Addons: The LDB post

Like many of you guys I was a loyal user of FuBar. Should you live under a rock and not know what FuBar is: FuBar is an Addon that lets you show information provided be little sub-Addons. There are addons that display your armor durability, how many friends are online and much more. Many standalone Addons provide an Icon for FuBar themself, so you can open the config dialog for an addon (like Grid, Bigwigs) through one click on its FuBar icon. So the advantage of FuBar is: Show many things with using just a tiny bit of your screen and making the acces to other addons much easier than remembering all those /cooladdon gui commands or having tons of ugly minimap buttons around your map.

my fubar, one year ago

So, that’s all nice and sweet. If you want to find more information about FuBar I can direct you to No Stock UI and its FuBar article.

FuBar is very popular and is still a top class Addon. But I experienced some bugs, some addons I used with FuBar were rather memory hungry, so I felt it was time for a change. The only real alternative is the LDB (libdatabroker) system. I’m no programmer, so I can’t give you any specifics why this is better designed than FuBar (which still uses Ace2), but most people I trust have switched to LDB a long time ago and addons with LDB support are popping out right and left. Many addons already have an LDB datafeed included, so they let you display information through that system or at least access the menu.

Now before you start looking for addons that show a specific information, you need an addon that displays this information at all. There are many choices around that can do that and you might have to try out for yourself which one suits your needs best. It mostly comes down to how and where you want to display LDB feeds: In a bar top or bottom of the screen? Static or on mouseover? In a block somewhere or integrated into your UI design?

My LDB addon of choice:

• ChocolateBar – I guess I like this because it is very simple and very FuBar like. Your plugins will be displayed in a bar at the top/bottom of your screen. You can assign them to the left or right side of the bar and turn the bar to autohide or not. The only thing I don’t like: no autohide/disabling in combat or disabling of opening the config dialog by right clicking the bar, which led to 1-2 infight popups of the menu. EDIT 9.4.: Latest build allows disabling clicking or full hiding whenever I’m in combat.

Alternatives:

• Fortress – Rather popular and with much much more options to play with. The LDB information will be shown in a little box for every addon. Those blocks are sticky and let you create bars, big blocks, single blocks, whatever you want. For me this was too much options for the thing I wanted: just one simple autohide bar.
• StatBlockCore – This is one of the first LDB addons I ever heard of and I used it for a long time on our laptop, where memory conservation mattered. I didn’t use it for a long time now, so I can’t say how it is in its actual state, but when I used it it was not so drag and drop friendly and much of the arranging had to be done with numbers.
• DockingStation – Like ChocolateBar working with Bars, not Blocks. Unlike ChocolateBars there is a third region where you can drop plugins in the center of a bar which I really like. The only downside is that you can’t hide the bar to show it on mouseover. When this gets implemented I will probably switch to DockingStation. EDIT 9.4.: Newest build includes alpha change on mouseover or hiding bar in combat.

Alternatives I never used:

• ButtonBin
• Wraith
• cargoShip (.lua config)
• NinjaPanel
• Titan Panel – very popular with some built in plugins but the ability to display LDB plugins as well. Not as small as many other LDB display addons

Now last but not least I’ll recommend some great plugins that use LDB. If you’re searching for plugins, LDB, data broker or broker might be the search terms you might want to use. My picks:

• picoFriends: Shows how many friends are online and opens friends list on click
• picoDPS: Minimalistic dps feed, shows your dps as text and dps of your party members on mouseover
• picoButtons: This lets you display the micromenu in your LDB addon. The micromenu are the buttons through which you access character frame, spellbook, talents etc.
• tekability: This is an example of an addon that has a dual purpose. Main purpose is to show durability in numbers on every item in your character frame. Additional nice thing: can display durability of most damaged item as a number on in an LDB addon.
• Volumizer: access to a little control panel for your sound/music options
• MakeRocketGoNow: This will take ALL your LDB launchers and but them in a dropdown menu that you can access with a click. This is very cool for quick access for all the addons you might want to reach the option menu sometimes, but not every day. So you can have all those option launchers in the panel of one plugin instead of having a million icons on your LDB Bar/Block.
  

  my LDB launchers, shown by makerocketgonow

• Broker_Recount: You can access Recount and its options. And Recount is something I toggle pretty often during a raid night. And a LDB plugin just looks better than an ugly minimap button.

That’s just the plugins I use. There are many many others for showing memory/fps, gold, group rolls, location, honor, xp or bag spaces.

Another addon you might find useful is FuBar2Broker. This little addon will try to convert some fubar information into LDB feed. Grid is an example that will work well with this addon.

If you setup your LDB addon for the first time: It might be messy in the beginning. You might have all plugins disabled or enabled and spread across the screen/bar with loads of information you don’t need. Most LDB plugins show 2 information: Text and Icon. The Text might be durability, dps, fps or something like that, the icon might be the icon of the plugin/addon. Find out what you need, text or icon or both. Think which plugins you want to load on your bar. Disable all you don’t need. If you use MakeRocketGoNow you can disable a lot of LDB feeds but still access the launchers through MakeRocketGoNow. Arrange plugins in a way you like. Done.

My ChocolateBar Setup:

click for bigger picture, please

Left Side: picoFriends, Loggerhead (combatlogging disabled), picoDPS, tekability.

Right Side: Skada (LDB functionality included), Broker_Recount (still evaluating if I can switch from Recount to Skada), MakeRocketGoNow, Volumizer.

Additional Reading/Plugin Links: tekkub github