AzCastBar Addon
A highly customizable and lightweight casting bar replacement addon, with support for saved profiles and plugins.
The main release comes with the following plugins:
- Casting Bars (player, target, focus, pet)
- Mirror Bars (breath, feign death and fatigue)
- Player Auras (buff, debuff, tracking and weapon enchant timers)
- Target Auras (same as player auras, but for your target by default, works as a dottimer)
The player cast bar supports safe zone indication for both cast and channeled spells. This "zone" represents your latency, when the spellcast has passed this point, you can safely cancel the cast and the spell will still fire.
The option dialog, along with the saved profiles are Load on Demand, which means it will only be loaded and take up memory when you're setting up the plugins.
The slash command for AzCastBar is "/acb". Using it will open the the option dialog.
You can clear all plugin settings and reset them to their defaults by using the slash command "/acb wipeconfig". This does not affect the saved profiles.
Plugin Support
This addon is build up around the possibility to add more bars with different functions, known as plugins.
The plugin package for this addon which you can find on WoWInterface includes the following plugins:
- Global Cooldown Timer
- Loot Roll Timers
- Battleground Timers
- Flight Timer
- Swing Timer
- Totem Timers
- Shaman Timers
You can find the official plugin package here:
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info8437-AzCastBarPlugins.html
Lacking Features, Ideas & Problems
- CastBar: When crafting a tradeskill item, and you run out of mats or in other ways fail the craft, the cast bar may hang. This issue will be fixed soon.
- Aura Timers: I plan on adding a filter to this, so you can filter out any buffs you do not want to clutter up the bars.
AzCastBar Changes | 2009 May 17
- Auras: Better showing of who cast the buffs and debuffs, as it could sometimes show wrong info for those cast by out of group people.
- Auras: The option to show pet auras will now also include vehicle auras.
- Auras: Added option to select the label format. Possible options are, name & stack, name only and stack only.
- Core: Changed the table recycler, this will affect some plugins, so they require an update.
AzCastBar Changes | 2009 Apr 27
- Auras: Buff and Debuff tooltips will now from who you gained it.
- Options: Added an option to reverse the statusbar growth. You can find it under "Appearance".
- Options: A statusbar spark option has been added under "Appearance". Plugins does not have to support this, it will automatically be positioned by the core. Furthermore, until the option for showing a spark is enabled, the texture widget is not even created.
AzCastBar Changes | 2009 Apr 19
- CastBar: Removed the real time latency option for the safe zone, which was added in the last release. The reason for this is simple, the first cast you do, the time it shows will be good, a real time latency. But when doing back to back chain casting, you actually send the cast request before the previous cast ends, thus showing the supposedly "real time latency" way too high. As there is no good way to avoid this, I've removed the option.
- CastBar: Merged trades should now fade out when completed.
- Auras: Removed some pre 3.1 code for the self auras only filter.
- Options: Corrected a bug that could cause a color option to generate an error when clicked.
AzCastBar Changes | 2009 Apr 13
- Changed the TOC version to 30100 for the 3.1 patch.
- CastBar: Fixed a rare bug, which gave a Lua error on line 181, that could happen under unknown circumstances.
- CastBar: Now has an option to show the real time latency for the safe zone, instead of the average one returned by GetNetStats().
- CastBar: A new option to show the target of the cast has been added. Only works for the player castbar.
- Auras: Removed some global pollution.
- Auras: Added option to show auras with no duration as a full bar.
- Auras: New option to select how long a buff duration you want to determine short/long buffs from, this time will determine when the bar will be colored using the "Buff Timeout Color". You can set it to zero to disable the timeout coloring.
- Auras: Updated the "LibWeaponEnchant" library. This should fix enchants reseting the total time and sometimes showing as "??" with "0.0" time after login or zoning.
- Options: Will now add some sound files to sharedmedia. Only relevant for plugins which has an sound file option.
- Options: You can now change the offset of the text labels on the bar, that is the name and time label.
- Options: The label color for the name and time, can now be configured individually.
- Options: Redesigned the way the label alignment works, so the option "Swap Name & Time Labels" has been removed. You now configure the alignment for both the name and time label.
- Core: Moved more of the plugin code into the core, specifically the parts that will apply bar settings and add new bars to the mainbar's bars table. Please update plugins to avoid any errors.
- Core: Most plugins now uses the "SetFormattedText()" function to set the time through the new "plugin:SetTimeText()" plugin function. Doing this does not generate a massive amount of Lua garbage strings.
- Core: Every plugin's main bar now has a default OnEvent script from creation which will call "plugin[event]" if it exists.
- Core: The OnConfigChanged function is now only called once per plugin, not once per bar.
AzCastBar Changes | 2009 Apr 01
- CastBar: Hopefully fixed an issue where the castbar could "hang" if you tried crafting more than one item which had a cooldown, such as "Northrend Alchemy Research".
- Auras: Improved the performance some by removing the OnUpdate handler from aura bars which had no duration. And those bars which does have a duration, has been limited to 60 updates per second.
- Auras: The option to color the background to match the aura color, has been replaced with a color alpha slider. Setting this to anything above zero, will color the background with the same color as the aura.
- Auras: Added support for the 3.1 code which allows to track who casts auras. This means the option to track only your own auras, wont break on patch day.
- Auras: New future option to also track the auras your pet applies. Will not work until the 3.1 patch.
- Auras: An option to only show the buffs which can be spell stolen has been added.
- Auras: Weapon Enchant Timers should now update properly. Also, the total time of weapon enchants are now shown.
- Auras: Now uses the "LibWeaponEnchant" library to update the weapon enchant data. This means less overhead, especially if used together with the Shaman timer plugin.
- Mirror: This plugin has been rewritten. It will have no effect on its functionality, but it should have a better performance, not that the old one had bad performance though.
- Mirror: The rewrite should also have fixed an issue, where the mirror timers wouldn't all show, if there were more than one timer when logging in.
- Options: The "Copy Settings" option has been moved to the General category.
- Options: A layout template option has been added, this will allow you to quickly set the appearance through a preset. Currently only two exists "Default" and "Auras", but I plan on adding more. If you have a nice setup, please post it and I will include it.
- Core: Added a table recycler library, and made most multibar plugins use it. This means that plugins that update their timers often, such as the Aura plugin, wont increase so extreemly fast in memory usage and invoke the garbage collector.
- Core: Removed the "shared" tooltip that was previously being used to scan for temporary weapon enchants.
AzCastBar Changes | 2009 Mar 26
- Auras: Added options to hide the default aura, enchant and tracking frame (hotfixed).
- The "PlayerAuras" and "TargetAuras", previously part of the AzCastBar plugin package, has now been renamed to simply "Auras" and included in the main release. It will add two bars, "PlayerAuras" and "TargetAuras", but they will be disabled by default. But do try them out, AzCastBar can be more than just a cast bar.
- CastBar: If a merged trade cast failed, it would not hide the cast, but instead just continue the animation as if you were still crafting. This is now fixed.
- CastBar: Will no longer try and use the player cast bar for possessed pets if your player cast bar is disabled.
- Mirror: When disabled, the default mirror bars will be re-enabled. Also optimised the code some.
- Auras: Rewrote the aura sorting function to be better. It now also allows for an easy way to change the aura type priority, but it requires Lua editing.
- Auras: Added an option to use the default debuff colors instead of the configured one.
- Auras: Optimised the updating of auras. Before all aura types was updated if just one type changed, now it will only update the type changed.
- Auras: Simple multibar support added. I intend to add an ingame option for this later, but for now you can add more bars, by editing the Lua file. Go to the very bottom and add a new "SpawnAuraPlugin" line, just change the name into something unique. This is nice if you want to have your debuffs in another place than buffs for example.
- Auras: Added an option to only show the auras that you caused.
- Options: Each plugin now has a new options category, which allows you to copy the bar settings from another plugin, this should save a lot of time when setting up bars.
- Options: Added a new "Appearance" option, "Use Bar Texture as Background Texture". Enabling this will instead of a complete plain white texture, use the texture set for the bar.
- Core: When a bar is configured with it's name label align to center, it will now properly show at the center, and not have it's room taken up by the timer label.
- Core: Added a helper function that determines the best anchor spot for a tooltip, so you should no longer see any tips blocking the timer bars.
- Core: Each plugin sub bar now has a reference to their config table, not just the main bar.
- Core: New helper function "AzCastBar.CreateMainBar" which will fill in the token, options and subbar table, and itself to the "AzCastBar.frames" table. Used instead of "AzCastBar.CreateBar" for mainbars.
AzCastBar Changes | 2009 Mar 22
- Options: Removed some SharedMedia debug code.
- Options: The minimum value for fadeout time can now be set to zero.
- Options: Now uses my shared libraries for options factory and dropdown menus. Makes things a little easier to update and to add new options.
- Core: No longer initialises all default variables for unset values on load, but instead uses a metatable.
- CastBar: Disabling the pet casting bar should now properly re-enable the default UI pet casting bar.
- CastBar: Should hopefully not conflict with certain other addons and now properly hide the blizzard casting bars when enabled.
- CastBar: Removed the code that made the target castbar not show if it was player, and focus not show if it was target. This seemed to confuse a lot, and removing it only means less code.
- CastBar: There is now an option to merge trade skills. What this does it to show you the total time when you craft more than one item.
AzCastBar Changes | 2009 Mar 08
- The CastBar and Mirror plugin has been moved out of the core part of AzCastBar, but will remain included in the main download. But doing this allows people to easily disable these two plugins if they have no need for them.
- Core: Changed some of the core functions, an update of all plugins is required.
- Core: Each bar frame will now have a global name, the format is "AzCastBarPlugin<TOKEN>", where token is the specific name of that frame, e.g. "Player". This was a request to allow panels to be anchored to AzCastBar frames.
- Core: It is now possible for a plugin to add additional options. Because of this, some options has been removed under the options and moved directly into the plugins themselves.
- Core: A slash command has been added to wipe all plugin settings, use "/acb wipeconfig" to do it. Note that this does not affect profiles.
- CastBar: The Safezone indicator now shows for channeled casts as well.
- CastBar: Will now show the bind location for "Astral Recall" just like it already does for Hearthstone. These should now also work for non english clients as well.
- CastBar: The "Enable Bar Plugin" option in will now re-enable the default blizzard casting bar if disabled.
- Options: A new option has been added to change the frame strata of the bar frames, you will find it under "Position" in the option dialog.
- Options: You can now change the offset of the icon to the status bar, look for the option under the "Anchors" category.
- Options: Removed the option "Show Bar Icon" and replaced it with an "Icon Anchor" option, which can be set to either "Left", "Right", or "None".
- Options: Fixed a problem where the "Left Offset" was not updated when moving the bar manually in edit mode.
- Options: By suggestion, I've added a new option to hide the borders around spell icons. This is on by default, so you'll have to go and disable it if you want the old look back, but I think most will prefer the change.
- Options: The position of the option window will no longer be reset when you load a saved profile.
- Many small optimizations and code improvements.
AzCastBar Changes | 2008 Dec 22
- The bars are no longer created as top level frames, meaning they should no longer be "popping" on top of other frames when shown.
- Bars showing the total time will now show two decimals instead of just one, for better precision with haste ratings.
- CastBar: Pets you are in possession of, will now show their cast bar using the player cast bar instead of the pet bar. Really nice for all the new WotLK quests.
- Mirror: Corrected an error that could occur if you had a mirror bar showing, when turning on "Edit Mode".
- Mirror: Now supports the option "Also Show Total Time".
- Options: Fixed a problem where the option dialog went blank for options, at least I hope so, it's been somewhat hard for me to reproduce, so please let me know if it's still a problem.
- Options: Changed how "Edit Mode" works. It's now a lot more clean, since it uses its own bars, instead of modifying the bar of each plugin.
- All functions which were previously global, those named "AzCastBar_*", has now been moved into a table named "AzCastBar" to lower the global namespace pollution. This change will require all plugins to be updated.
AzCastBar Changes | 2008 Oct 22
- Fixed a cast bar problem, where it would say interrupted and hide itself when casting a spell, if you tried to cast another spell.
- Added an option to show the total duration of the cast.
AzCastBar Changes | 2008 Oct 18
- Changed the TOC version to 30000 for the Wrath of the Lich King patch.
- Options: Switched to using "LibSharedMedia-3.0". The library itself is still not included, so get it elsewhere.
- Options: Updated the parameters for the scrollbars to make them work for the 3.0 patch.
Installation Guide
- Exit "World of Warcraft" completely
- Download the mod you want to install
- Make a folder on your desktop called "My Mods"
- Save the .zip/.rar files to this folder.
- If, when you try to download the file, it automatically "opens" it... you need to RIGHT click on the link and "save as..." or "Save Target As".
- Extract the file - commonly known as 'unzipping'
Do this ONE FILE AT A TIME!
- Windows
- Windows XP has a built in ZIP extractor. Double click on the file to open it, inside should be the file or folders needed. Copy these outside to the "My Mods" folder.
- WinRAR: Right click the file, select "Extract Here"
- WinZip: You MUST make sure the option to "Use Folder Names" is CHECKED or it will just extract the files and not make the proper folders how the Authors designed
- Mac Users
- StuffitExpander: Double click the archive to extract it to a folder in the current directory.
- Verify your WoW Installation Path
That is where you are running WoW from and THAT is where you need to install your mods.
- Move to the Addon folder
- Open your World of Warcraft folder. (default is C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\)
- Go into the "Interface" folder.
- Go into the "AddOns" folder.
- In a new window, open the "My Mods" folder.
- The "My Mods" folder should have the "Addonname" folder in it.
- Move the "Addonname" folder into the "AddOns" folder
- Start World of Warcraft
- Make sure AddOns are installed
- Log in
- At the Character Select screen, look in lower left corner for the "addons" button.
- If button is there: make sure all the mods you installed are listed and make sure "load out of date addons" is checked.
- If the button is NOT there: means you did not install the addons properly. Look at the above screenshots. Try repeating the steps or getting someone who knows more about computers than you do to help.
Translations
When you download a mod, please be sure that the mod is compatible with your translation of wow. Some mods only work on the US versions, while some only work on some of the various European versions. These variations are called "Localizations".
TOC Numbers (Out of Date Mods)
When Blizzard patches WoW, they change the Interface number. This means that all mods will be "out of date" unless or until the author releases a new version for that interface. Some people go into the .toc files and update the numbers themselves, but this is STRONGLY advised against as it will cause problems locating possible incompatibilities addons. When you log into WoW after a patch, you DO NOT have to delete your interface directory. All you have to do is simply tell WoW to ignore the interface numbers and load all the mods anyway. All you have to do is, while at the "character select" screen, look in the lower left corner and click on the "addons" button. A window will pop up listing all your installed mods.
If you look in the upper left corner of that window there should be a box that says "Load Out of Date AddOns". You want to CHECK this box. Now simply go into WoW normally and all your mods should load. As of the 1.9 patch, you will have to do this after EVERY patch/update that Blizzard posts! If you encounter any problems with a mod after a patch, please be sure to let the author of the mod know so they can fix it.
See also: About "Out Of Date AddOns"
Mac Support
WoW addons are not platformed based. As such, they can be used on either Mac or PC. You can extract both .zip and .rar files on a Mac using StuffitExpander.
Directory Structure
World of Warcraft
|_ Interface
|_AddOns
|_*AddonName*
|_ *AddonName*.toc
|_ *AddonName*.xml
|_ *AddonName*.lua
|_ (possibly others as well)...
