Authors CurseForge

Is there a way to change the anchor point of UIParent that each unit frame uses? I haven't found an option for it. I want to anchor my pet's unit frame to BOTTOMRIGHT, so that it will stay in the same location relative to the edge of the screen under different resolutions.

Quote from mrmcgee21

Hello, just want to start off by thanking you guys for keeping Pitbull4 up and going, I've been using Pitbull for many years now and love it. I recently though have ran into a problem with battlegrounds constantly fumbling up where my party ends up in the raid window, and my friends are usually in several different groups. I found that Grid has a customlayouts addon where you can actually define exactly what players to show as party members all the time, regardless of what group in the raid they might be in. But Grid isn't Pitbull by anymeans and trying to use it as a party frame is driving me nuts.

So my question is, is this possible in Pitbull4? I tried to actually look at the code but I'm completely lost in it. But if there is anyway this could be worked in I for one would be willing to donate some more.

It's something we could do. But I've been really hesitant to do it. Let me give you a brief overview of how raid and party frames work in order to explain why. Groups (be it a raid or a party) all have to use a specific interface from Blizzard in order to get the frames to work. This interface is called the SecureTemplates and in particular the SecureGroupHeader templates. There are a lot of limitations about what can and can't be done in combat with the UI. The Templates handle doing some things for us that we can't do for our selves because they would normally be against the rules.

For example we can't create unit frames in combat, we can't move them, we can't size them, we can't hide or show them. Instead all of these things are done for us by Blizzard code. Since we can't do these things this also means that the sorting and what not is also done by Blizzard code.

We can set options on the GroupHeader outside of combat which tell the Blizzard code what to do for us. If you go into your Groups section and look at the options almost all of these get passed through to the template in some form.

So about custom sorting. This can be achieved by using what the templates call nameLists. You sort the group however you want and then while you're out of combat you set a list of names in the order you want them. The problem with this is that the nameLists can't be set in combat. So if someone joins your party while you're in combat they can't be added to your frames until you leave combat.

There is no way to have custom sorts and frames working perfectly in combat. So it's likely that I'll implement some sort of nameList functionality at some point in the future. It's not a super high priority for me because it feels like a really poor implementation.

Quote from gamemaster128

Is there a way to change the anchor point of UIParent that each unit frame uses? I haven't found an option for it. I want to anchor my pet's unit frame to BOTTOMRIGHT, so that it will stay in the same location relative to the edge of the screen under different resolutions.

Not at this time. It's hard coded. I'm going to be changing this soon, it's necessary to allow us to have some decent defaults that work regardless of resolution.

Quote from detox2

For the interes to the ones using [Outline] DogTags:

When I was using Stuf unitframes I loved the "Outline | Monochrome" option for my texts on my Unitframes.

Unfortunately Pitbull comes with a hardcoded Text-Shadow and thus making the Outline not look as nice on pixelfonts as Stuf Unitframe does.

If you ever wanted to get rid of your Text-Shadow, locate

if you're using LuaTexts you can just add:
font_string:SetShadowOffset(0,0)
to the LuaText to get rid of the shadow on any particular text that you want.

Quote from markv

I tried searching through this thread but really am kind of brain dead at this hour. Is there a way to limit the length of a players name within the health bars? I am using Lua Texts with this and my player health bar also is displaying that persons name but the name exceeds the lenght of the bar and I really just want it to cut short the player name if it exceeds that length. Right now I am just using a custom lua text of the following:

return '%s',Name(unit)

Any help would be appreciated.

The easiest solution is to avoid using Right aligned text. Right aligned text isn't automatically cut off. It's a limitation of the way we do layouts and the things that WoW allows us to do. The way we're doing it now is probably great for 99% of the people. But people that want to make extensive use of Right alignment can run into this stuff.

Outside of that you can limit the length of the name by using the strsub function. e.g.:

return strsub(Name(unit),1,3)

Would limit the name to 3 characters. Incidentally you don't need a format string if you're just returning a single string. The 1 in the call means to start at index 1 and 3 means to stop at 3. So you can chop up whatever you want out to the string. To say limit to 7 characters you'd pass a 7 as the last parameter and so on.

This question has come up repeatedly on the 2 LuaTexts threads (the one on ElitistJerks that you already have been pointed to and the other one in the Unit Frames forum here on wowace).

Major changes coming to PitBull4 down the pike and I figured some of you might like a heads up.

First of all I have singleton units implemented such that you can have as many frames for them as you want. This means that you could have more than one target frame. This is going to allow a lot of flexibility with configuration that simply wasn't possible before. If you wanted you could completely control your layouts and just piece together different frames to create the look you wanted.

For example one popular request that this will allow that has come up multiple times is detached cast bars. You could create a layout that has nothing but the CastBar enabled on it and then make another target frame. Place it anywhere you like and that'll be your cast bar.

For the most part PitBull4's infrastructure already supported this. However, the configuration files format did not. So this change is necessitating some configuration format changes.

At the same time that this change comes through, additional anchoring options will become available. In particular the ability to anchor frames to each other, and to set the anchor points of the frames. This will allow resolution independent configuration.

But more importantly it will allow us to finally have a respectable default configuration. We will have frames positioned near where the default UI frames are. Frames will no longer be piled up in the middle of the screen. A number of frames will be disabled by default in order to lower the degree to which the mod can be overwhelming when you first install it. While our default config will be fairly simplistic it should be usable enough that someone can probably run off and start playing right after an install.

All of this comes with the cost of some configuration file format changes as I mentioned above. However, all of this will be happening at the same time. So there will only be one change that you need to worry about. Once you run the version that includes these changes you will not be able to downgrade to a previous version without doing some reconfiguration. So I strongly recommend that you make backups of your WTF/Account/USERNAME/SavedVariables/PitBull4.lua file before installing this new update. Backing up this file will allow you to move back to a previous version if you have some unexpected issue.

I don't know precisely when I will be done with it. But I'd expect it in the next few days.

Quote from Siege

I
What I'm trying to accomplish is to show all buffs and debuffs on my target frame (in this case) but instead of having large aura sizes for all self-casted buffs/debuffs, I want to simply have all buffs/debuffs on the target which matchup with those previously made whitelists to be the large ones, despite whether it was myself or someone else who casted one of the whitelisted buffs/debuffs on that target.

There's no way to do that right now.

Also, a minor problem I'm having is that with that target frame, I've also unchecked "Enable" for the "Borders" tab on the target frames custom Layout, however only buffs on the target are now without borders... debuffs still have borders for some reason.

In the Borders tab there's a drop down labeled Current border. Choose the ones specifying debuffs and uncheck Enabled for them.

Quote from Siege

Is there any chance something like this could be implemented in the near future?

To be honest, this was my primary reason for downloading these unit frames (even though i've come to appreciate a lot of other things about it) and making these certain buffs/debuffs bigger (regardless of who cast it on the target) seemed like a great way of eliminating certain other addons (such as afflicted3)

Near future probably not. More long term probably. It's come up before and it's something I've thought about. I can see how allowing the configuration of how individual auras would be displayed to be configured by the filtering system can be nice. Adding it however, would complicate a lot of things.