BAB Bars

BAB Bars is an innovative action bar addon that allows you to create bars that follow all sorts of paths and curves. Would you like buttons to go in a circle around your minimap? To follow a curve beneath your character's feet? How about make a gentle wave at the bottom of the screen? You need only drag the anchor and pivot points to your desired location and the bar will change shape.

Important:
You need to download and install the BAB Texture Pack to use BAB Bars.
The texture pack is only updated if new textures are added to the game itself. You don't have to update the texture pack every time a new BAB version is released.

Videos

• BAB Bars Overview
• Variant Button Size feature demonstration

Quickstart

BAB Bars shows up with a single new bar with 12 buttons (above the Blizzard standard bars) in configuration mode at first start up.
Type /bab or press ESC to close the configuration mode. Type /bab to switch back into configuration mode.
Have a look at the new bar. There are 4 small 'pivot points'. Two green at the bar ends and two red between them. Click and drag the pivot points to control the bar shape.
Use the grey bar anchor behind the buttons to drag the bar around.

Q & A

Q: How do I access bar configuration?

A: Type /bab and hit enter. Repeat to exit configuration.

Q: How do I create a circular bar?

A: Under Automatic Bar Shapes click the red Circle button and check the box next to Permanent.

Q: How do I change the button skin?

A: Go to the (separate addon) Masque options menu (/Masque), choose the Addons section, go to the BAB section, select the desired BAB bar, and choose the desired Masque skin. If you experience issues with a "normal" skin, try one of the BAB Masque textures.

Q: Help! I chose a round Masque skin and my buttons look strange.

A: Under the Buttons section in the BAB "Bar Options" window, use the Button Shape drop-down menu and select Round.

Q: I chose a square Masque skin and my buttons do look strange.

A: BAB Bars needs Masque skins with all Skin textures having at least 1 transparent pixel at their borders. Edit the skin textures, or ask the designer of the skin for a customized version.

New: Spell Selector

The Spell Selector is a small window that opens if you do a right click + ctrl on a bar button. It contains all your current spells (and your pet spells and actions). Click a spell in the Spell Selector window to assign the spell to the button without opening the spell book first. Does work in combat too.

New: Conditional States

The new Conditional States feature adds easy to use but powerful options to define almost any condition statement that is available to the Blizzard macros (eg. [exists], [form:1], [stealth], etc.).
You'll define up to 8 different States to control the bar contents and visual appearance. Each of the States is made of up to 3 Conditions and an action that triggers if the condition is true. It's even possible to invert each condition and to link the conditions via AND or OR statements.

The States UI explained

There are 8 dropdown controls for each single state. Use them as follows:

• Dropdown 1: Modifier for condition 1 (= means the condition 1 has to be true to trigger the state, ! means it has to be false to trigger the state)
• Dropdown 2: Condition 1
• Dropdown 3: Link type between condition 1 and condition 2 (& means AND and / means OR)
• Dropdown 4: Modifier for condition 2 (see above)
• Dropdown 5: Condition 2
• Dropdown 6: Link type between condition 2 and condition 3 (see above)
• Dropdown 7: Modifier for condition 3 (see above)
• Action: The action if the state Triggers
• Presets: Some pre-compiled states. Just select one and BAB automatically sets up the proper conditions to the State.

How to use the States

An example: Let's say we would like to create a state like "[I]if I'm targeting someone, and if I'm pressing the CTRL key, then hide the bar[/I]". That would be the following state:

[=] [Exists] [&] [=] [Key:CTRL]

[Hide Buttons]

Tipps, limitations and stuff:

• To remove/reset a State just set the first dropdown to ''.
• Keep it simple
  DON NOT things like State1: [=][Always] [Hide Buttons] and State2: [=][Form:1] [Show Buttons].
  Instead DO State1: [!][Form:1] [Hide Buttons]
• Be specific
  DON NOT things like State1: [=][Key:ALT] [Show Buttons] and State2: [=][Key:SHIFT] [Show Buttons] and State3: [=][Key:CTRL] [Show Buttons]
  Instead DO State1: [=][Key:ALT][/][=][Key:SHIFT][/][=][Key:CTRL] [Show Buttons]

Reporting bugs

I do not play the game actively. I'm only developing addons. That means, if you don't report bugs they will remain forever. 🙂

Please report all bugs and problems as detailed as possible. It helps a lot if you provide the ingame error massage with you report. An addon like BugSack is the best way to capture information about errors ingame. There's also a forum. for this addon.

Show your work

I would love to to see what you are doing with this addon. Please feel free to show screenshots of your UI using BAB Bars in the comments or the forum..

Masque support

BAB Bars does support Masque. But it depends on special Masque skins. All Masque skin textures must have a transparent border (at least 1 pixel).