Im not going to have them be minibars. Additonal bars yes but minibars area little small for clicker people. I personally use a mix of keyboard and clicking, if i cant reach it with my left hand resting on the wsad keys i click it. The smaller the icon the harder it is to find and click in a hurry.
As far as the chat goes, the mainbar across the bottom is broken up into 3 peices. Leftbar, center hub, rightbar. You could opt to turn off the right bar and slide everything over to the right and stick chat on the left, or put minibars in their place if you wish or just move the target and player windows up top like they are on most UIs. Thats the beauty of layout mode. The user should be able to find a layout suitable to them.
As far as my reaction timer problem...#1 and #2 in your list cant be done as we have no control over that timer...its another peice of the UI that seems to be controlled via gamecode and not xml.
A quick update: The mana/endurance window is in. I still need to add the Jin/Virtue/Pheno points stuff into it though. An idea did cross my mind thoug...where the jin points are right now i could make a HP orb. And on the target window I could do the same...and just put the stuff in the circle inside the bar. I doubt I would do it but it did cross my mind.
I may end up cutting down the width of those 2 windows.
Another thought crossed my mind in that i could reposition the text on the player target window and the mp/end windows so that if you wanted to you could fit them together like a puzzle....again i doubt i would do this.
I will be shrinking the mainbar icons down from 40x40 to 38x38. The concept ones were 38x38 and i forgot to resize them down, so they are a little too big for the bar.
I also had to make some changes to the def target window part...nothing visual just the right click area i had to shrink down. Now to get the right click area you must right click on their name, not their hp bar. I was running into overlap issues that would prevent the user from clicking round slots 2, 3, 7 and 8
One other thought did cross my mind was to make the mana and endurance bars side by side across the top of the mainbar. I like having them close to there because they are your fuel for those buttons. Its nice to have them in the same focus. However doing so would ruin the symmetical balance, and I would be forced to do the same to the player hp and target hp which i would not want side by side.
I dont mean to be selfish, but CoreUI turned into a community UI, slowly drifting away from what I wanted it to be. Dusk i am making to please myself. Thats not to say i wont be listening to suggestions. But in short, i am the judge jury and executioner on this one =)
Besides if I leave some user wanted unsatisfied, that only encourages others to take up the notepad and get into xml modding
One last note - I still have not designed a compass for the UI yet. For now ill stick with the default one but I need to expirment with the imagescroller control and see if i cant make a semi circle compass arcing the exp bar. I doubt it will be possible because the image scroller would have to allow a clockwise and counter clockwise movement which i strongly doubt it does.
DuskUI Development Thread
Linear Mode
