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Slip Frames (Enhanced Player/Target Frame)

Unit frame transparency and click-through on demand.

Description

Slip Frames

Adjust unit frame transparency and click-through on demand with the mouse wheel.

Is this addon for you?

If one of the following sounds familiar to you, give Slip Frames a try:

  • You keep your Blizzard Player and Target frames tucked away in the corner or at the bottom of your screen because they’d otherwise get in the way.
  • You have your Player and Target frames in the center area of your screen, but it’s not really great because they often do get in the way: they block your mouse clicks, or obscure your view.
  • You have the Target frame in the mid/lower right part of the screen, and when you move with the right mouse button, you often get stuck because you accidentally click on the frame.
  • You’ve been playing one of those mini games with fixed camera angle, like an Untangling puzzle, and could’t finish it because your Player frame made it impossible to click a node.

What the addon does

Slip Frames allows you to adjust two attributes of the frames using your mouse wheel:

  • Transparency, aka opacity
  • Click-through behavior: whether the frame intercepts (receives) mouse clicks, or if clicks on the frame are passed through to the background/world frame.

Adjustable frames are:

  • PlayerFrame
  • PetFrame
  • TargetFrame
  • FocusFrame

These are the game’s standard frames. Compatibility with unit-frame addons that modify these frames is uncertain; you might give it a try. (If the addon replaces the frames, Slip Frames will not work and you should not load it.)

The Point of this?

By (Blizz-)default, these frames are 100% opaque and always receive mouse clicks. This is a good starting point, but lacks flexibility.

Some third-party unit frame addons allow you to set transparency and click-through, but the settings are buried in a settings panel or require slash commands. As a result, they become permanent either-or settings, making hot swapping impossible.

Usage

With Slip Frames, you can change frame transparency and click-through behavior on the fly, without having to open any settings panel or enter slash commands, just by simple mouse wheel actions:

With your mouse over the Player, Pet, Target, or Focus frame:

  • Click-through: Mouse wheel up (forward) to make the frame immune to mouse clicks (frame “locked”); mouse wheel down (backward) to make the frame receive clicks again.
  • Transparency: Hold down a modifier key and roll the mouse wheel up/down to adjust transparency.

Any modifier key works: Cmd/Meta, Alt, Ctrl, or Shift.

Details

In combat

  • You can change the click-through behavior also in combat, since this can be crucial, e.g. for setting raid markers via right-click. This is securely implemented so that it doesn’t taint.
  • Everything else (e.g. setting transparency) is not allowed during combat.
  • Opacity will automatically go to 100% when entering combat, and revert to the set values after combat ends.

Frame scope

  • For the transparency value, the frames are treated as two groups:
    • Player & Pet frame
    • Target & Focus frame
  • Changes to one group member also affect the other, but not the other group.
  • This allows you to have different transparency for Player/Pet vs Target/Focus frame.
  • Click-through is set per frame. (I can add an option to make this also per-group, if someone thinks it might be useful.)

Extras/other

  • While you hover over an unlocked (non click-through) frame, opacity automatically goes to 100%.
  • Step size for transparency adjustment is 10%. Defaults are 20% for the PlayerFrame group, 60% for the TargetFrame group.
  • Any changes you make will print feedback to the chat console, for example the current alpha (opacity) value in percent; you’ll also get feedback sounds (not in combat).
  • To prevent accidental changes to your transparency values, double-click any of the affected frames (alpha lock). The automatic opacity increase to 100% during combat or hovering is not blocked by this.
    • If you think this doesn’t work, then disable click-through (wheel down) and try again..

UI and Settings

There are no GUI or slash command settings. Everything is done with the mouse wheel. The values will be saved account-wide (not per char).

If you forgot how the addon works, you can display a help text by entering /slipframes or /sfr in the chat console. /sfr version prints the addon version. If the little feedback sounds annoy you, toggle them with /sfr sound.

Have fun with the addon!

Feel free to share your suggestions or report issues on the GitHub Issues page of the repository.
Please avoid posting suggestions or issues in the comments on Curseforge.

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