HelloRangeDisplay

A lean estimated-range readout for WoW Classic Era. Shows roughly how far away your target is, in the colour that tells you whether you can cast at it.

Written as a replacement for RangeDisplay, which stopped working when patch 1.15.9 moved Classic Era onto the modern UI codebase and retired the LEARNED_SPELL_IN_TAB event its range-check library registers on load.

Heads up — this is a personal work in progress. I build and evolve it as I play using it, so features land when I need them and design choices reflect my play style.

What it shows

        20 - 30

A bracket, not a number. Nothing in the game will tell an addon how far away a unit is, so the range is inferred from the questions your character can ask — "is that within 30 yards" — using your spells, cached item ranges and interact distances. The two numbers are the tightest pair of answers available; the real distance is somewhere between them.

Colour is the part you actually read, and it says what you can do, not how many yards away something is:

Colour	Meaning
Amber	Too close — inside the minimum range of your longest attack
Green	Comfortably in range
Gold	At the edge of your range
Red	Out of reach — the cast will fail

There are no threshold settings, because the thresholds come from your own spellbook. A mage is green out to 26 yards and gold to 35; a hunter gets amber under 5 where their shots won't fire; a warrior is green only in melee, because that's where a warrior needs to be. Talents that extend your range move the bands with them, and so does every level you gain. The options panel shows where they landed for your character.

Readouts are available for your target and your mouseover (which can follow the cursor like a tooltip, and works on raid frames — so a healer can check range on someone without giving up their target).

Commands

Command	Effect
`/hrd`	Show / hide the readouts
`/hrd config`	Open the options panel
`/hrd lock` · `/hrd unlock`	Lock the frames (locked also means click-through)
`/hrd resetpos`	Move the frames back to their default positions
`/hrd reset`	Reset every setting (asks first)
`/hrd scan`	Dump every range check the addon found, and what it reads right now
`/hrd dump`	Record a diagnostic snapshot to saved variables (needs a `/reload` to hit disk)

Unlock the frames to drag them; they show a labelled backdrop and a sample reading so you can place them without hunting for a target first.

Caveats

Only works on Classic Era, no support for other game versions.
Every number is an estimate. The precision you get depends on your class and on how many item ranges your client has cached — a mage with six spells and six cached buckets gets tight brackets, a fresh warrior gets 8 - 28. /hrd scan shows exactly what's available on your character.
Interact distances are measured, not documented. They vary with your race's hitbox; only Tauren and Undead overrides are known, so other races get the defaults.
Spell ranges are read from the client, so talents that extend them are handled automatically — but a spell you can't currently cast may still report as out of range and slightly widen the bracket. See DESIGN.md.

Testing

Tests.lua runs the range engine outside the game against a stubbed API:

lua Tests.lua .

892 checks across eight simulated characters, including the invariant that the reported bracket always contains the true distance.