The HUD Thread

[Caeryn]

One of my favorite things about PC games is customizing my HUD and my UI.  Unfortunately, as most of us know, 1.0's UI options were pretty crappy and limited.  With the wealth of options that ARR brings us, and the semi-large number of "hidden" options means there's lots of possibilities that might not be apparent at the start.

 

After lots of tinkering, here's my preferred layout for A Realm Reborn:

 

 

When I play games as beautiful as this, I like leaving as much real estate as possible to actually SEE the screen.  The default positions have most of the UI elements slightly inwards, so my first step was to push everthing to the edges, into the corner.  The default action bars are 2 stacked on top of each other, but when I push the rest of the stuff to the sides, I can free up some leg room and put them side by side.  I have my most-used skills on the left bar, so that one button push will activate them, and the less common ones can be clicked on the side.  I would like to permanently remove the Menu Icons on the lower right, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

 

The biggest change I've made is to add a vertical taskbar to the upper righthand corner.  Up there I've moved all of my non-hotkey skills, or skills that have a longer cooldown that might not be connected to my main job, which at the moment is Paladin.

 

I've got sprint up there, in addition to my two mount choices.  A small gap and there's Return and Teleport, a small gap then Protect/Stoneskin, a small gap and then Raise.  It seems to be working out really well, giving me at-hand options without taking up space for things I might need at a moments' notice.

 

The secret to premium space management is overlapping.

 

 

When I was arranging my HUD, I noticed that the bounding boxes are considerably larger than the things they're boxing.  By the precise science of "squinting really hard", I smooshed everything as close together as possible so that the parts I can actually see are pretty flush next to each other.  Notice the cluster of boxes in the lower and upper right where lots of things meet.  Also, by overlapping my hotbars in the middle slightly I was able to gain almost a whole extra word's worth of chatlog space per line, which adds up quickly in a long RP session.

 

I just thought I'd share a cool HUD option for people and the reasoning behind it.  SHARE YOUR UI's BELOW!

[Havoc Snow]

Just out of curiosity, what is your screen resolution set to and do you run it n borderless window mode or fullscreen mode?