It is about 12:05 am and I am working on integrating combat tracker with the heal tracker. What I am going to do is use the working combat tracker code and then reuse some of the heal tracker code I wrote before. Notice that this code was not working so integrating it might be a disaster but I am willing to give it a shot. I am optimistic that this time around I will get my Heal Tracker to work.
After spending a good hour and a half on the project I have written the untested code for the mod. I am going to test it in the WOW environment and report my results. The first thing that happened was that the modification was not listed in the addon’s menu in the world of warcraft interface. This is because I had named it “Combat Tracker 2”. WOW does not allow modifications to have spaces in the name of the container in which the source code for the modification is stored so I changed it to “CombatTracker2”. The second thing that happened was that none of the original combat tracker code was working. The frame is showing below the mini map however when I right clicked or entered combat nothing was showing up in the chat dialog. I am currently blocked as in I do not know what to do. I will probably end up reading the lua chapters again to see what is going on with the mod.

HealTracker is based upon the CombatTracker modification discussed in the previous section. Instead of displaying incoming damage and average damage per second, it displays outgoing heals and average heals per second. The only adjustment that was needed to convert CombatTracker to a HealTracker was on line 34 of CombatTracker.lua. Change log: 34) if unit == “player” and action ~= “HEAL” then To: 34) if unit == “playertarget” and action == “HEAL” then This approach did not work initially because the statistics were showing up as a sequence of 0s. So what I did was I changed the “playertarget” portion of the code back to “player”. The unit we are interested in is the actual player itself and not the player’s target. I still need to get verification on whether this fixes the bug. I used the following resources to make the conversion: I used the description of the Unit_Combat event listed in the reference section of the book. This was needed because I was interested in the unit’s action during combat. pg. 870. Unit_Combat Fires when a unit takes damage during combat. Arguments: 1 – unitID – Unit was affected (string) 2 – action – The action type that happened, such as WOUND, DODGE, HEAL. (string) 3 – descriptor – A descriptor that describes the action, such as CRITICAL, CRUSHING. (string) 4 – damage – The amount of damage or healing received. (number) 5 – damageType – The type of damage dealt. Is 0 (physical) for healing. (number) I also used the wowwiki because I wanted to know what : http://www.wowwiki.com/UnitId “focus” The current player’s focus target as selected by the /focus command. (Added in 2.0.0) “player” The current player. “pet” The current player’s pet “partyN” The Nth party member excluding the player (1,2,3 or 4) “partypetN” The pet of the Nth party member (N is 1,2,3, or 4) (Added in 1.5.0) “raidN” The raid member with raidIndex N (1,2,3,…,40). .”raidpetN” The pet of the raid member with raidIndex N (1,2,3,…,40) (Added in 1.5.0) “target” The currently targetted unit. May be overriden in macros by unit specified as a value of respective Secure Button attribute. “playertarget” The currently targetted unit. Always. “mouseover” The unit which the mouse is currently (or was most recently) hovering over “none” A valid unit token that always refers to no unit. UnitName will return “Unknown, nil” for this UnitID.

     Combat-tracker is a fully functional add-on that is authored by the writers of the book “World of Warcraft Programming”. Essentially what it does is it tracks the damage per second inflicted by you on another unit in the wow universe. It appears below the mini-map (located to your top right) in a rectangular shell and is initialized with the words “CombatTracker”. Once you engage in combat the text of the shell changes to “In Combat”. Once combat is over it will display three numbers which correspond to: total combat time, incoming damage and average damage per second. The rectangular box is referred to as a “frame” in the book and one of its properties is set to “moveable”. This means that the frame can be dragged and positioned to any part of the screen. Right clicking on the frame will bring up a chat screen which displays the same statistics as the frame but with a little more detail. After viewing these statistics you can choose to close the chat screen by hitting the escape character on the keyboard.
     My experiences whilst creating this add-on were quite frustrating. The way the book is structured, the code is displayed in small chunks with accompanying explanations and  instructions as to where to append these code snippets in various files. This is a good approach however I believe it could have been structured in a better way. I would like the book to display all of the code in one location so that the user can create these files on the fly and then have the book extract small chunks of code and explain to the reader what the semantic meaning behind the code is. The author’s approach lead me to confusion and frustration. It led me to skim through the book to try and find either another example of a modification or a tool which made add-on modification easier. My searches led me to Add-On Studio – a tool based atop the Microsoft Visual Studio suite which makes wow interface modifications a drag and drop task. I will discuss this shortly. A couple of days passed with no progress on the add-on until I went to the book’s official website. I realized that the code for the combat tracker was already written and so I downloaded the zip file, extracted it and placed it in the appropriate directory. Success! I had my first working add-on. This was a very big sigh of relief because I believed that much of the code in the book was depreciated and that it was not suitable to work with the latest patch (Wrath of the Lich King). To enable older add-ons to work with the latest patches there is a mode that you must select in the add-on menu after logging in. It treats older add-ons with just as much respect as the newer ones after being enabled. I might warn you though, older add-ons may or may not work completely with the newer patches of the game. I got lucky in my case. To make sure I understood exactly how the code worked I went back to read chapter 10, 11, and 12 in the book. These chapters went through frames, how to add behavior to them and finally how to implement the combat tracker.

I read chapter 10, 11 and 13 and implemented the combattracker from the book. It works and I am pleased with the results. I still need to go back and do an assessment and re-check all of the code to make sure I understand how it works.

Today I was successful at installing Visual Studio 2008 service pack one on my PC. The academic alliance here at UCI gave me access to their software suite which allowed me to download Visual Studio.net in a matter of hours for free. The academic alliancewith microsoft gives engineering and computer science students access to their suite of products at no cost to the student.

So after the download, I had to uninstall the express edition of Visual Basic which I had installed prior to this version of Visual Studio and reinstall add-on studio. Add-on studio sits on top of Visual Basic and allows developers to drag and drop elements to a form which emulates the screen the user will see in the game.

Creating it was very straight forward thanks to the tutorial provided within the AddOn studio interface. All I had to do was drag and drop elements and then define their properties and build the solution. The build then deployed my project to the correct warcraft folder and I was able to launch the game with no problems at all.

Working on Combat Tracker Mod from Book:

Issues: 

Encountered CombatTracker out of date error

Looked at:

- http://www.wowwiki.com/TOC_format#Interface
- http://www.wowwiki.com/Getting_the_current_interface_number

“<path to WoW installation>\Blizzard Interface Data <your locale>\FrameXML\FrameXML.toc”

Did not help so I looked up: “.toc” in WOW folder and used same interface value as wowload.toc

“## Interface: 30000″

- Combat Tracker UI code is not working

The frames should display below mini map on upper right corner but they don’t.
This is probably due to depreciated code in book.

Going to try an alternative to modding: 

- Addon-Studio works with visual studio to provide drag and drop functionality
  for interface elements so you can see how the mod will look in the game

Downloaded from:

http://www.codeplex.com/WarcraftAddOnStudio

Installed the files:

AddOnStudio1.0.1.zip

- Visual Studio Files were installed as well

- XMAL error from VB files prompted me to go to the 

  UCI msdnaa website and download visual studio 
  enterprise edition 

- Forum said that XAML error could be fixed if you
   installed Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

- Visual Studio a 3.3 gig download is 18% done

Last night I managed to get through the first four chapters of a book named “World of Worldcraft Programming” written by James Whitehead II, Bryan McLemore and Mathew Orlando as an introduction to building a WOW addon. It seems simple and intuitive. The programming language Lua which contains the logic portion of the addon shares many similarities to python programming – a skill which I picked up at work. My next goal is to download the Lua Interpretter in its World of Warcraft flavor so that I can actually code in the game. This will allow me to test my code in WOW which is a big advantage to doing it offline. The book was handed down to me from Graduate student Yong Ming Kow and serves as a formal introduction to extending WOW’s functionality. I am excited as this appeals to my creative nature. I love coming up with new tweaks and I am always looking for ways to make things cleaner. Lets see what I can code up in coming hours…

I managed to get World of Warcraft working! The new password worked. I created a character called PunjabiBlood on the Alliance side as a Warlock on the Shattered Halls server. I also managed to complete my first quest and interact with a couple of newbies like me =D Now back to modding updates: One of my ideas for an add-on is to use the warcraft api to create a script that displays averages. I wish I could be more clear on specifically what kinds of averages I want to calculate but at this point my knowledge of the who command is limited. I also want to learn how to dance in world of warcraft, if anyone knows how to do this let me know. My favorite dance routine is from the night elf and it can be viewed here: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/races/dancing.html.

This weekend I focused on getting WOW up-to-date. The procedure involved installing five WOW discs and an additional two discs for “The Burning Crusaide” and “Wrath of the Lich King”. It took at least 4-5 hours to complete the initial installation. After this I needed to obtain 300 mb of patches from the WOW servers. This did not take too long as Blizzard’s heardquarters are situated nearby and I was able to get blazing fast download speeds. I am stuck though, my account does not work, I believe this has something to do with upgrading it.

Hello everyone! My name is Rubin Singh and I am a student with senior standing at the University of California, Irvine.  This blog was created as part of a greater research project under the direction of Professor Bonnie Nardi and Graduate Student Yong Min Kow of the Informatics Department at UCI. It will be used to communicate and track my experiences whilst creating a World of Warcraft (WOW) Addon. 

I have a basic understanding of how to play WOW. Infact my first experience with game was two weekends ago when I downloaded the trial version from www.worldofwarcraft.com. The game is very intuitive and fast to pick up. I explored the single player version of the game for about a year in 2004 so there are some similiarities which will help shorten the learning curve for me.  I am also a big fan of counter-strike — a modification of half life, although I have not been able to play recently because of the workload from school I am hoping to make a comeback this Summer. Moving forward, one of the resources I employed to learn the basics of WOW was ”SyF’s World of Warcraft Tutorials” on Youtube.com. These videos describe: how to select a server to play on, how to create an identity for yourself, basic controls of the game and other critical features to get you started. Profanity warning! There might be profanity useage in the tutorials videos please ignore those and stay tuned for subsequent posts about the setup procedure for addons.