do you think?

I quite like it! Interested in what you come up for group/raid if you wanna take it that far.

Healer icon could be an outline of a heart with maybe a blood droplet in the upper left/right quadrant if it will fit (I'm no artist). Once the heart stops you're dead.

I you want to distinguish it more from the tank icon, the shield could have a couple of V lines down the face of it.

I actually love the healer icon, fits the style of the unitframe perfectly imho

I think I'll have to agree on that, while what you are suggesting might look nice Fizzlemizz, the + sign fits better with the simplicity and the look of the unitframes.
The icons do look very nice Tonyleila, looking forward to what you do with the partyframes.

Screenshots
 

I have looked a bit into Sword Art Online anime again and collected some screenshots. There is even one with debuff and a full zoom of the unitframes. Also some of nameplates and menus.

http://i.imgur.com/WMZ3uWe.jpg

Yay editing of 8,000+ icons! That is of course you want to auras to legitimately match.