Authors CurseForge

Castbars is a lightweight and efficient enhancement of the Blizzard castbars, including both the Player/Vehicle Castbar, the Pet Castbar, Target/Focus and the Mirror Timerbars.

See http://www.wowace.com/addons/castbars/ for a full description.

Please post your comments and questions in this thread. If you find an issue or have a suggestion for improvement, please post a ticket at http://www.wowace.com/addons/castbars/tickets/

Hello! I have just recently returned to Wow, last played during BC. So I have been trying to get updated on the current add-ons in development. What is your intent with this add-on compared with Quartz? Is it intended to be an alternative in aesthetics, or more lightweight and closer to Blizzards code than Quartz is, or both?

The first main difference was the use of Ace3, but Quartz has been updated (not by the original author though) to use Ace3 now. The second main difference is that Castbars uses the existing Blizzard frames and code for all basic functionality. All additional features are added to this code by adding to the event handling and rearranging the frames. This makes for an extremely small code size, currently around 1100 lines in a single source file, of which more than half is used only once during initialisation and then freed (for garbage collection). The code is also not modular, as everything is contained in a single unit, instead of spread across multiple modules. This means more efficient event handling and less duplication, because every module does not have to listen to the same events, and the information gained in one event handler can be used across the addon. From a maintenance point of view, modularity is better, but since we can implement the current feature set in a few hundred lines of code i strongly favour efficiency in this case.

There are a few features in Quartz that Castbars does not (currently) have:

*Display of the source of spell interruption. This will probably be added.
*Swing timer. This is quite a heavy feature (requires listening to the very busy combat log events), and i think it is more suitable for an independent addon.
*Buffs. Again, quite a heavy feature. I'm very satisfied with NeedToKnow and TellMeWhen, and i like the fact that this is in a separate addon.
*Flight Timer. Something i already have in a separate addon (InFlight), but it may be added to Castbars, similar to how Quartz is able to hook into InFlight.

Castbars support ConfigMode (and thus OneButtonConfig), which makes it easy and quick to move the bars around. I'm not sure Quartz does that?

Apart from that, the design goals of Castbars is to be light, to the point and easy to use. That means sensible defaults, so you don't get a smashed up screen when you log into a new character, and easy to understand settings so you can easily change those few settings you need to.

Thank you for your quick response and your service to the WoW community. I am inclined towards efficiency myself and love the idea of building upon the existing frames and code, so you have convinced me to go with Castbars for now. I also agree that it is probably best to leave some of those extra features to other addons. If I notice any problems, I will be sure to send in a ticket to help out. Again, thanks!

Quartz doesn't hook to InFlight since the new Ace3 versions :)

First of all I love your addon. Tried quite a few castbars and never were happy with them until I discovered this one.
I have a question though. At the end of the cast, the entire bar will turn green. I am not entirely sure what the green signifies. Successful end of cast?
Also, can this color be changed? Thanks for a great addon:)

That's the blizzard code turning it green while it fades away to indicate successfull cast. The standard castbar does that as well. There is not currently any way to change it, but it is not that hard to do. But is it really worth it?

Well no it's definitely not a dealbreaker or anything. I have lived with it so far and it's not biggie if it isn't changed. It's a bit of ocd in me:). That hideous green i'd probably change to a nice light shade of blue that's used for casting color. I suspect from your response it requires quite a bit of blizz code change and that means performance issues etc etc. No worries if it isn't really efficient to do.

Is it just me or is there a gap between the border and the castbar's top, bottom and right side? Also might be nice if you could customise the icon, size, pos, border all that jazz ;p Still enjoying this addon ofc

Yes, there is a small gap. What exactly do you want to customize? I don't want to add a lot of customization just because "i can".

Quote from xbeeps

Yes, there is a small gap. What exactly do you want to customize? I don't want to add a lot of customization just because "i can".

Well I'd mainly like to able to put a border around the icon, doesn't look very good to have the castbar with a sexy custom border and just leave the icon naked imo. Finally, hoping to not sound too demanding, any chance that the gap between the border and sides of the castbars can be removed? ;D

Quote from xbeeps

*Swing timer. This is quite a heavy feature (requires listening to the very busy combat log events), and i think it is more suitable for an independent addon.

How much CPU usage would this use if you were to implement it? Really like this castbar, but as a hunter it would be convenient to have a swing timer aswell. Maybe as a plugin or a lua option (so casual users wouldn't accidentaly enable it and suffer a slight performance decrease).

You can't really quantify the amount of CPU it uses in a meaningful way. There are two contributing factors. One is that the combat log events are extremely frequent - take a look at the combat log in a 25man raid during an encounter (and this is usually only some of it). When several addons are listening to this event noticeable lag is introduced (on all but the most powerful systems), simply because of the shear amount of code that is executed for each and every event (even those events that are useless to each addon, which is the vast majority). The other factor is code size. I estimate that it would increase the code size by 50%, and because there are no clear events suitable for a precision swing timer, it will be complex and messy code that will be harder to maintain (requires special handling of some abilities).

That is why i (still) recommend that someone get rolling and implement this as a standalone addon, instead of plugging it into various castbar addons (to which it really doesn't have any relation except perhaps for the most likely positioning on the screen).

Here's to hoping you will update this for 4.0.1. :) I know it was failing on the betaservers some time ago, gonna give it a whirl again later tonight and see if I can catch some usuable error reports.

Castbars hasn't been touched in 6 months, you're probably going to have to switch.

Gnosis and AZCastBar are both updated and work, and Nev posted here that Quartz is either working now or will be shortly.

I got it to work okay. I haven't tested it well, only the Mirror bar could have issues. Here is what I did to get it to work.

1. Delete lines 24 & 25, Hunters don't have volley any more
2. Do a search for "frame.shade" and comment out (--) or delete those lines.

Tada, works again. I'll do some testing on the mirror bar to try and figure out what he was trying to do with the frame.shade lines.

Hmm, maybe the frame.shade stuff wasn't broken. I don't know. I'll update the code as I find fixes i'm confident in. There are alphas with a couple fixes.

Thank you for the update ulic.

Castbars is up an running and working fine, also on the PTR, so it is ready for Cataclysm. In fact i think it is the only castbar addon that properly supports the new channeling ticks mechanics with the ability to show the extra ticks gained through haste on some channeling spells.

I'm currently working on some visual improvements such as icon and border customization, and the next push will contain new textures unique to Castbars to make it prettier out of the box.

So here's a question. With this new latency queuing slider, how is the latency estimate for safe next cast going to be affected in castbars? I mean...won't the safe casting point for queuing up the next spell kinda depend on what you set the slider at?