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Addon Corner: Data Broker

And now for something a little more complex, Data Broker isn’t a specific addon, but more a new way for addons to display information. Addons that utilise Data Broker (or LDB) expose their information but don’t actually display it, that job is done by a specific display addon.

Sound complicated? I guess it does, but it’s really not any different from using FuBar or Titan and their associated addons except for two important differences. The first being that for the addon programmer they no longer have to write code for all the possible “bar” addons and secondly it gives the end user (you and me) choice on how we want to display stuff.

Okay, okay, so how does this work you ask?

Basically it works much like FuBar or Titan does now, but instead of grabbing say FuBar and having to grab other FuBar mods, you now just pick a display and any Data Broker mods will work with it. This gives you choice and versatility.

First you need to grab something to display. LDB has been accepted by the community really quickly which means that pretty much anything you used to display on your old FuBar or Titan bars has been adapted to LDB. There is a category for Data Broker addons here at WoWInterface.

Second you need to choose a display addon. This is what makes Data Broker such a cool development, it gives you choice in how you want to display things.

Here are a few display mods:

ButtonBin - A simple tray-like display.
Carousel - A single block that enables you to rotate through your various Data Broker addons.
Fortress - Individual blocks that can be snapped together however you see fit. Can replicate a FuBar-style display easily.
MakeRocketGoNow - Focussed on displaying “launchers” for various addons. Generally used alongside a more traditional display.
StatBlockCore - Also uses individual blocks, similar to Fortress but with a slightly different design intent.

I personally use Fortress with blocks snapped horizontally to look a bit like FuBar/Titan, but you can snap the blocks together however you want. Prior to trying Fortress I used StatBlockCore which is very similar, I just prefer how Fortress looks and feels when snapping blocks together.

There are no doubt other displays than the ones mentioned above, these are just the more popular/visible ones. I suggest simply trying a few out and see how it goes.

Tags: addon, Addon Corner, Data Broker, LDB

Addon Corner - Addon Basics

This time I thought I’d take a step back and actually start from the beginning and cover what an addon is, where you can get them and how they can help you!

So, first things first, what exactly IS an addon?

Well, World of Warcraft was designed so that players can create extensions that add or enhance World of Warcraft’s interface (the stuff you see onscreen). An addon is just that, an extension to the interface, generally to make something more accessible or easier to use.

Great, so what kind of things can addons do?

Addons have been created for a multitude of tasks, if you can see something onscreen then there have been addons to replace it with “better” versions. By better I really mean different, one person’s “better” is another person’s “worse”… 

Addons cannot “play” the game for you however, they can assist and aid you, but you must hit the buttons to move and cast. Pretty much anything else however is in an addons jurisdiction.

Okay great, so addons let you customise your interface, where do I get them from?

Well, this is the easy part, there are few websites that specialise in WoW addons. Both WoWInterface and Curse.com house the majority of addons available. Generally, if you’ve heard of an addon it will be available at one or both of those sites.

Cool, I’ve found an addon I want to use, what do I do with it now I’ve downloaded it?

Once you have the addon downloaded, it is just a case of “unzipping” it into your “World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons” folder.

Wait, what’s “unzipping”?

Addon’s generally come compressed, generally known as zipped (due to one of the most popular compression utilities called PKZip). This saves space and makes transferring files easier. You have to uncompress, or unzip these files to get them in a usable state. If this sounds complicated, don’t panic, the process is exceptionally easy.

You may or may not have some form of utility installed to aid with this process, but either way the process is similar. Simply navigate to where you downloaded the addon and double-click the addon to open it.

Then click Extract all files and click Next, then click Browse… and make your way to your WoW addons folder, typically “My Computer\Local Disk (C:)\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons” then click OK then Next then Finish.

Okay, I’ve done that, now what?

That’s it, the addon should now be functioning ingame. Start up WoW and have a look!

Wow, it worked! Now what?

Well, the answer to this depends on what the addon you installed does. Some addons require a little bit of configuring, some work straight away without you doing anything.

Generally there are two things an addon might do that lets you set it up how you want. The first is it might create a button around the mini-map area that you can click to get to it’s options or perform some task (the tooltip will generally explain). Secondly, more recently it might add a configuration area to the games options panel, to get access to this simply press Esc (or click the Game Menu icon) and select Interface. Select the Addons tab on the top-left of this pane and you’ll see various options sections for any addons you have installed that utilise this area.

Unfortunately, not every addon is consistent in HOW you access it, but generally one of those two methods will suffice. If you cannot figure out how to use an addon or how to access it’s options, I recommend visiting the addon’s page on the site you downloaded it from as there should be some kind of instruction there.

Hopefully this post is helpful, if you think I have missed something or glossed over something, please mention it in the comments and I’ll add or alter the post accordingly.

Tags: Addon Corner, addons, wow

World of Warcraft Levelling Guides

The loveable and quirky Praeludiah asked me about levelling guides earlier so I thought I’d give my thoughts on most of the popular ones and the alternatives available. This entry is pretty long, so have a coffee ready and enjoy. Hopefully it’ll be informative and useful.

First of all let me quickly just state the obvious, levelling guides essentially step you through the questing process, telling you which quests to take, which to leave, where to go etc. They also generally require you to buy them for often ridiculous sums of money.

Are they worth it? In my opinion no, not at all. Let me cover each of the “popular” pay guides first, I’ll cover alternatives after. (I’m not including links to the various pay guide sites as I’m not willing to be held responsible for anything “nasty” you could potentially get from them. If you REALLY want to see the sites, you can google them, you’ve been warned.) Click Read More… to mmmm continue reading!

More »

Tags: Addon Corner, carbonite, levelling, levelling guides, questhelper, tourguide, wow

Birthday Money, WoW and Guild Wars

As anyone who knows me will attest, I dabble in programming quite a bit. Normally not actually finishing anything but dabbling non-the-less.

For my birthday I got a little bit of money, with that money I’ve bought myself “World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons“. It’s a well recieved book that is apparently quite thorough, written by “famous” addon authors.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get to grips with the LUA implementation WoW uses and write some interesting addons, I already have a request for a bag addon from Joanne, she hates pretty much all the bag addons I’ve ever shown her…

I’ve also bought myself the last Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North. I keep getting twinges to play now and then so thought I’d pick it up as it was only £12.

In other news, a fellow guildy has suggested I do a beginner’s guide to WoW addons as my Addon Corner’s are only understandable by WoW Geeks so that’ll be my next Addon Corner.

She also mentioned levelling guides to me so I thought I’d cover my thoughts on those along with levelling addons in my next blog post.

So busy busy me for the next few days…

Tags: addon, Addon Corner, guild wars, programming, wow

Addon Corner - Opie

Rather later than originally intended, here is the 2nd video Addon Corner. Better late than never, eh!

This time covering the Ring-based Shortcut mod, Opie. Again, I apologise for my voiceover… It’ll get better… eventually.

Hope you enjoy it.

Tags: addon, Addon Corner, opie, wow

Addon Corner: Carbonite Quest

Edit: The version I used is 1.251. For some reason 1.26 wasn’t working for me.

And so, it arrives. Welcome to the return of Addon Corner, this time with video.

In this edition of Addon Corner I cover Carbonite Quest, a world map/quest tracker replacement.
I apologise beforehand about the voice-over, hopefully I’ll get better at it as time goes on. Seeing the addon in use is definitely better than not.

You can download Carbonite Quest from both Curse.com and Carboniteaddon.com.

Any suggestions about what I should cover next time are welcome. At the moment I’m thinking either QuestHelper or doing themed episodes, quest trackers, unit frames etc.

Tags: addon, Addon Corner, carbonite quest, mmo, wow

5 Essential WoW Addons

One of my friends started playing World of Warcraft again after a LONG absence and while helping I realised how much I take certain addons for granted. There are some addons which alter the game in such a way that you wonder why they aren’t that way by standard.

This is a list of those addons that I consider essential along with my reasoning and a download link to the most prominent site that addon is available from.

Cartographer - Having all the map visible from the start is pretty much essential for questing, plus you get the ability to see party member locations, a waypoint arrow (for your corpse runs), map notes and herb and mineral tracking to name a few.

Lightheaded - Lightheaded gives you access to comments from Wowhead on your quest log pane, making completing quests much easier, complete with clickable co-ordinates which use the waypoint arrow from Cartographer to show you the way.

Doublewide - Doublewide extends the quest log to two panes, with quests down the left hand side and the description on the right. Makes much more sense than Blizzard’s default.

tekKompare - Lets you compare equipment with what you currently have on quickly and efficiently.

WIM - WoW Instant Messenger replaces the only bad thing about the chat system, sending private messages. WIM adds an IM-like window to each conversation which allows quick and easy replying. It also lets you log chats, use tabbed windows and much more.

“So how do I install these wondrous addons?”, I hear you cry. Simply extract the archives to your \World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns folder.

I’m still working on the new-fangled video-based Addon Corner, the first of which should be hitting this blog sometime this week, but if you want to see my thoughts on some other addons, why not check out my old Addon Corner posts.

Tags: Addon Corner, addons, cartographer, doublewide, lightheaded, tekkompare, wim, wow

The Road to Karazhan …

… is fraught with drama, where even the smallest guild seems to suddenly have ego problems sprout overnight.

I am in a small guild, it originally had around 30 characters in the guild with about a third of those being alts. Some of the members had never been online but the regular members were nice and friendly and would gladly help you out. We generally did a 5-man a day and all was good.

Now, none of us are particularly well geared (with the exception of two officers in the guild) as we are still collecting bits and pieces from normal 5-mans and stocking up on our “welfare” Season 2 epics. This is important, going into heroics with greens and the odd blue is just asking for trouble. (Even mostly blues and the odd purple could be a problem depending on how exactly you are geared.)

The guild leader changed the message of the day to one inferring we should focus on getting geared up for heroics, which is great because that’s exactly what we should be doing.

This soon changed, today I logged on to be greeted by “<guild name> will soon be raiding, get DeadlyBossMods, Omen and GuildCalendar from curse.com”. (as a sidenote, there is no addon called GuildCalendar, they meant the excellent GroupCalendar, all these addons will be covered in a future Addon Corner btw ;))

Raiding? We haven’t even successfully completed a Heroic yet, how the hell can we be raiding???

I was out at a barbecue last night but Joanne was convinced to try a Heroic Ramparts run, it was a disaster. 3 hours total and still no clear.

If we are too undergeared to successfully clear normal 5-mans without incident, let alone a heroic, how can the guild leader seriously expect us to do Kara?

Also, the “friendly” nature of the guild seems to have vanished over the last few days, our member count has jumped to 50, and while that should be a good thing as most of the new blood is already level 70 with some very nice gear, there seems to be a lot of e-peen stroking and bravado.

We shall see how things progress but I’m not very optimistic about the guild’s future.

Tags: Addon Corner, guild drama, karazhan, omen

The Return… of Addon Corner!!!

You may have noticed my posting has pretty much gone down to once a week, sometimes slightly worse. But THAT is going to change. The main reason for post slowdown is World of Warcraft, it’s absorbing all my time like a crafty MMO black hole, however, I have a plan.

Way back before the dawn of time I used to talk about various World of Warcraft addons. If you remember that then you may remember I also threatened to do short video pieces about them too but promptly stopped playing WoW.

Well, I’m planning on bringing back Addon Corner in fancy video form (as fancy as my PC will allow anyhow ^_^). I’ll probably cover a few essential addons to start with, but I’d like to point out some of the more unknown/obscure addons over time.

I’m not sure how frequently I plan on doing these yet, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to create them weekly like before, but I’d like to achieve that if possible.

If anyone has any suggestions for addons or a category of addons they want to see me break or otherwise abuse with a strangely haunting English voiceover, let me know in the comments!!!

Tags: Addon Corner, addons, wow

About Addon Corner

You may have noticed I haven’t done an Addon Corner for awhile, I’m currently planning on bringing it back in a new video podcast style so you can actually see the addons in use. This will kind of be a trial run for me to see how feasible doing a full on podcast is.

Tags: addon, Addon Corner, podcast