In all honestly, this message board is meant to be for beta testing the addon and providing feedback. At first, I threw out a small mission statement of what this addon will do and, like you said, the scope of this addon has pretty much broken free of its cage and is running around rampant, doing a LOT of stuff that I never dreamed it would do, or to the extent that it does. So, this forum is horrible for explaining to new people what to expect. That's what my LunarAddons website will do, once this project is finished and goes public.
LunarSphere, in summary, is a sphere addon like Ventantes where you have buttons that circle around a sphere, but unlike Ventantes, you can assign any action you want to the buttons as if they were action bars. It has multiple types of "addon" features that are all rolled into one, which uses less memory than having all these addons, uses less CPU cycles, and is typically always up-to-date.
- The 10 buttons around the sphere can also be made into menus that pop-out another 12 buttons, effectively giving you 130 buttons to mess with (kinda like Bartender or Bongos).
- These buttons have Stance Support (if you want to turn it on) ... which is HUGE for Warriors and Druids since, well ... they don't have sphere addons, probably because of the fact that stance support is a pain to add to an addon. So ... Warriors and Druids can rejoice.
- Each button has the ability to automate some action selections for you, if you set them up that way. The "Use strongest water" action will assign the strongest water in your inventory to that button and anytime you get better water (or run out of the good stuff), it will cycle to the next "best" water (Similar to an addon like Autobar)
- You can drag and drop your own reagents to autobuy (Ventantes would buy ammo for you based upon your level, and that was pretty much it), and the list can be huge if you want (Like an auto-restock addon).
- You can also assign speeches to certain actions, such as summoning your pet, so LunarSphere will say a message in "say" or "group" or as an emote something like "Aw, come here fella. I got good food for you" or if you summon your mount, a cute (or annoying, however you feel on the subject) speech will be said, like "Come forth, Great Riding Kodo!" Ventantes does this, but it's limited to the speeches it lets you use. LunarSphere lets you create your own speeches, your own scripts (groups of speeches, like a package) and assign them to whatever spell or item use you want (like a, um ... roleplaying speech addon?).
- The tooltip section of the addon lets you set the game's gametooltip position, and even color its borders and background (similar to addons like TinyTip or CowTip, but less rebust)
- The sphere can have text in the middle that states certain details, like your life, mana, exp, the 5 second rule, and whatever else I add to it. Ventantes has this too, but when LunarSphere is finished, there will a lot more events to watch for instead of the 5-6 that most sphere addons check.
- There are two "gauges" that wrap around the outer layer of the sphere. Ventantes has one gauge, and it could be set to show your life, power, exp, etc. Same with LunarSphere's gauges, but there are more events to choose from, and when LunarSphere is finished, there will be a ton more ...
- Not right now, but when LunarSphere is finished, users can set how they want the cooldown to appear on their buttons. Right now, it's a text display, but I plan to add fading in/out and some other options. Pretty much to make the buttons look more like action bar buttons
- Memory management in LunarSphere will be pretty tight-packed. Right now, users can disable features they don't want and those features will not take up memory while LunarSphere is running. In Ventantes, if you disabled the speech, your memory is still being used to store the speeches and the entire code to display the speeches. That's not the case in LunarSphere. The same for reagent buying and a few other things.
- LunarSphere can hide the Blizzard action bars, the minimap time and zoom in/out buttons, the stance bar, the whole bottom bar, the menu buttons, and some other UI areas. This is for users that want to use LunarSphere for their action bars, their stance bars, their main menu (you can assign bags and menu options to the buttons and open them from a LunarSphere button) and more. This allows users to make their UI more minimalistic without the need for another addon, or keep their UI and expand upon it with LunarSphere. Bartender, for example, hides a lot of that stuff since it replaces it with its own version. LunarSphere will let you keep your bars if you want.
- I offer Catnip. You know you want it.
- Customization. Obviously, you can assign your own spells, macros, and items. You can make the buttons do what you want (within the options presented to you with the addon, which is quite a lot). But not everyone likes the Ventantes/Serenity button artwork (the white circle with black border). LunarSphere lets you pick from 46 different buttom images. Not all of them will be used, and I'm sure most people will hate a majority of them, but there's something for everyone in that list. You can also tint them any color you want. You can show the button shine on the icon, or remove it. You can scale the buttons larger or smaller. You can set the sphere texture icon to be one of over 15 included icons (one for each class icon, horde and alliance image, the classic Necrosis/Serenity/Cryolysis style "orb" and a few others). You can also color this as well. You can change the artwork for the gauges and the border of the sphere. You can change the color of the gauge events (don't want yellow to be the color for Energy tracking? Make it orange, or silver).
- Importing art. LunarSphere lets you import custom artwork for your buttons. 46 button skins is a lot, and when LunarSphere goes public, I hope for 70 total, including square button options. If you want your own, make it and drop it into the import folder and load it with LunarSphere. You can skin parts of the addon with your own stuff. Make your own gauge art (although there's not much to make in that area), sphere border art, and sphere texture art (It's like getting a miniture DiscordArt or SharedMedia or cyCircled addon, just for LunarSphere).
- Importing speech libraries and templates. Users can share their speeches with other users by sending them the export file for their speech and people can import them and keep them in their addon's settings. They can also import templates (button layout, sphere settings, reagent settings, skin settings) from someone and have the same layout as that user.
- Exporting speech and templates. Want to share your sphere layout or your speeches? Just export them to the export file and send them to whoever wants them.
- Smart item recognition. Unlike most sphere addons, LunarSphere searches the items you have and checks certain attributes they have. If they match the criteria of a food object or a mount, LunarSphere will recognize it as such and the auto-item assignment features will use the items found. That means when a new WOW patch comes out, or an expansion, the odds are VERY high that the new drinks, food, potions, mounts, bandages, etc. will be auto-detected without the need to update LunarSphere. LunarSphere was built to handle its own without the constant updating of its code when Blizzard adds something new. Of course, if Blizzard changes something that BREAKS LunarSphere, I usually have the new version out before the patch it out (thanks to PTR testing) or the day of the patch.
... that's the best I can do with short notice. Hopefully it answers some questions and helps you to make your decision.
I'm sure I left out some things ...