Getting Started with FlexBar

Introduction:  Flexbar provides 120 buttons that can be moved, scaled, shaded, hidden, shown and alpha blended completely independently of one another.  This allows you to put just as many buttons as you need, just where you need.

In additon to basic extra bar functionality, FlexBar employs an event (think trigger) / action (command) architecture.  It is constantly keeping track of the status of a wide number of things from your buffs to your health to whether you have a target or not.  When it detects a change in these it raise an event that you can have a command respond to - such as showing your overpower button when your opponent dodges.

Additionally FlexBar provides some extras that just came with the territory:

Extra macros/scripts beyond the limit of 18 with a character limit of 10240 (nearly limitless if you break your scripts into preloaded functions).

AutoItems - makes it so, when you run out of a potion that was on a button, the icon stays there, and when you get more, it automatically puts them back on.

Extra macro commands (these were 5 line bonuses that just expose some things that flexbar already had in it)

• /fbuse Item -- uses an item by name from your inventory
• /fbdoin delay /command -- delays execution of a macro command for delay tenths of a second
• /fbcast -- like cast but will cast pet spells, stances etc.  Also, if you omit the rank it uses the highest rank of that spell.
• /echo #color message -- echos a message above your character's head in the specified color (white, green, red, blue, cyan, yellow, magenta).  Omitting color makes it white.
• /print #color message -- like echo but writes the message to your chat box.

A Note on Performance:  On my low end system (1.1 GHZ Celeron, 512MB, GF2 MX400) - without any mods I get 21FPS at the tower of Azora facing the road.  With FlexBar installed with 120 buttons showing and a couple of events (not many), and Auto Performance Options checked I get 20.  With more events this might go lower, but it shouldn't be much.  On the memory side, it may show temporary drain during configuration, but the amount of that that goes on in normal play is low and will not force the Lua environment to frequently garbage collect.

Installation:  If you have already installed FlexBar, skip this.

If this is the first time you've installed a mod, there are a couple of preparatory steps to take:

1.  Find your World of Warcraft\ directory, inside it, if there is not a directory name Interface, create it.

2.  Inside the Interface\ directory, create a directory named Addons. 

NOTE:  A common mistake is to put Addons in the World of Warcraft\Data\Interface\Addons directory, this is not correct.

3.  Unzip FlexBar, put the entire folder in the addons directory.  You should now have a directory that looks something like (mine is on my D drive) D:\\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons\FlexBar.

4.  Log in, check the Addons GUI (see the button at the bottom left of the character screen) and verify that FlexBar is installed and enabled.  

5.  If, for any reason after a patch FlexBar does not load because it is out of date, check the "Load out of date addons" box in the Addons GUI - DO NOT edit the .toc as some people will tell you.  This is a sure way not to know what addon is causing trouble after a patch.

Getting Started:  A New FlexBar installation starts with all buttons hidden, in a grid 12 buttons wide by 10 buttons tall.

The first thing to do is to display a few buttons to play with:  (note: all these commands are covered in depth in the Commands appendix - including all parameters)

/flexbar show button=1-12

will do the trick.

Now, so you know which is which:

/flexbar text button=1-12 text='%d'

You'll note (if you're not a warrior) that the actions on these buttons duplicate your default action bar page 1 - this is normal and is a result of the way WoW allocates Button ID's.*

Now, the initial location is not where you want it, so look to the top left corner of the button, click on the little handle you see there and drag the button around.

Once you have them where you want them, you'll often want them to stay put - /flexbar lock button=1-12 will make them unable to move.

Sometimes you want the buttons to stay put relative to one another and to drag them as a group:

/flexbar group button=1-12 anchor=1

Now you can drag the entire group as a whole by button 1's anchor. 

Also, sometimes dragging individual buttons is a pain, so :

/flexbar verticalgroup group=1 width=6

will make that group a 2 button high, 6 button wide bar.

Take a look in the command appendix at the appearance, group and movement commands for further details.

If all you need is a few extra bars where you need them, that's all you need to know - but there's more :)  See the advanced topics.

*There are only 120 to go around, and any buttons with the same ID's show the same actions.  By default a flexbar buttons ID is the same as it's number.  On the default action bar, the ID for buttons 1-12 on page 1 are 1-12, on page 2 it's 13-24, on page 3 it's 25-36, on page 4 it's 37-48 , page 5 it's 49-60 and page 6 it's 61-72.  With the exception of Warriors - page 1 is 73-84 in Battle Stance, 85-96 in Defensive Stance, 97-108 in Berserker Stance.