Usability suggestions

SergOK · 01-12-10, 09:16 AM

First let me say this is an awesome addon that approaches the problem in a very systematic and thoughtful way. I really like it.

Now a few things I've noticed which I think need improvement:

1. Range

The precision is insufficient. I get "0-10", "10-30", etc. readings which are useless for a melee class, especially for a rogue. Please fix so that the readings are "0-5", "5-10", "10-15", '15-20", "20-25", "25-30", and from this point on as you feel like, with 10 or 20 yard steps.

2. HUD percentage text

Please consider an option for switching display of health and power percentage indicators off. There are maximum 8 percentage indicators, which is a lot of numbers being displayed on the screen. For many classes they are quite useless as they don't really need to know exact percentage of relative health or power, having the awesome bars to judge about relative health and power is quite enough. Providing option of switching off percentage indicators is a small change with a big benefit.

3. Text positions

nUI is lacking in the customization of text position. What I would love to have is Range and current Power (Energy/Mana/Runic) display right next to my character because these are crucial pieces of information for my rogue. Right now I use IceHud that allows positioning text on the screen. Would be great to have the ability in nUI to move HUD text around.

4. This seems like a bug - player buff icons (both with Aura button addon and without) seem to be overlaid with some green stuff so that the icons look greenish.

Xrystal · 01-12-10, 09:31 AM

Originally Posted by SergOK

First let me say this is an awesome addon that approaches the problem in a very systematic and thoughtful way. I really like it.

Now a few things I've noticed which I think need improvement:

1. Range

The precision is insufficient. I get "0-10", "10-30", etc. readings which are useless for a melee class, especially for a rogue. Please fix so that the readings are "0-5", "5-10", "10-15", '15-20", "20-25", "25-30", and from this point on as you feel like, with 10 or 20 yard steps.

Unfortunately range is based on testing for ability range access so we are limited with what ranges they have to test for.

2. HUD percentage text

Please consider an option for switching display of health and power percentage indicators off. There are maximum 8 percentage indicators, which is a lot of numbers being displayed on the screen. For many classes they are quite useless as they don't really need to know exact percentage of relative health or power, having the awesome bars to judge about relative health and power is quite enough. Providing option of switching off percentage indicators is a small change with a big benefit.

I am quite sure if you take a look at the Layout folder you will see a set of layout files for your specific HUD and several enable flags that can be turned off as per your choice. Try them out and see if that resolves this issue for you.

3. Text positions

nUI is lacking in the customization of text position. What I would love to have is Range and current Power (Energy/Mana/Runic) display right next to my character because these are crucial pieces of information for my rogue. Right now I use IceHud that allows positioning text on the screen. Would be great to have the ability in nUI to move HUD text around.

See above as location anchors of several movable parts of the layout can be tweaked as well.

4. This seems like a bug - player buff icons (both with Aura button addon and without) seem to be overlaid with some green stuff so that the icons look greenish.

I think the coloring is based on who cast that buff. I could be wrong though, but I am sure I read that somewhere here.

That said, nUI 6 is being designed with more flexibility in mind as I am sure that Scott didn't realise the amount of changes that people would request would vary so much at the time he created nUI 5.

spiel2001 · 01-12-10, 11:07 AM

Just to elaborate a bit on Xrystal's very accurate replies...

The range calculate is the "best" is possibly can be. Blizzard very purposely does not allow addons to determine exact range to target, or even party members (though it's easier to infer distance to party members).

The only way to determine range to a target (or another player) is to determine which spells you can apply to the target and of the spells you can apply, which ones are "in range" -- based on that, you can use the min and max range for each of those in-range spells to infer the target is somewhere between two values. It simply is not possible to be any more accurate than that and Blizzard will go a *long* way out of its way to make sure it stays that way.

HUD percentage text is easily turned off as Xrystal already pointed out. Also, there's a plugin you can grab from the "nUI: HUD Designs" section at http://files.nUIaddon.com that you can use to remove all text from the HUD.

neuralassassin · 01-12-10, 02:48 PM

Another thing to point out as your a new user and this slips by quite a few people is that the hud has three different settings:
-Player/Target- which is the default

-Health/Power- Which puts your own and your targets health on the left and your own and their mana on the right

-Simple Hud- Which removes and the health and the power bars leaving a health race bar(there is a description of what that is in the faq section) the cooldown bar and the debuffs.

As xrystal said all three of those hud are edited pretty easily from the lua files. And all or most of it will be configurable from ingame gui once scott finishes 6.0

SergOK · 01-12-10, 03:55 PM

Thanks for the replies. I have actually read entire documentation and experimented with nUI in game, I feel quite comfortable with the different modes / configuration and understand them well.

I've switched off percentage text display in the lua files by disabling "pct_health" and "pct_power" elements. I've actually created my own HUD plugin by copying some original files (I looked up how nUI: Textless HUD was done) and made modifications in my plugin so that I don't change original nUI code. I made some other modifications in my plugin too, they work fine so I've managed to solve my "text problems.

Regarding range - I understand your comments but I've been using IceHud addon for quite long time for this specific purpose and it works fine, it determines range with 5 yard precision up to 40 - 50 yards, so there probably is some way.

One thing that annoys me right now is the strange way the HUD bars update - they don't update smoothly but rather in some "jerks". It's like the bar updates once in a sec or two. I've tried /nui framerate command but it does not change it (it changes icon update rate though). It's also not other addons problem because that was from the very beginning with the clean install. I've watched the movie in the gallery section and the bars seem to update fine in the movie. Is this some kind of bug in the latest nUI_5.06.07_Plus.zip?

Brillynt · 01-12-10, 04:27 PM

Looks like ice hud is using LibRangeCheck to determine ranges.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-a...check-2-0.aspx

Ahh something new for you to look at Scott.

Brillynt

spiel2001 · 01-12-10, 06:27 PM

I'll look at it for nUI6... not going to invest time backing it into nUI5.

I'm curious to see how they're doing it. It would be interesting to see how they're getting around Bliz's limitations.

SergOK · 01-13-10, 05:13 AM

Would it be possible to do such a thing:

1. The player selects "Add New Text Field"

2. The player is able to type any text in the field including some predefined placeholders which could be the following:
Player_Max_Health
Player_Max_Power
Player_Cur_Health
Player_Cur_Power
Player_Pct_Health
Player_Pct_Power
Target_Max_Health
Target_Max_Power
Target_Cur_Health
Target_Cur_Power
Target_Pct_Health
Target_Pct_Power
Pet_Max_Health
Pet_Max_Power
Pet_Cur_Health
Pet_Cur_Power
Pet_Pct_Health
Pet_Pct_Power
ToT_Max_Health
ToT_Max_Power
ToT_Cur_Health
ToT_Cur_Power
ToT_Pct_Health
ToT_Pct_Power
Range_to_Target
Player_Name
Target_Name
Target_Level
Target_Race
Target_Class
Target_Spec
Pet_Name
ToT_Name
etc.

3. The player is able to specify color formatting. For example if I type "[Target_Level:HostileColor] [Target_Name:ClassColor] [Target_Spec]" then in this text field I wanna get the target level colored green or red followed by target's name colored according to its class followed by target spec colored in the default color. You could look up TargetInfo bar in IceHud addon to see what lib they use for string parsing, it's DogTag or something.

4. The player specifies font family, color, size and text adjustment for the text field.

5. A bar representing the new text field appears on the screen which the player is able to drag and position anywhere.

I don't know if you already got something like that in mind but if that's possible and won't affect UI performance then together with the already present features that would be a kickass and attract lots of people.

The HUD layouts could initially be provided text less or with predefined text fields which the player could then modify / move / delete.

spiel2001 · 01-13-10, 05:48 AM

You can already modify the HUD to your heart's content. You just can't do it in game via an interface. As it is now, you can open the HUD file in any text editor, even while logged into WoW, make the changes you want and save. Then just do '/nui rl' to see the result.

nUI6 will provide a GUI interface for this.

Providing the HUD with no text as the default will never happen as the vast majority of users want the text. In addition, the vast majority of users would never consider modifying the UI themselves. I have to pick the default values that are most commonly desired and then allow the people who want something else the ability to achieve it. That's what I've tried to accomplish in nUI5 and will improve upon in nUI6

SergOK · 01-13-10, 06:28 AM

Originally Posted by spiel2001

nUI6 will provide a GUI interface for this.

All right, that is great and will come in handy. I'm already quite satisfied and again gotta say you are doing a great job!

I just tried to suggest my way of GUI interface for handling HUD text. Since you already invest your time in providing a GUI interface you might want to invest it in providing a completely customizable HUD text tool without limitations that will be in the core of nUI and that you and HUD layout designers will use as well as some users. If that's feasible and integrates well with other parts, of course (which I don't know).

All right, now a small suggestion: include Target level somewhere please, maybe in Target Name or Target Spec. I found HUD Target Level plugin but I could not position the level indicator where I wanted to, will try a bit later again. Then again, if nUI6 has GUI interface for moving text then that will probably be solved automatically.

spiel2001 · 01-13-10, 07:25 AM

The target level is already included in the target unit frame. In addition, there is a plugin available to add the target level to the HUD which you will find in the "nUI: HUD Designs" section at http://files.nUIaddon.com

As for the issue of customizing the HUD, you will be able to entirely customize every aspect of the HUD via the GUI interface. In fact, you'll be able to customize every aspect of the nUI layout via the GUI interface.

nUI is already primarily a layout engine. It just happens to be using the data files in the [ nUI > Layouts ] directory to accomplish the task. You can alter virtually every aspect of nUI's presentation by simply altering the appropriate layout file. The difference is that nUI6 (Plus) will provide a complete set of GUI tools for doing that rather than requiring you to hand edit text files. You can see some eye candy demonstrating some of that functionalily for nUI6 (Plus) here: http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...&postcount=167

mitch0 · 08-24-10, 03:15 AM

Originally Posted by spiel2001

I'll look at it for nUI6... not going to invest time backing it into nUI5.

I'm curious to see how they're doing it. It would be interesting to see how they're getting around Bliz's limitations.

First of all, sorry to necro this thread

Anyway, "we" are not getting around Bliz limitations, LibRangeCheck is using spell ranges _and_ item ranges, that's why it can provide finer grained range estimates for all classes (it is using some default checks, like follow distance and the like for "strange" units where the above don't work). The lib is under public domain license, so feel free to include it into nUI if you wish. (I get some reward points if folks get it from curse.com, but I think it wouldn't be feasible to get it included in nUI in a way that would grab the lib from there, so *shrug*...)

cheers,
mitch

spiel2001 · 08-24-10, 03:54 AM

I didn't mean "getting around" in any derogatory way. ~smile~ Turn of phrase only. nUI is using the same approach, actually, so I suspect the issue at hand is just a bug in the code somewhere.