Ka0s Panel Master

Ka0s Panel Master draws plain backdrop panels behind your UI, so a screen full of separate frames reads as a few deliberate groups.

That is all a panel is: a rectangle with a color, a border and a position. It sits behind everything, it holds nothing, and it never moves or touches any of your other frames. Your action bars, your chat window and your unit frames stay exactly where their own addons put them — the panel is just the backdrop they sit on.

If you have used kgPanels, or the panels built into ElvUI, this will feel familiar.

Make one with /pm new, unlock the screen with /pm unlock, drag it where you want it, then /pm lock. Everything else lives in the settings panel or under /pm config.

Screenshots

Panel Master in action

Basic panel

Panels with bundled artwork

Panels with SunnArt artwork

Usage

Slash commands

/pm is the command; /panelmaster does the same thing. Running /pm on its own lists everything below.

The fields you can change on a panel are name, enabled, width, height, point, relPoint, x, y, strata, level, scale, alpha, bgTexture, bgColor, bgClassColor, borderTexture, borderSize, borderOffset, borderColor, borderClassColor, mouseover, mouseoverAlpha, accentEnabled, accentEdges, accentTexture, accentThickness, accentOffset, accentColor, accentClassColor, accentBorderTexture, accentBorderSize, accentBorderOffset, accentBorderColor, accentBorderClassColor, artTexture, artCustomPath, artColor, artClassColor, artAlpha, artFill, artPoint, artX, artY, artScale, artRotation, artFlipH, artFlipV, artDesaturate, artBlend and artLayer. So:

/pm panel ChatBG width 420
/pm panel ChatBG bgColor 0.1,0.1,0.12,0.8
/pm panel ChatBG bgTexture blizzard marble
/pm panel ChatBG borderClassColor on
/pm panel ChatBG strata LOW
/pm panel ChatBG accentEnabled on
/pm panel ChatBG accentEdges top,left
/pm panel ChatBG artTexture class-death-knight
/pm panel ChatBG artFill FILL

Colors take either r,g,b or r,g,b,a, in 0–1 or 0–255 — 1,0,0,0.5 and 255,0,0,128 both mean half-transparent red. Texture names are whatever LibSharedMedia has, and are matched however you type the capitals. accentEdges takes a comma list of top, bottom, left, right — or none for no bars at all. artTexture takes the id of a bundled artwork (matched however you type the capitals), None, or Custom; the five art* dropdown fields refuse anything that is not one of their values and print the real list back at you.

Anchoring other things to a panel

Only useful if you write your own UI code or edit a config that takes frame names — skip it otherwise.

Every panel has a fixed frame name built from the name you gave it when you created it: PanelMaster_Panel_ followed by that name with anything that is not a letter or number turned into an underscore. A panel created as Chat BG is PanelMaster_Panel_Chat_BG.

Other addons can anchor to that name:

myFrame:SetPoint("TOPLEFT", "PanelMaster_Panel_Chat_BG", "TOPLEFT", 4, -4)

The frame name is fixed at that moment and never changes again — renaming a panel does not change it, so anything anchored to the panel keeps following it. The trade is that after a rename the frame name no longer matches the panel's name, and you can no longer work it out from the name alone. Hover the Panel name box in the settings window to see the current one.

Settings panel

Open it with /pm config, or find Ka0s Panel Master in the game's own Settings ▸ AddOns list. It has a landing page and three tabs beneath it:

General carries these:

On Profiles, everyone starts on the shared Default profile, and switching profiles redraws your panels immediately.

On Panels, type a name at the top and press Enter (or click Okay), then pick any panel from the dropdown to edit it. One panel is shown at a time, so the page stays the same size whether you have two panels or twenty. Each panel's editor has:

Two opacities, and they do different things. Each color carries its own opacity, which affects only what that color paints — so you can have a see-through fill inside a solid border. Panel opacity is on top of that and fades the whole panel at once, and it is the level a mouseover panel fades up to.

How panels work

1. Create a panel and give it a name. It starts as a mid-sized dark rectangle in the middle of the screen.
2. Unlock the screen. Every panel puts on a gold outline and its name, and becomes draggable.
3. Drag it where you want it, and resize and recolor it from the settings panel or the command line.
4. Lock the screen again. The outline and the label go away, the panel stops taking mouse clicks entirely, and it settles into the background layer — behind your bars, your chat and your unit frames.

The frame strata is what makes a panel a backdrop rather than an obstruction. New panels start in LOW, which sits above the game world and Blizzard's parchment art but underneath essentially every interface frame — so you can click straight through it to whatever is on top. All eight of the game's layers are offered: BACKGROUND puts a panel under absolutely everything, and DIALOG and above will cover normal UI, which is occasionally what you want and usually not.

A panel never takes your mouse, whatever layer it is in. That stays true even with Show on mouseover only turned on — the panel watches where your cursor is without claiming the click.

A key part of a panel's look is the accent bar — a thin colored strip running the full length of an edge, the look BenikUI's panels are known for. It is on out of the box, so a new panel arrives as a dark block with a class-colored strip along its top, and the panel's own border starts off so one thing defines the edge rather than two. Tick whichever edges you want, pick a thickness, and push the offset positive if you would rather it detached into a separate floating stripe. It draws above the panel's border, can carry a thin border of its own, and takes any status-bar texture you have installed. Untick Enable accent bar for a plain block.

Out of the box every character shares one set of panels, because most people run one UI. If you want a character to differ, make it a profile of its own on the Profiles page — you can copy your existing layout into it as a starting point, so nothing has to be rebuilt.

Panel artwork

A panel can carry a picture as well as a color. Pick one of the pieces bundled with the addon, or point it at a texture file of your own, and it is drawn inside the panel's bounds — clipped there, so art that is offset or scaled up cannot spill out over the rest of your UI.

Every panel starts with no artwork at all (artTexture is None), so nothing you already have changes until you choose something.

What you can set per panel:

Bundled Artwork

The addon ships with a bundle of 100+ images. All the images were sourced from warcraft.wiki.gg and were upscaled and enhanced by the author. The WarcraftWiki originals are published under CC BY-SA 4.0 and the upscales ship under that same license - so if you reuse them, credit the source and keep them under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sunn — Viewport Art packs

If you have Sunn - Viewport Art or any of its official art packs installed, their themes appear in the artwork dropdown too, grouped under Sunn ->. Nothing is bundled or copied — the addon reads what is already on your disk.

The art packs only. Panel Master borrows Sunn's artwork; it does not do anything with Sunn's viewport — the black bars that letterbox the game world. If enough people want viewport support, it can be added later as an enhancement; say so on the issue tracker.

Only packs you actually have are listed. A pack you uninstall stops being offered on the next login, even if Sunn's own saved settings still remember it — so nothing in the dropdown is an entry that would draw a blank panel.

You do not need Sunn itself loaded. The art packs are ordinary texture folders, and Panel Master can draw them whether or not the addon that came with them is running — it knows what the twelve official packs contain, and offers a theme only when that pack's folder is really installed. So you can leave Sunn - Viewport Art disabled. Sadly the original addon has not been updated in a while and is incompatible with WoW 12.x.x, so it will show up as incompatible — but its art packs work with Panel Master regardless.

A Sunn theme is several files laid side by side into one wide bar, and that whole bar is what you get: one dropdown entry per theme, under the theme's own name. Every setting above works on it exactly as it works on a single piece — it is treated as one wide image and cut up only at the last moment. So Fit fits the entire bar, Fill (crop) crops it and may leave only the middle section on screen, a 90° rotation stacks the sections vertically, and a horizontal flip reverses their order. Fit to artwork is worth pressing here: it gives you the bar at its authored size — 1536×256 for a typical three-section theme — which is the shape it was drawn for.

Two things to know:

• Packs whose art has a transparent strip along the top declare how much (Sunn uses it to hang that strip over the game world). A panel has nothing to hang it over, so that strip is trimmed instead — the art sits flush in the panel, and Fit to artwork measures what you can see rather than the padding.
• Tile on a whole bar repeats the entire bar rather than each section, and is capped so one panel cannot cost hundreds of textures. Past the cap you get fewer, larger repeats — never a bare strip. Tiling is also the one case where the transparent strip above is not trimmed, so a tiled bar shows its gaps.

Using your own artwork

Any picture can become panel artwork, but it has to be in a format WoW can load: a .tga or .blp sitting inside an addon folder, addressed the way the game addresses it, e.g. Interface\AddOns\MyStuff\art\crest.tga. The game cannot read .png or .jpg at all, and a path it cannot resolve draws nothing and raises no error.

Converting one is the fiddly part, so the converter this addon's own art was made with is yours to use — you do not have to be a developer to run it. It takes any image and writes the TGA the client wants, upscaling a source that is too small, giving one transparency if it has none, and cleaning up the halo an upscaler otherwise smears along every edge:

python3 tools/artwork/artwork_cleaner.py --single ~/Pictures/crest.png
python3 tools/artwork/artwork_cleaner.py --batch  ~/Pictures/art ~/my-wow-art

--single writes the .tga beside the image you pointed it at; --batch converts a whole tree into a folder of your choosing. It needs Python with Pillow and numpy, and it lives in the source repo rather than in the addon you downloaded — the packaged addon carries no build tools. Put the result in a folder under Interface\AddOns\, then point the editor's Custom path at it: that takes any texture path, so nothing else has to be set up.

What makes a good file. 32-bit TGA with an alpha channel, square, and a power of two on both axes — WoW cannot wrap a non-power-of-two texture at all, which the Tile fill needs. The background wants to be genuinely transparent (alpha 0, not white and not black), because the panel's own fill, texture and opacity show through it.

If you would like a piece added to the bundled set instead of keeping it to yourself, open an issue. Art has to be redistributable — CC0, MIT and public domain are all fine, non-commercial and no-derivatives licenses are not, and neither is traced Blizzard art submitted as your own. The full conversion guide, including how to pick good sources, is in docs/artwork-spec.md.

FAQ

Troubleshooting

Credits

The bundled panel artwork comes from warcraft.wiki.gg, AI-upscaled to the sizes the client wants and redistributed under CC BY-SA 4.0, the same license as the originals.

Issues and feature requests

Bugs and feature requests are tracked at github.com/tusharsaxena/PanelMaster/issues. Please file them there rather than in comments — it is the single place the project's to-do list lives. A debug log (see above) helps a great deal for anything that looks like a bug.

Version History