Customizable Raid Cursor Appearance

[vocal violet]

Currently, users have the option to disable the avatar, leaving only a small triangular indicator. While this can be useful, it is often challenging to locate this small triangle on the screen, especially during intense gameplay moments.

I propose allowing users to modify the appearance of the raid cursor by replacing the triangle with a static character, emoji, or a custom image. This customization would enable players to choose a more visible and distinctive marker, making it easier to locate the cursor quickly during gameplay.

For instance, we could have options for different symbols or emojis, which would stand out more than the current triangle. By being able to select a more prominent character, players can effortlessly identify the raid cursor's position on the screen.

I also want to propose an alternative to this problem, in fact I want this solution mostly because I cannot move cursor to raid members as it's stuck on somewhere else.

In these situations, I tend to repeatedly press movement keys, hoping to bring the cursor back to the team frames. However, it can feel like the cursor is trapped, similar to a squirrel navigating a U-shaped tunnel—when I try to move left or right, it remains stuck.

To improve this experience, I suggest implementing a feedback mechanism for when the cursor becomes stuck. It would be helpful if the plugin could provide visual feedback, such as an animation or indicator, showing where the cursor is currently trapped. This way, I would have a clear understanding of its position and could take appropriate action to reposition it effectively.

A big buzz in vision or buzz on controller would do the trick, I think.

[faint flame]

Added:
https://github.com/seblindfors/ConsolePort/commit/3d1324793d13aef877ef122b357110f001180bbb

[vocal violet]

wow thank you! Can’t wait to try it on

[south matrix]

@buoyant hazel

Merged from: Raid Cursor offset and unit frame selection

[native mulch]

• This is my primary request.
  The raid cursor can block some important elements or information under certain conditions.
  It's been mentioned a couple of time in the past - a simple offset has would solve that for the most part and shouldn't take long to implement.

• Fix pixelation of the raid cursor when it's scaled up, by providing a larger texture that is scaled down from. Possibly provide a field to select a custom texture from the internal atlas as seen in WeakAuras.

• Have you ever thought about replacing the raid cursor with frame highlighting (presumably the border)?

• It's not easy to diagnose/debug how the raid cursor will behave when changing selection from say player to party.
  If one frame is slightly larger than the other on one axis it breaks the transition. Weird things can happen.
  Maybe some visualization would help with this problem.

Originally posted <t:1761576777:f>

Let's number these so they are easier to address.

1. Per your prediction, this is not a tough problem to solve.

2. What do you mean by "texture"? The raid cursor has a few textures, the triangle pointer, the health fill border, cast animation, etc.

3. Frame highlighting is cool until it isn't. It means the raid cursor has to touch the frames other than just looking at their attributes, which has a bunch of assertions to it. There is no "rule" how a given unit frame addon should handle highlighting, so it will likely have spotty coverage.

4. This is a fair criticism, and it's a tough one to solve in a good way. The raid cursor doesn't really know what it's doing, the movement is a linear algebra algorithm that takes a bunch of pre-screened candidates and measures angles and distances to determine the best candidate to move to. It's not programmed to behave in any particular way, it depends entirely on the layout of the UI. A common ask is to stop it from moving to the player/target frames, which can be done with a filter condition, but it's not an intuitive way to handle it for the less tech-savvy.

Originally posted <t:1761578378:f>

When it comes to wrapping, where you can go around to the other side of the grid, it requires that unit frames are exactly aligned on the corresponding axis and furthest away from the source among the candidates.

Originally posted <t:1761578658:f>

The algorithm also has a bias towards straight lines. If you have a small grid of unit frames for the raid, and the player frame is sitting underneath but is considerably larger, the center of the player frame will be offset. If it's offset enough, it will require an unintuitive input to reach, such as pressing left instead of down for example.

Originally posted <t:1761578810:f>

All movements by the raid cursor are based entirely on the center of the unit frame. This is not the same as the interface cursor, which is a little bit smarter.

Originally posted <t:1761578876:f>

1. I should mention that you already include an offset but it's a single non-negative number, not a 2D vector which would optimal I think.

2. In this case I was referring to the triangle one.

3. Yeah I believed that to be the case as well, but maybe you had some insight to circumvent that which I hadn't thought about. Some Unit Frame addons allows the user to assign the border outline to decursing and the likes. Maybe it wouldn't be far fetched to allow the user to decide whether they would rather that ConsolePort overwrite this purpose in the name of preference. But I also get the point that focus should be mostly be placed on features that produce consistent and predictable results.
   Thought it was worth a mention though as I believe from a general UX design perspective this would probably be the preferred solution as it probably feels more intuitive.

4. I have been using filters for a while that works as intended.
   Seems like the solution to this would involve a rewrite of the algorithm. One that would wouldn't just look at all available points from different frames but instead the next point from the same category of frames ("who's the next player in the raid"). This would in turn require some ordering sorting logic to determine what is considered next in the given group context, depending on the cardinal direction.
   You essentially reconstruct a grid from the player indexes.
   When the cursor reaches the border of the grid we assume that one of two things happens: we either wrap around or we jump to the next unit frame group.
   I believe that this is what is causing the core of the problem.
   We have no way of knowing what the intention of the user is.

Originally posted <t:1761580555:f>

A possible solution to this is like most text formatting solutions, add a toggle that forces the wrap but give it a conditional statement and possibly a context -Wrap around if in raid (meaning it will never leave the raid frames), otherwise use the following: Player -> Party1 -> Party2... -> Target -> Wrap
This way it's clear to the user and the algorithm what the intention of the user is.
As of right now, there's no way of knowing what group of frames the user wants to focus. Adding input that differentiates between certain groups would allow the user to spawn the raid cursor in the raid frame group and stay there until it wants to move to another group.

Originally posted <t:1761580670:f>

Apologies if my explanation is unclear and/or uninformed. Hopefully you get the overall meaning of what I'm proposing.

Originally posted <t:1761580751:f>

[south matrix]

@edgy flame

Merged from: Customizable Raid Target cursor

[native mulch]

Would love to be able to customize the look of the Raid target cursor or atleast chose x/y offset for it.

Originally posted <t:1678131917:f>

[south matrix]

@opaque mulch @lapis moat

Merged from: Raid Cursor Customization

[native mulch]

I agree. How difficult was it to customize on your own?

Originally posted <t:1697046940:f>

Gotcha. Especially as a resto druid right now, the position of the cursor is a bit painful. But even on all my healers moving off to the side would be a great option

Originally posted <t:1697125188:f>

thanks for the suggestion. Right now I'm using default raid frames with biggerbuffs or something to allow it to show 6 HOTs

Originally posted <t:1697132694:f>

but they are just in 2 lines

Originally posted <t:1697132699:f>

so I dropped the scale of the cursor to .5

Originally posted <t:1697132705:f>

cool I'll try that out

Originally posted <t:1697132738:f>

I know ive used grid in the past

Originally posted <t:1697132743:f>

I asked this same thing long time ago. Had to make own addon to hide the original cursor and replace it with my own that had own texture and was offset certain amount from the hidden raid cursor.

Originally posted <t:1697871647:f>

It is amazing feature but the position is horrible for 90% of UIs. Would really love to be able to easily offset it or change it to highlight th frame.

Originally posted <t:1697871697:f>

bruh how are you selecting people like that? i wanted to attempt healing cuz in ff14 it was sick. this not so much

Originally posted <t:1705953380:f>