From cargBags to Bagrealis

Over the last few months I was heavily thinking on how to improve cargBags, my inventory addon for WoW. The plan was to rewrite the whole core for version 2.0 to improve its overall performance. But let's take a quick look into the history of cargBags, before coming to the list of things that did not work out as expected.

cargBags was released with version 0.3 as a simple and lightweight inventory framework inspired by oUF. It should only have the most important features for updating buttons and the rest should be made by layout and plugins. From day one, cargBags was my major addon and basically teached me most of my Lua knowledge. For every major rewrite, I concentrated on the new problems of the previous version and with them in mind, I completely redesigned the core. In Version 0.4 (the first rewrite), this was the Handler-system, which should allow other data sources than the Blizzard API, e.g. viewing the bank from everywhere. Version 1.0 was an even more complete rewrite, featuring the filter-system which gave rise to the first layouts of other people. Now items could be categorized into different bags by different filters instead of only bagID. The new problems with the filtering system and the increase in feature requests gave me the need to work out another rewrite. In detail:

Okay, my new inventory concept (presented in the last entry) starts to take some shape. The whole positioning- and drag&drop-system is implemented and I'm currently experimenting with the container frames. Nevertheless, there is still a lot to do - I can't even toggle the frame! I have to open it via command! The screenshot is not really a fast and useful storing system, it's more of eye-candy to demonstrate the current features. You can expect the buttons to be a lot more chaotic positioned in their daily use, I don't suspect people to form circles with every new item they get ... but who knows.

I thought about a new inventory frame in World of Warcraft. My dream always was to create fluid item icons which can be dragged and scale as one likes, because it seems to be the best solution for a minimalistic, yet elegant design. You could basically group icons into categories and select multiple ones to do the same action on all of them (e.g. mailing or selling). Icons which are placed on top of each other would slide away in all directions if you mouse-over them to provide access to single ones.

The reason for this is simple: I'm not really satisfied with the normal design principles of the different inventory addons (even my own cargBags!). You either have a large all-in-one frame which holds lots of icons in fixed rows, so that it is hard to find a single item - or you have lots of frames categorizing the items into Consumables, Weapons, Quest items ... but you would need tons of different categories to find an item fast. My concept could combine the best of both worlds: You group the items by yourself, so you can remember where they are! The scalability makes it also possible to prioritize items: You can make important ones bigger and less important ones smaller.

WoW Lua: Positioning text in a frame

A small sketch I did for someone to show the principle of anchoring text frames correctly in the World of Warcraft API.