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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games)

World of Warcraft UI Customization 46

Posted by Zonk from the all-depends-on-how-you-want-to-see-it dept.
geekboy_x writes "The gang at Blizzard has released a UI customization tool for World of Warcraft. It basically breaks the meta-interface into individual XML descriptions that you can change, add, or omit to your (corrupted decaying undead) heart's content. Note that you should have pretty good chops in both XML and Lua, and if you break it, you bought it." The best known UI project out there for WoW right now is Cosmos, which adds a few extra hotkey bars, a clock, a quest manager, and a nice buff/debuff timer.
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World of Warcraft UI Customization More

World of Warcraft UI Customization

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  • Telo's (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bonewalker ( 631203 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @04:39PM (#11055814)
    Personally, I think you should take a look at Telo's add-ons. Not so well known, maybe, but they work well, and have no bloat.

    Here is his post. [worldofwarcraft.com]

    • I have to say I have had no problem with Telo's, and most of my guild have begun using it, an essential addon for any caster class.

  • CTMod is what i use (Score:4, Informative)

    by pezpunk ( 205653 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @05:03PM (#11056027) Homepage
    personally i prefer CTMod [warcraftstrategy.com]. granted it doesn't have every feature under the sun like Cosmos, but it's a lot less bloated and buggy. it includes the features that i consider "vital", including the extra toolbars, HP and Mana recovery tickers, map notes that you can send to other players, Damage per Second indicator, and the ability to re-name your bags.

    the only feature i missed after switching from Cosmos was the explicit levels of the quests in my quests logs. so i found someone who ripped that feature from Cosmos, then i edited to work with the current version, and slapped it on. you can download my UI here: (i didn't really write any of it, just collected it and made some minor changes)
    http://www.theoverprivileged.com/wow/Interface.zip [theoverprivileged.com]

    just put this Interface directory in your WoW directory and you should be good to go. click on the "Ct" button on your mini-map to configure it. the initially-empty toolbars are invisible until you drag an icon, then they show up. you'll figure it out.
    • Or you can download Cosmos, unzip it, pull the QuestMinion directory from AddOns and move it to your real AddOns directory. While the main cosmos interface may control it, it has no real dependencies with it. You can technically do this with any package out there to mix and match them, but be aware that if two (or more) try to do the same thing there will probably be issues. but you just have to quit and remove individual ones until it works. Soon Blizzard plans to have a front end to enable/disable at w

  • Farming. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @05:03PM (#11056031) Journal
    Interesting note, Blizzard removed timing features from the language to prevent automated tasks. CosmoUI had one feature as a work around, but asked to remove it.

    Stops that auto farming sitting in a field, like the fishing bots did. I wish I knew how the fishing bots worked, as you had to click a moving icon.

    There are also 2 other UI Mods that are popular CTMod [warcraftstrategy.com] and Gypsy Mod [the-mad.net]

    The XML language has made it easy for people to upload thier characters to websites like Allakhazam [allakhazam.com] and Thottbot [thottbot.com]. Very nice gaming resources for WOW.

    Reminds me of the days Tribes scripting took off, made many people into full time programers. Glad to see it in newer games, actually promoted by the game developers.

    Good job Blizzard.

    • Re:Farming. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by geekboy_x ( 410674 )
      Not a huge surprise about the timing, in light of the accounts that were permanently banned this week due to bot use. Makes my fishing macro sort of useless, tho. Dang!
    • Wow doesnt run under winex? It has native support for OpenGL, and runs in a window.

      Hell, they even have an OSX version, thats basically a *nix version.
      • >> Hell, they even have an OSX version, thats basically a *nix version. Foo port. Mac OS X isn't just a bog standard Unix / X11 combo with some Apple stickers on it, it has a completly different GUI system, has different libraries etc. It's not like they could've just clicked a "i586 Linux" checkbox and done a Linux version.

        I know there are platform independent libraries / middleware to get around some of the problems (OpenGL, SDL etc.), but I'd imagine it would still take quite a bit of work to por
      • they even have an OSX version, thats basically a *nix version.

        This is by far the biggest misconception about OS X on Slashdot. Yes, the inner core of the OS is BSD, but the high-level APIs that every program that's not a command-line tool must use - especially Carbon - are COMPLETELY different from those found on other unixes. Porting to or from OS X is no easier (or harder) than porting to or from any other platform, and having an OS X version of a program available has no effect on the difficulty and e

  • Do we like Blizzard today? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Waitasec... give money to lawsuit-happy [slashdot.org] suemongers [slashdot.org]? They are suing Free Software developers, don't help them!

    • Every time I mention the bnetd thing i get modded down. new game is out, people don't care what kind of injustices have been forwarded by blizzard. that requires a little bit of bravery and no one has any anymore.

      • Re:Do we like Blizzard today? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by king-manic ( 409855 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @04:38PM (#11062313)
        Every time I mention the bnetd thing i get modded down. new game is out, people don't care what kind of injustices have been forwarded by blizzard. that requires a little bit of bravery and no one has any anymore.

        That because Naikrovek, What blizzard did was not morally or ethically wrong, but what bnet-d team did was morally and legally wrong. So they mod you down becuase what you say can be paraphrased as:

        "Whaaaa they took away my ability to play without paying, those bastards. Their evil."

        As companies go, blizzard is as good as almost any other. They support their games long long after they have to, they insist on quality over quantity or deadlines. They make polished high end products. If every game company could do the same we'd get nothign but great games from every studio. They happen to take exception to what Bnet-d group was tryign to do (emulate their servers) which allowed people to play blizzard games without paying blizzard. Blizzard has no moral obligation to help them out or let the project live. The Bnet-d team had a responsibility to protect someone else product by not trying to crack the protection(which was proven in court that they had a legal responsibility). Thus they squished em. Thats not evil. Thats like finding someone who was makign copies of the keys to your house and telling a cop, the cop arrested them and conficated their equipment. You did nothing wrong, but the keymaker did. Your vilifying blizzard is the same as someone villifying you for reporting the key copier to the cop. Sure the guy might just be making the keys to give you a spare when you need it, but it's more then blindingly obvious that he's going to do something else with the key.
        • Perhaps you're not familiar with bnetd:

          Battle.net is (at the time of bnetd, anyway) a free service. creating bnetd did not save anyone any money.

          the bnetd team did a double-blind reverse engineering process, which is perfectly legal.

          the purpose of bnetd was to have your own private game server, free of cheaters and griefers. NOT to save money.

          bnetd was created legally with good intentions. Not a single EULA of Blizzard's was breached. It was a totally fucked up situation.

          So look back and read about
          • I know everything about bnet D. And it didn't verify cd-keys. The most effective protection Blizzard had was that multiplayer on their games required the server to verify keys. BNET-D circumvented this. Essentail any copy of the blizzard games could be played without buying it. I do recall all the code used for bnet-d showed up in pirated versions of the blizzard games and pirate servers. It was in blizards interests to shut it down. This is blatantly obvious. If they didn't then the next time someone wants
    • AC There a fine line between "needless prosecuting" and "protecting their product". It's blindingly obvious to everybody but a few select OS people that bnet-d was trying to "steal" from blizzard. Blizzards authentication proccess should not be made public (as key gens would be made instantly) and Blizzard does not have any obligation to work with bnet-d to make bnet-d work legally. Bnet-d is trying to bypass a copy protection feature from blizzard. They plan to do this so you can play without paying. Blind
  • And.... it's down already. I wish they had an option to distribute this using some kind of universal bittorent client. I know a lot of people don't like it, but if they would give easy access to all their files using some special client then there would be a better chance that a dedicated fileserver wouldn't collapse under all the requests.
    • They = ?

      Blizzard uses BitTorrent (POORLY) to distribute WoW patches.

      BitTorrent is NOT the right solution to every single problem.
      • They do, but I meant to roll it out as a method to distribute all their files - not just their patches.
        • Did you read the rest of my comment?

          Do so, please.

          BitTorrent is great when there's a whole lot of people who want the file. But when they've all gotten the file and there's only one or two seeds and 5 or so peers, the speeds are horrible and people get angry.

          Also, Blizzard needs to add a way to limit one's upload. Their "download tool" maxes out my upload and that totally ruins my ability to download.
          • I agree that Bittorrent isn't always ideal. However, in this case, Blizzard would constantly be the seed, using the same servers that they were using before. So, when there are few people wanting the file, this would just mean that there would be little sharing but it would still be coming at fast speeds from the Blizzard servers.
            • Guys, do we really ned bittorrent for this small file? Yes, I know the link isn't working very well, but it is just an ftp. Just login anonymously to their ftp server, and you can find the file no problem.
  • Cosmos has a lot of really nice features that take advantage of groups of people using Cosmos. The abilitiy to view what quests other Cosmos-Users in your group have, to share map notes with other Cosmos-Users. Even better is a sort of an ingame BBS that (if cosmos was more widely-used) could really be useful in finding groups and selling items.

    Unfortunately Cosmos has a bit of a bad stigma with some people. Many people I have talked to thought if they used Cosmos they were breaking the EULA and could be
    • The problem I have with Cosmos is that it really aggressively takes over your UI. I installed it because I wanted the SecondBar (and *only* that), but it did a million other things, created windows that I didn't know how to turn off, and even changed some of my precious key bindings. So it had to go. It sure would be nice if all of that crap was off by default.
      • If you just want an extra bar, I recommend Telo's bottom bar (linked in one of the first comments to the original article). It seems to be the best at moving other things you need to see off of itself.

        Also note that many, though not all, Cosmos functions can stand alone. To check, look at the .toc file in each sub-directory. If it doesn't say "required dependencies: Cosmos", you can usually extract just the one subdirectory into your /interface/addons folder, though depending on how well documented the
    • In previous Blizzard games, various hacks to give you access to information your client had to have but you weren't supposed to see were in fact cheating and bannable offenses. This notice on the main WOW page aside, Blizzard hasn't done much to inform users that this time they're ENCOURAGING people to mod their UI's, in part because they have failed to include highly important features in the one that ships with the game (every single class needs a second hotbar in their early teens). And, in all fairnes

  • Cosmos can be found at http://www.cosmosui.org not cosmosui.com.

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