Check it out!: Pitbull Unit Frames 4 - Beginners guide

As an effort to keep giving my personal and most humble opinion about WoW related issues, today I want to write about this addon: Pitbull Unit Frames 4.0

The name says it all, it's basically a unit frame replacement for the ones blizzard provides. I won't go on about why would you want to replace the default unit frames, when they look so cool, and are (maybe for you) so usefull and well placed. This is a basic overview of the addon itself, so here we go:

Downloading & Installing

This is basically the same for every addon, it should be no biggy, just go to Pitbull's main site , click on the Download link and then unzip the file into your Interface/Addons folder. Then restart WoW and there you go! Now it's all caos!

Configuring

One thing that this addon can be, is: a pain to configure! Why? Because the average user won't try to read a tutorial or a guide on how to configurate an addon before installing it! That's right! I'm looking at you buddy!

They normaly just install it,and start tinkering with the configuration menu..., well, this is not going to cut it here, this bad boy needs a bit of time, but once you get the hang of it, you'll love it!

Starting up

To bring the configuration window up, just click on the new icon that's around your mini-map. Once you've done that, you should be seeing something like:

Pitbull 4.0 main configuration screen

The first thing you gotta understand, is that pitbull is all about layouts. What you do, is create a new layout, and then go to the units section, and assign that layout to that unit/unit group, and that's about it :)

Now, on to the more specific things:

Depending on what you're trying to configurate (solo mode, party layouts or raid layouts), pitbull has different config modes for you to see exactly what you're changing while you're changing it. To check out those modes, go to the combo box up on the left: "Config mode" and select the simplest one, that for our little guide will suffice: Solo

OMG what did you just do?! What just happended?!?!

Relax, I meant that to happen.. really! What you're seeing right now, is every little thing that can be shown on a unitframe, that's to say:

• Health bar
• Mana Bar
• XP bar
• Buffs / Debuffs
• Party Icons / Raid Icons
• Text like:  Name, level, class, etc, etc

Don't worry, once you're done editing, just go back to "Disabled" and all these things will go away :)

 Configuration mode on a single unit frame (caos!)

 So, having in mind that layouts are all that's important here, what you're going to do, is start thinking how many different kinds of unit frame you want to have. In my case I normally like to have:

• One for my character
• One for my target
• One type for all the party frames
• Another one for all the raid frames
• And one last one for my target's target

So, lets personalize our character's unit frame:

1. Go to the config mode, and select solo.
2. Create a new layout, lets call it.. urmm... "Player". To do this, just click on the "Layout Editor" and write the new name on the "New Layout" field (a confirmation button will apear once you start typing)
3. Now that we have our new layout (even though we haven't changed it yet, lets assign it to our character's unit frame, so that we can see the changes we make to it on real time). In order to do this, go to the "Units" section, and under "Current Unit" select "Player", and assign it our "Player" layout. That's it, now go back to the Layout Editor and let the tweaking begin.
4. There are several tabs on the editor, these are:
• General: Lets you modify size and scale of the unit frame.
• Bars: Lets you configure all bars on your portrait, like health bar, mana bar, XP bar, etc, etc.
• Indicators: Configures icons like ready check status, party leader, master looter, etc.
• Texts: Configures the font, size, and position of different types of text on the portrait.
• Auras: Auras are basically all buffs and debuffs around. You can configure how to notify you and where to put the icons of every aura around.
• Others: Just a few more options, like where to show that the unit has aggro, heals incoming and a few minor adjustments.
5. Ok, now that we know what does what, lets keep going. I personally like my own unit frame bifg, so I can see really easy how much health and energy/mana I have left, so lets go to the general tab, and take the width slider up a bit, like to 250 maybe. Now, since we're talking about health, lets go to the Bars tab, and select the Health Bar tab. By default, the height value of this bar is 4, I don't like that, lets take it up a bit, say...7. There is also the thing about the texture of these bars... the default ones, well they're ugly. You can change it right here, select the texture you like from the "Texture" combo box on this same tab (I normally use "Armory" since it's clean and simple). Now there are a few more options that you might or might not like to use, lets see:
• Color by class: it'll fill your health bar with the color of your class, in this case, it's probably useless since we already know what class we are... right? 
• Custom color: Now here is a usefull one, since we're configuring our health bar, what better color to assign it than red? Uh?
• Color by hostility: It means the color of the bar will change if you are attacked. Could be usefull.
• Full / Empty opacity: Want your health bar to fade away when you're dying? And be fully opaque when at full health? Play around with these options then.
6. The same way you configured the health bar, you can go on and configure your energy/mana bar. What is that you say? You're a warrior so you don't use energy but rage? Just go to the energy bar.., that's the non-mana users bar.
7. Ok, right now, it's all looking great except one little thing... check your health bar. What's missing? That's right, you have no idea how much hp you have! We gotta fix this right away, so guess where are we going next? That's right! The Texts tab!  Go there, and on the "Current text" combo box, select "Lua: Health". This will change the form a bit, so you can configure all the apsects of this text, like font, size, position, etc, etc. We'll just focus on the value shown. Right now, the way it's working is... once you get hit, it'll start showing how much health you're missing... :S Not really usefull if you ask me, so, lets change it up a bit: On the "Code" combo box, select the one that says: Health: Percent. Better, now it shows you a percentage of how much health you've got. Still, I'm a bit of a numbers addict, and I like to know exactly how much health I have left, so lets change the text inside the "Combo" textbox, for this:
   
local s = Status(unit)
if s then
  return s
end
return "(%s/%s) %s%%",HP(unit), MaxHP(unit), Percent(HP(unit),MaxHP(unit))

   Now... that's what I call usefull. It is now showing how much health you've got left, how much total health you posses AND a porcentage of health left.There is only one more thing left to change here... the size. I like my health text bigger, so lets just move the size slider up a bit to... lets say: 180%. That's better.

And that's about it for today, I'll let you tinker with the other options and if you have any questions just let me know. Truth is, there is A LOT more to see on the configuration menu, but if I were to cover the whole thing, it'd take me a few weeks to write it all, so, have fun playing around with this great addon!

Oh! And just so you can see the final result, we went from this:

Default layout of pitbull

To this:

Final layout we just did (better uh?)

Aaaaand, that's it. I hope some of you find this usefull, and if you do, drop a comment, I'd love to hear from you.

Catcha around!