On Friday I decided to rebuild my user interface.  The impetus for this was an issue I was having during Punch and Pie’s first 25 man raid.  My unit frames were acting up in a way that prevented me from seeing the names of the people in the raid.  This made being master looter very stressful.   Prior to Friday, I used a compilation of addons call ArkiveUI .  Arkive is a luxury UI with all the bells and whistles; not a light weight user interface.  Prior to blowing away my UI, I took a look at my setup through Addon Control Panel (yes, I have an addon to manage my addons).  My priest had 156 active addons consuming easily 170MB of memory (that is before recount gets rolling).  The power of Arkive is that it will configure all of the included addons specifically for your class.  The down side is that you do not learn what or how all the addons work, so if you want to tweak something or if something breaks it can be difficult to fix.  The last part is why I decided to Trim the fat and reduce my UI to only items I absolutely need.  Read on for the details of what I chose and how I configured my UI.

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In the last installment of Gooey, GUI, UI, I discussed some pros and cons for changing your User Interface.  Now I’ll focus on where you can get addons, how to install them, and ways to maintain your UI.

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It’s been over 2 weeks since I’ve entered the World of Warcaft.  The holidays have seen me jet-setting across the country to visit friends and family.  I’ve been completely out of touch with my guildies and the goings-on of WOW.  And yet somehow I’m still functioning.

I told myself that I would continue to blog during my vacation, but it turned out that I really didn’t have much to say.  I found myself constantly distracted with family drama, and the Christmas holiday.  My only WOW-saving grace was my buddy Nazaries, my Paladin “protégé” for lack of better terms.

Our family’s hubs are in the same town in California, so we both found ourselves home for the holidays waging war against the waist line.  We took the opportunity to exercise several times, and the WOW banter during the workout was very enjoyable…and satiated my WOW-appetite.

We spent a few hours one night re-working his user interface.    I like to use a bastardized version of the ArkiveUI , which is a really sweet suite of mods that completely re-works the user interface.  We started with the complete ArkiveUI, and then removed everything that we didn’t want.  What is left is a very clean UI with all the relevant information at the bottom of the screen.  Here is a screen shot of the full up ArkiveUI – our modified version is basically cosmetically the same.

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So before I start delving into how to change your User Interface in World of Warcraft in the next couple episodes of the column, I figured it would be a good idea to discuss the good and the bad aspects of doing so.  Yep, that’s right, there are several reasons why you’d think twice about changing your UI, but I contend there are more positives than negatives to make that UI look fantastic.

First, lets talk about what you have control over as the user.  If you are like most people, you don’t have tons of money lying around to buy the fastest gaming rig on the market every year that would allow you to run the game at full settings.  And that consideration should be made when you change your UI.  Each addon you install takes a small amount of your system memory and CPU horsepower to run the code in real time, many times every second.  Some mods hardly use any system resources while others use quite a bit.  So if you have a computer that is only squeaking by running WoW, you may consider passing on changing your UI or only use very small, and simple mods (such as auto repairing at vendors and auto-selling and grey items you’ve picked up).  The default WoW interface is the way to play the game with the least impact to your system resources.  However, if you have a computer that is able to run Crysis at 75 fps, you’ve got more than enough system resources available to load up hundreds of mods (and I’m not exaggerating).

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Blizzard has given us a fantastic game that is highly engrossing.  It appeals to many different people on many different levels.  At one point during the last 5 years I have played the game, I found myself getting highly engrossed in customizing the User Interface (UI).  So much so that I was spending more time editing my UI than I was actually playing the game.  The Application Progamming Interface (API) that Blizzard has built into the game is very powerful, allowing users to mold and make sense of the overwhelming amount of data that is contained within WoW.

The Default UI - Gets the job done, but can it be better?

“Gooey, GUI, UI” will deal with how to take advantage of the API by configuring add-ons that thousands of users have created for use in order to organize the view into the World of Warcraft.  The first couple posts will start off exploring the pros and cons of changing your UI, describing how to install an add-on on your computer and within WoW, where to get add-ons and ways to manage add-ons, and the real focus will be on the different types of add-ons and introduce what is possible for your UI.