Letterboxed View

LETTERBOXED VIEW

What is a Letterboxed View? Letterboxing is what they do with widescreen movies to make them look widescreen on older, regular TVs. They do this by adding black bars to the bottom and the top, allowing the full widescreen width to neatly fill the width of the TV

WHY THIS ADDON?
This addon does a similar thing.

Back in 2015, I came back to World of Warcraft after playing Elder Scrolls Online for a while and I realized just how confining the camera view was for the 3D world. It felt almost claustrophic. After some investigation, I realized I could reduce the vertical size of the 3D world on the screen and that would expand the view horizontally quite a bit, sort of like playing on one of those super widescreen monitors, while still playing on a 16:9 monitor. Doing so does not crop the top or bottom, it just forces it to draw smaller on your screen.

Thus, one of the lovely things about this new way to see the game was that I could move UI elements like my Bartender 4 Action Bars, threat meter, dps meters, quest tracker, chat, and so forth OFF the game world and into the black areas at the top and bottom of my screen. No more would I have to struggle to see enemies and fellow players through a host of 2D UI elements that covered the game world.

For years, I did this adjustment using a macro on each character. Then, Blizzard started resetting this view after every cinematic and that became problematic, with me having to hit the macro every time the client reset the view back to the full screen default. I then set about to fix this problem without using a macro by writing an addon. This is that addon.

SETTINGS

By default, it uses 90 pixels for the top inset and 76 pixels for the bottom inset, but you can change those numbers by editing them via Options > AddOns >Letterboxed View

COMPATIBILITY

This addon should work with the Retail, Cataclysm, and Classic Era clients.

ERRATA

The square image I chose for this addon submission is a square-cropped view inside Retail wow. I captured the full width of the screen, but it screamed that the image must be 1:1 ratio, so I cropped it down.

I chose the MIT License option in case I stop playing the game and others want to continue development.