September 22nd, 2008
One of the more popular addons for World of Warcraft was Scrolling Combat Text by Grayhoof. He had announced he would make a port of it for Warhammer and a few days ago it was released on curse. For me personally this has been the addon I have been waiting for since release and I am very happy it is now here. The fact that all healing and damage done is around the target avatar makes it to easy to miss and you do not have time to parse the text in the combat log down in a corner of your screen. Time to go install and see if the Warhammer port is everything I remember it to be from WoW.
September 19th, 2008
With the arrival of the real launch and the chance that you were able to get a collector’s edition comes your chance to respec the face of your character without having to go for a reroll.
Dwarf male head model ce item
Once your register your collector’s edition you will receive the item seen in the screenshot in your ingame mailbox. If you take this item to your local dye merchant you are able to view the exclusive head where you can then choose to change or not. This is a one time change and you will not get the chance to change back afterwards.
In the image below you can see how my runepriest looks after the addition of the new head. In my opinion a huge improvement over the randomly generated one I had chosen before. For screenshots of the complete set of new head models head on over to TenTonHammer.
Dwarf male exclusive head model.
September 9th, 2008
One of the things added we have in the current generation of mmorpg’s that we did not see much of before is the ability making large changes to the in game UI. This ability comes in two forms in Warhammer Online. First default built in customization options, the second is addon’s. In this article I will focus on what it is possible to change out of the box without installing any addon’s. I will cover the possibilities with addon’s in later articles, both from user and programmer perspective.
In the Customize Interface menu you are able to set the number of action bars visible at the same time. The options here are
- 1 Bar - Centered
- 2 Bars - Side by Side
- 2 Bars - Stacked
- 4 Bars - Small Cluster
Each bar gives the standard 12 ability slots. This is fairly standard for mmorpg’s, but from here on out we will see some possibilities that is not normally present without installing addon’s.
First is the option to set “Global UI Scale”. Values range from 0.5 to 1.5 with default of 1. This means you can reduce globally all UI elements to 50% of their size or increase them by 50%. But everything so far is merely puny options compared to the next thing, layout editing.
Layout Editing
In layout editing you can move and resize every single component of the user interface. If you check the screenshot, this means every single green marked component. Over 25 individual components to move around and each one can be given their own individual opacity settings. This is a level of customization, without addon’s, that we have not seen before and it will enable many more users than normal to change their ui. Of course with addon’s we will be able to do so many more things, but that will be the topic of another post.
