UI Evolution

When I first started playing World of Warcraft, I was actually quite thrilled to be using the default user interface.  The following components are standard in any game of this genre.

• Player and Party Icons
• As seen in the upper left corner, these display the class, level, health and mana/energy of your character.
• Maps
• The upper right mini-map can be expanded to show the world-view of where your character is located.
• Chat and Combat Log Windows
• The bottom left and right display the various chat channels (world, party, trade, guild, etc) and the combat log.
• Spell Bars/Buttons
• The bars on the bottom and right hand side of the screen can be configured with various spells and abilities that you use frequently.  These buttons can be bound to certain key combinations.
• Cast Bars
• These are not shown in the picture above, these bars display the length of various casting abilities.
• Player/NPC Health Bars
• The bars shown on top of the other players, in the picture above, display their health and mana and are useful to help target specific enemies while in battle.

Over the course of leveling each class to 60, back in 'Vanilla' World of Warcraft (WoW), I was quite content with this default UI.  However at some point I realized that there is a huge world of 'add-ons' that have been (and continue to be) developed in the LUA programming language.  Various sites hosting these add-ons cropped up and I began cobbling together my own assemblage of add-ons to aid my adventures.
These add-ons required constant tweaking and each one of my ten characters had to be configured individually.  When these add-ons updated, there were often conflicts which required me to remove certain conflicting modules.  When I installed a new operating system or moved to a new computer, I had to spend hourse reconfiguring these all over again.  It was a mess.
At some point I realized that it would be easier to take a pre-configured suite of working add-ons that is well maintained and used by other players.  So I reviewed certain suites of user-interface add-on compilations and settled upon MazzleUI.

 This worked well and provided a ton of extra functionality.  But at some point in 2007, Mazzle stopped playing and the UI add-ons continued to get updated but conflicts arose and it was too much of a hassle to continue using an abandoned compilation. 
So I went back to the default UI and a few essential add-ons that I had to maintain and configure on my own.  A few months went by and I continued my search for the best compilation that worked for my style of gameplay and best suited the conveniences I enjoyed.  At some point I found ArkiveUI.  Arkive picked up where Mazzle left off and designed a user interface based upon the same design principles.
I was thrilled to discover the large user base, the support forums, the updated add-ons and in-game setup wizard that made this compilation so successful.

 The design was well-thought out and provided the right focus, in the center of the screen.  Using a heads-up-display addon and other elements.  I was hooked and I was very happy to use this on each of my characters. 
With the ArkiveUI I came, saw and conquered bosss after boss throught the Burning Crusade edition (Magtheridon, Gruul, Serpeantshire Cavern, Black Temple, Sunwell) and well into the next expansion (Naxxramus and Ulduar) and even most recently into the Wrath of the Lich King (Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel).

 The UI made sense and played well.  I enjoyed the welcome and convenient placement of the party/raid frames, the HUD, threat and dps meters, the tank frames, chat frames, centered mini-map and the button bars.
However, I found that no matter what I tried, when I was in a large raid (25+) I could not get good frame rates.  I upgraded my computer's graphics card, CPU, hard drive and still was stuck at 10 frames per second when at 1920x1280 resolution, regardless of the graphics quality and anti-aliaising.
I followed multiple threads on the ArkiveUI Forums and found a few tips, mostly dealing with disabling certain add-ons and reloading the UI.  While this worked, I had to then re-enable those addons after the raid and it was quite a hassle.  Even with half of the add-ons disabled, my frame rates did not improve substantially and never went above 20 fps in a big raid with lots of UI elements (e.g. Onyxia whelps).  I even tried throwing the latest and greatest hardware at the problem and built my own uber-gaming-pc with the latest and greatest CPU, GPU, memory and SSD, to no avail.  Finally, with head hung low in sorrow, I went in search of a new compilation that would boost my frame rates and allow me to do more in raids (more dps, fraps while raiding, stream the UI online, etc).

 I came upon FinalFLO UI, which had a very similar look and feel to ArkiveUI, so I tried it out to see if the frame rate issue would be resolved. I enjoyed the large user-base, multi-resolution support, in-game setup.  There are even vidoes to help configure the add-ons.  Nonetheless I struggled with the configuration of a number of key add-ons (Macaroon in particular) which I found to be quite convoluted and over-complicated, even for me.  So I was left frustrated and still searching.  I kept looking over the list of compilations at the WowIterface website.  I downloaded a number of attractive user interfaces to play around with and see if they suited my  play style and contained the bulk of the addons that I had grown accustomed to in my gaming adventures.

 I finally found the BodaUI suite and in my testing I was getting over 60 frames per second in 25 man raids, even with full UI elements (e.g. Sindragosa).  This allowed me to fraps or stream my game without any impact to my game response time.  I did not have the time to descern which add-on (which existed in the other UI compilations and was missing from Boda) was the culprit in the fps issue.  I was happy to discover a UI which was well thought out and served my needs.  There were however a few issues I needed to change.  Firstly, the UI was only configured, off-the-shelf, to support 1920x1080 and I play with a few extra pixels at the bottom of my screen, with my 24" display supporting a native resolution of 1920x1280.  So I had to adjust the placement of the kgPanels, SBF, Bartender, Omen, Recount, StatusWindow, MBF, Chinchilla and the chat windows.  I also added Grid2 for usage in 10/25 man raids and left Pitbull for 5 mans.  I increased the size of the chat window, because I read and chat a lot and like to follow more lengthy discussions.  Also when watching the trade chat channel, often I trolls can consume much of the chat real-estate.

 Here i the UI I use, BodaUI, showing 81 frames per second at Sindragosa (in combat this lowers to 60 fps), using 60mb of memory, half of which is Recount, Autobar and IceHUD.
I have added other add-ons here and there as needed to make life easier.  I have a back-burner TO-DO, to get it all zipped up and generalized so that I can share this with others, but in all honesty, the as-is BodaUI is very straightforward and can be tweaked easily for ones own liking.
I encourage others to check this out.  Boda wrote this primarily for Protection specced Warriors, this is seen most readily in the out-of-the-box configuration of the SBF filters.  However, these serve as a great guide for how to best configure this addon and others to benefit the other classes you play.  I have added filters to support the various roles I serve in my adventures and I found it to make my gameplay better.