Preview of the new minimap mod SexyMap

By Alex Ziebart

The mod I'm about to talk about isn't some essential combat mod. It doesn't vastly change how you play the game. It won't help you in the arena or in raid dungeons, or even RP. What will it do? It will make your minimap look totally sweet.

From one of the original authors of Omen and the maker of Chatter (among other things) comes the simply (and appropriately) named SexyMap. Using spell effects already in the game files (I believe the default uses Hand of Freedom as the outside ring and Hand of Salvation on the inside), SexyMap makes your map look... sexy. It's difficult to see just how awesome it is from pictures, but I don't have video handy, unfortunately. What you can't see there is the two rings are animated, one moving clockwise and the other counter-clockwise.


It's extremely customizable as well. There are a few different preset borders, with the default being by far the coolest, and with each of them you can alter the colors via the built-in addon menu to fit whatever you'd like. Do you have a green-themed UI? Make it green. Do you want it to match your class? Go ahead. Zach Yonzon, one of our local Paladins, decided to turn his yellow to make it more Paladin-esque. Holy maps!

For comedy, here's the default borders but in pink.

As I mentioned, there are a few other preset borders, but they're not quite as cool looking, in my opinion. All of them are just as customizable though, and if you know what you're doing when it comes to digging through the game textures and the like, you can create some new borders yourself. I'm no good at that, so I'll just show you another preset!
That, too, can be turned whatever color you want. Blue or pink or green or whatever. One thing you probably notice in these screenshots is that all of the 'extra' stuff from the minimap is gone. The time is gone, the calendar is gone, the location bar is gone, all of it. It's not gone, it's faded, which you can turn on or off in the addon settings. When you hover over the map, all of it comes back.
So things can fade away when you don't need them. If you want them to do so. If you don't, just turn that feature off. If you leave it on, now and then you might run into other addon buttons that won't fade away, and I don't think there's much that you can do about it. SexyMap will try to fade those out, but if the other addons won't let it do that, then that's just how it goes, unfortunately. The problem isn't terribly widespread that I've seen, it's only been a select few so far.

Beyond that, this mod lets you do the usual minimap things: Move it around, suppress certain elements, and move nearby elements such as the default quest and achievements trackers so you can put them in more convenient places if you'd rather have your map where they are.

I think that's all there is to say about SexyMap, and really all that needs to be said. It's a fairly simple and straightforward mod if you just want your map to look pretty. It gets a little more complicated the more you want to customize it. Changing colors is easy, pulling new textures out to make a complete new border is more complicated.

Easiest way to get this addon is via Curse, and it's a fairly new mod so if you run into any bugs or errors, make sure you report it!

If you want to look at the other preset borders before you download the mod, I've put together a little gallery displaying each. I slapped it right in the middle of my screen using the most basic, default UI possible so you can get some idea of how much screen space it will use up in your UI. Enjoy!
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