Sunday, January 9, 2011

How I Make A UI Part 1: A Starting With Bartender 4

This is just a walkthrough of how I get some of the addons I use to look the way they do. We'll be working with bartender 4, shadowed unit frames, vuhdo, align, sunn viewport art, sexymap, and DS Graphics Sunn Viewport Skins.  This section starts with bartender, since it's the first addon I configure in a new UI. Originally  I was going to do them all in one big post, but well, that would have been a REALLY big post, so I split them up. Next time will be Sunn Viewport Art and Shadowed Unit Frames. Here's a nice picture with the addons all labeled so you can see what is what. It's also a good example of what you'll see when you first log in with all these installed.


Now to configure!
First off, we start with our action bars. So type in /bt and hit enter. You see...
We're going to go to the Blizzard Art Bar option and disable it. I don't particularly like that art. That gives you...
Now, enable bar 2 if you want. I like to have bars 1-4 enabled, but it does depend on how many bars you want.

Then type in /align in chat. That'll put a grid on your screen so you can line stuff up. Then you want to uncheck the Lock box in the bartender window, then close the window. Don't worry, you can get it back any time by using /bt, and this way we have space to move bars around. Move the bars where you want. I go for bars 1 and 2 centered at the bottom of my screen, but that's me.

Now, not only does bartender let you move bars where you want, you can also change the scale of a bar (I shrink my bag bar and micro menu, since I don't need them as big as the default has them), change the number of rows (allowing you to make an action rectangle instead of a bar), and even change the number of buttons per bar.  You can also do cool things like having bars faded out.

Once you're done moving things around, lock the bars. I ended up with...
That's bars 1 and 2 in the middle, and 3 and 4 on either side. 3 and 4 have been scaled down a bit and also made into 3by4 rectangles. The micromenu, stances bar, and my bag bar hang out neatly on top.

Now, I know you're thinking..."But I don't want to configure bars for all my alts. That's such a hassle!"  And with Bartender, you don't have to.  All you need to do is...

Log in on the alt.
/bt
Go to Profiles
Select Copy from
And copy from the toon you just set up.  See...
Here I'm copying my previously setup hunter's bars to my warlock. And it looks like....
And there you go, you now have customized action bars and you know how to use bartender 4.  And remember, you can always reset the profile if you hate what you've done. Oh, and set your keybindings if you need to.

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