Modders: How did you get started?

[Redbeard]

Howdy,

I am wondering, for those of you on the boards who dabble / develop your own mods... How did you get started? Im searching the web for tutorial stuff but just wondered if you had any guides earmarked for your own use,

Appreciate your thoughts.

P.S. At the moment im most interested in seeing what can be done about macro management, especially since we rely so heavily upon macros (well most of us) for boxing...

Thanks.

[Fizzler]

I purchased the WOW Programmers guide wanting to learn more about LUA and warcraft addon programming but just never found the time to get into it. I am not even sure where that book is heck its the size of the NY Phone book for crying out loud I am sure I can find it.

http://www.amazon.com/World-Warcraft-Programming-Reference-Creating/dp/0470229810

I want to say they maintain a site as WoW programming is an ever moving target.

[Bot]

http://wowprogramming.com/

take a peak around there. i just was looking at it for the first time and it looks like it may be interesting

[Jafula]

Some references:

http://forums.wowace.com/

http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=11

http://forums.curseforge.com/forumdisplay.php?f=76

http://www.wowace.com/addons/ace3/pages/

http://www.wowace.com/addons/ace3/pages/getting-started/

http://wowprogramming.com/docs/api_types

Definitely the book mentioned above. My copy is well read.

Other addons as well.

Jamba 0.5 is released under a GPL license; so you are welcome to use code from that if you are willing to release anything you make under the GPL as well.

Macros:

FYI: Macro stuff on my todo list. As I have been working on Jamba a bit more regularly the last few months I might get around to some of this stuff (but don't let me stop you).

Jamba-Target rewrites macros on the fly (out of combat) and substitutes #MOB# in the macro for the name of the actual mob being targeted.

See: http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=16181

So my feature/bug tracker has this section called "Jamba-Macro" and here is the contents of one of the entries:



My lofty goal...

Imagine a first time PVE 5 boxer. Install 5 wows, key clone, maximiser, etc. Create 5 new toons. Set up toons/tags in jamba.

Add macros:

/jamba-group inviteteam (on master)
/jamba followmaster (on slaves)

Pre-bake macros: (on slaves)

/jamba settargetmaster
/jamba setassistmaster

Drag spells from spell book to Jamba-Macro-Baker GUI -> produces draggable baked spell macro DBSM (/cast [target=targettarget,harm][] or /assist baked-master-name; /cast). Drag DBSM to bar and keybind.

Keybind baked target, assist on slaves.

Keybind jambatarget 1-8 on all.

Press Jamba-Bake-Me-Now key/button to bake macros.

Setup complete.

Play (use jamba target to mark mobs, or baked /assist, click spells, win)

Wait - drop one slave, create another. Add to jamba team, bake spells to macros; go. No need to configure macros for master to know about new toon; just drag its spells to the baker; drag to action bar, keybind, press Jamba-Bake-Me-Now key/button, go.

Bake up /target dps1; /cast Flash Heal.
Understand? Pipe Dream?

"Jamba provides a completely seperate macro interface. All of your macros can be written and are stored inside of jamba. Macros can be written with token tags in place of targeting information. For example.

Your current party has a paladin named Tankadin who has been given the tag "Tank1"

/cast [target=tank1-target]

would be rewritten automatically to

/cast [target=Tankadin-target

I may have wandered a bit off subject but I needed to dump these ideas somewhere."



I really like it. I'm sure it can be done. I'm busy fixing spam / performance bugs for Jamba-0.2. But when I'm done, I'd really like to bounce more ideas off you, like being able to drag a spell/ability from your spell book to Jamba-Macro-Baker which produces something to drag to your action bar, etc.

Say if you wanted a button to heal your a toon (party4) - name for party4 is Bob.

Drag heal spell from spell book to GUI. On GUI select tag "party4".
Click pre-bake button.
GUI produces dragable JambaMacro button with image of heal spell and text 'party4'.
Drag JambaMacro to action bar.

Click global bake-all-now button. Text on JambaMacro button changes from 'party4' to 'Bob'.

Now, say Bob leaves and Tom joins.

Click global bake-all-now button. Text on JambaMacro button changes from 'Bob' to 'Tom'.

I'm sure you get the gist and its what you were trying to explain to me...

So I'm hopeful you'll be around to help flesh this out and make it become a reality.

[Redbeard]

Thanks for the links everyone. Since the book seems well recommended I might grab that. Jafula, I am having (maybe its too early) a hard time conceptualizing if I would use your macro program or not. For me right now Id like to solve two (relatively) hopefully simple issues. 1) Limitation of the size / number of macros you can make, and 2) Sharing of macros between accounts.

It sounds like youre cooking up some more advanced features (which is always fun!) but might be beyond what I personally am looking for.

Hmmmm.

[Redbeard]

Hm Ive got my work cut out for me...

Formulated an idea I need to

A) verifiy if its possible
B) learn how to modify an existing wow window
C) learn how to create my own custom window and populate it with info

I will get back to you guys with some more substantial stuff when I actually produce something =)

[Jafula]

A thread that might be of interest:

http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=6910

And the thread about LibRPC mention in that thread can be found here:

http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=5721

[Maxion]

Thanks for the links everyone. Since the book seems well recommended I might grab that. Jafula, I am having (maybe its too early) a hard time conceptualizing if I would use your macro program or not. For me right now Id like to solve two (relatively) hopefully simple issues. 1) Limitation of the size / number of macros you can make, and 2) Sharing of macros between accounts.

It sounds like youre cooking up some more advanced features (which is always fun!) but might be beyond what I personally am looking for.

Hmmmm.

For just that, you can use macaroon, and copy your savedvariables file to other accounts to keep it the same across accounts.