kgPanels

Welcome to my …

kgPanel Tutorial!

Here you will learn how to use kgPanels as well as make a simple panel, export graphics, and much more!

Firstly, here is the contents:

-What is kgPanels?

-What are the Options?

-Simple Panel

-Parenting things

-Exporting Art

-What is kgPanels?

kgPanels is a panel art display AddOn for World of Warcraft. kgPanels is the successor of eePanels2. This AddOn allows you to place art into your

World of Warcrat Interface. You can also do alot of other things, which I will not cover, but kgPanels can actually display stats much like litestats,

it can also display LuaText, DogTags, you can set the OnClick feature so it can be a button, etc. Again, I am only going to cover the Art portion of the AddOn and not these things.

-What are the Options?

Here are the options displayed ingame. I will help by showing some screenshots through the way as well.

Firstly, to access kgPanels ingame, type /kgpanels config

You will see this:

Here are the options in text:

General Options

-Layouts

-none

Art Library

-Backgrounds

-Borders

Active Panels

-your panels you create are below this area

General Options

Here you will see only one option, [ ] enable addon

-Layouts

Here you can make your layout. You must make a current layout in order to start making panels. To do this, all you do is click on General Options\Layouts and make a layout name. Lets make one together, name it MyLayout. It should look something like this once created:

You can see that I have some layouts already created on my Profile.

When you create it, click on it. You should see something like this:

To Use the Export feature (basically copying a layout), click Export, copy everything here, then close. Then go to General Options\Layouts and instead of making a whole new layout, go to the option “Import As” type what ever you want here, this will be the ‘Copyied Layout’ and then past the code that you previously copied into the ‘Import Layout’ area, then press Accept then Import. You will then have two layouts, one is the original copied layout, the second is the copied layout.

Art Library

-Backgrounds

These are your user made backgrounds already premade, so when you want to make a panel with your custom user-made background, it will already be uploaded into the kgPanel Art Library and you only will need to choose from your list of backgrounds rather than having to always find the directory path every single time you want to create a panel.

If you want to upload a custom background into the Art Library Backgrounds, you will first need to get a program like paint.net or gimp. These are free, or if you have adobe photoshop, or something similar already, you can use this as well.

In order to have images show in WoW they must be divisible by 2. You want your image to be either 64 x 64, 128 x 128, 256 x 256, 512 x 512, or 1026 x 1026. Or images can be 64 x 256, so on so forth. They cannot exceed 1026 x 1026 to my knowledge. Images also must be .tga file, saved as a tga. Now, time to try it out!

Download this file here

This includes both the example background as well as the example border for the below border tutorial,

After downloading it, lets put it in a folder inside your wow directory. Go into your WoW Directory, go into your Interface\AddOns\MyMedia\example.tga

Now, in order to show this image ingame, go into the kgPanels configuration and Click on ‘Art Library’. Type this:

Notice the directory path is:

\\Interface\\AddOns\\MyMedia\\example

It must always be two \\ and not one \. Also, it doesn’t have to end with .tga, and it always begins with two \\ then interface. This is very case sensitive, so if there is any capitalization, make sure it is included or else it will not be loaded.

After you have it typed out like I do, press okay, and then press add.

It should now look like this:

Notice I have alot of backgrounds loaded But yours should look similar with Example loaded, showing a preview of what it is along with the directory path below the example picture.

-Borders

Same as above, all you want to do is add the directory path with the name of the border you want to load in game. But, one thing that is different, borders are very much different. Download the image below to get a picture as to how borders are made:

This is a very simple border made in paint.net. Borders must be an image of 128 x 16 pixels and must follow this basic format. You can re-edit borders and backgrounds, and such while playing and simply reloading your WoW will show your changes. (how to reload – type:

/script ReloadUI()

Case sensitive.)

Use the border provided in the MyMedia zip. Then add the directory ingame, inside your kgPanel configuration:

Make sure you change the artwork type to Border and not Background.

It should then look like this, when you add it to your art library above.

I will explain more below, when we create a simple panel on how to place these in your panels after they are added to your artwork library.

-Active Panels

Now to create a panel! Lets create a panel together. Click Active Panels and click on the field to type in your Panel Name. Lets call it Panel.

It should look similar to above. Now click Okay then Create. A Panel will appear in the middle of your screen. Now click on your panel name again in the kgpanels config and go to:

Active Panels

-panel

-Texture Options

-Text Options

-Scripts

FAQ

It should look something like this. Click Texture Options, and go to Background, click on Example and then go to border and click on Border.

It should look like this:

Now click on Panel and go to The Background Style area, Click on the Background Color, and choose grey, with 100% opacity.

Then click okay. Then go to Border Color and change the border color to Red.

Then place the panel where ever you wish.

Parenting

To Parent panels to things, like your minimap, or your unit frames, you will want to type this code ingame and hovering over what you want the parent name to come back as, then press enter while hovering over the element you want to parent the panel to.

Here is the script -

/script ChatFrame1:AddMessage(“You are hovering over frame: ” .. GetMouseFocus():GetName())

Highlight the whole script, then press CTRL+C to copy it, then ingame press CTRL+V to Paste it. Remember to paste it while hovering over the element you want to parent. For example sakes, lets parent it to the minimap. Firstly, lets copy this script ingame, then paste it while hovering over your minimap, You should get an answer back in your chat area saying

‘You are hovering over frame: Minimap’

Now, type what you got an an answer in the area of the kgPanel you created named ‘panel’ as shown below”

Move how you want the panel to look then lock it.

And that is how you parent a panel to something.

If you parent a panel over your target unit frame, it will hide with the target unit frame as well.