MMOInterface

Posted By: (Dolby) - May 13, 2008, 5:50 pm EST

EverQuest II Game Update 45 has been released today. With this update brought changes to the interface. I have posted a compare of the changes for your viewing pleasure.

HIGHLIGHTS

A miraculous event has occurred in North Qeynos. Pilgrims can learn about it from the witnesses at the Temple of Life.
During "A Prophet Returns" (GU45): There's a mysterious blight spreading across Norrath's cities. The Celestial Watch seeks to help those suffering from it while servants of the Plaguebringer bask within their cries. Which will you choose?
Additional bank space and new functionality to the shared bank have been added. Check out the BANK section below for details.
Grey quests are now easier to find, will award adventure experience and, in many cases, will award more achievement experience.
Coercers and Weaponsmiths and Woodworkers will each find significant changes to their classes.
Priest single target cure spells have been combined into one spell named "Cure".

GU45 Patch Notes

GU45 XML Compare

Blizzcon™ 2008 Announced

Posted By: (Cairenn) - May 12, 2008, 12:13 pm EST

BLIZZCON™ 2008 ANNOUNCED

Back by popular demand, and now with 50% more hall space for your convention-going enjoyment, BlizzCon officially returns to the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA, on October 10–11. Join us for another epic celebration -- meet your guildmates and fellow gamers from around the world; spend some quality time with current and upcoming Blizzard games; and partake in the contests, tournaments, and developer discussion panels that make up BlizzCon.

Press Release:

Blizzard Entertainment® gaming convention returns to Anaheim Convention Center October 10–11

PARIS, France. May 12, 2008 -- Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for its third BlizzCon™ gaming convention, to be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California on October 10 and 11. BlizzCon is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment®'s Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® franchises. In response to the demand to accommodate more attendees, this year's event has expanded from two convention halls to three.
"Whenever we've been able to meet and interact with Blizzard gamers from around the world, it's been a great experience for us," stated Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We're looking forward to seeing even more of our players at this year's BlizzCon and delivering another entertaining and informative event for them."
BlizzCon will offer a wide variety of activities to help all attendees get the most out of the two-day event. In addition to serving as a gathering place for the different Blizzard Entertainment gaming communities, attendees will be able to enjoy:

Hands-on play time with upcoming Blizzard Entertainment releases
Discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers
Competitive and casual tournaments for players to showcase their talents
Areas and activities devoted to licensed products such as the World of Warcraft® Trading Card Game
Costume, machinima, and character sound-alike contests with great prizes
Commemorative merchandise based on the Blizzard Entertainment franchises
A silent auction
More exciting activities to be announced

Tickets for BlizzCon will go on sale in the next few weeks at a price of $100 USD per person. As the event draws closer, further details will be announced on the official BlizzCon website: www.blizzcon.com.

SOE Dev chat

Posted By: (Dolby) - May 8, 2008, 10:23 pm EST

Today Allakhazam held a developer chat with the folks at SOE. A chat log of the event has been posted for your reading pleasure. Many different questions were answered and its a great read. I've quoted the one question directly related to UI Authors...

kiara: Question number eight (point 5 --Bludwyng): (Stugein) Any chance you guys can pass Pet Health to the clients in the same way you pass group member health so UI modders can add members' pets' health to group windows to make life easier for healers?

Autenil: I've actually wanted this forever. Unfortunately we haven't had time to do it.

Autenil: I could probably be talked into getting this on the schedule as something that UI modders would be able to do.

Autenil: We probably wouldn't be adding it to the default UI though.

World of Warcraft Programming

Posted By: (Cairenn) - April 25, 2008, 8:25 pm EST

Written by three of the WoW addon community’s superstars, WORLD OF WARCRAFT PROGRAMMING: A GUIDE AND REFERENCE FOR CREATING WoW ADDONS (Wiley Publishing, Inc.; May 2008; $39.99) is an all-in-one guide to writing addons for World of Warcraft. Addons can take various forms, from simple changes to the functionality and appearance of toolbars and hotkeys to sophisticated suites that perform statistical analysis of in-game economies and trade.

This guide is geared towards using Lua, a popular programming language used in video game development. Specifically, Lua is used for in-game scripting and creating addons for World of Warcraft. The authors cover the most relevant material, as well as a number of pitfalls and common mistakes that the reader may experience in development. No prior programming experience is assumed, although familiarity with languages such as PHP or JavaScript may be useful to the reader in picking up the Lua language. WORLD OF WARCRAFT PROGRAMMING also includes complete instructions on how to implement a number of specific addon concepts such as:

Unit frames
Secure templates
Dynamic frames
Parsing tooltips
Dropdown menus
Scroll frames

The final section of WORLD OF WARCRAFT PROGRAMMING is a comprehensive reference guide to the World of Warcraft API. Having a fully indexed, consistent set of reference documentation makes finding the specific function developers need much easier.

With comprehensive coverage, this book guides aspiring developers through learning Lua and XML, creating several example addons, and provides them with an indexed reference for the API. WORLD OF WARCRAFT PROGRAMMING is perfect for those users who are interested in learning how to script and write addons, and will appeal to established addon authors looking for definitive reference material for the World of Warcraft API.

You can pre-order the book at Amazon.com. They are offering an additional 5% discount on pre-orders, but that is only until they start shipping it. It is due to be available on shelves at your favourite book retailers May 5th (in the US).

About the Authors:

James Whitehead II is the author of LightHeaded, PerfectRaid, Clique, TomTom, and other addons available at WoWInterface. He is also coauthor of Hacking World of Warcraft.

Bryan McLemore joined the UI community in early 2005 and cofounded the Ace Project and WowAce.com. His "day job" is in Web development.

Matthew Orlando is the author of BuyEmAll, CogsBar, MacroTalk, and other popular WoW addons. He's a programmer and maintains Cogwheel's Complete Macro Guide.

The book’s cover art was created by Lar Desouza and it’s based on the characters of Looking for Group, a popular Word of Warcraft-based webcomic: LFGComic

Happy Anniversary from LOTRO!

Posted By: (Cairenn) - April 24, 2008, 4:16 pm EST

It's been a year since LOTRO was released to one of the most successful launches in MMO history. With the additions of free content updates Books 9 - 13, the game is better than ever!

To thank our players and celebrate LOTRO's success over the past year, for the next few weeks players will find special tokens throughout Middle-earth! These items can be exchanged to barter NPCs for gift boxes containing random special gifts like potions, crafting items and recipes, and cosmetic clothing! These tokens are available to all players and are bind-on-acquire. Freeps and Creeps in the Ettenmoors can play too!

Happy Anniversary, LOTRO - we're looking forward to another successful year in Middle-earth with our players!

[Read More]

LOTRO Book 13: Doom of the Last-king Release Notes

Posted By: (Cairenn) - April 23, 2008, 2:43 pm EST

The LOTRO Game Servers will be brought down on Thursday, April 24 from 6:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT) for an update to Book 13: Doom of the Last-king. Release notes are now available on the Lorebook. Roheryn will remain up and available during the downtime. Thanks for your patience, and we'll see you back in the game soon!

Patch notes of immediate interest for this community:

User Interface

The Dressing Room UI will now come to the front of the screen when you try on an item.
Pending Quest Rings over NPC heads will now update to the normal quest ring when the quest is no longer pending.
Fixed a bug in the Auction UI that caused the Bid button to stay enabled even when it was not possible to place a bid.
Renamed the UI Option "Show Dispellable Effects" to "Show Dispellable Effects Only."
Items in the world that advance or grant quests will now close the associated quest UI when you get too far from the item.
Cosmetic pets now have a tutorial hint associated with them
Messages that have an item link at the beginning of a sentence will now be capitalized properly.
Any inventory items that cannot be used in combat will now reflect their usability state changes when entering/leaving combat.
You should no longer find yourself targeting the corpses of your previous attackers when using the "Previous Attacker" key binding.
The Reputation Panel should now always be displayed after clicking on a Reputation alert.
Intermittent issues with items in pack slots not being usable should be resolved.
The trade window will no longer show the name of the previous trading partner when starting a trade with someone new.
Dye interactions should no longer cause lingering dye pot mouse cursor issues.
Fixed some feedback problems when using the /inspect command: When used on non-players, would give a general error. When used without a selection, the help feedback was incorrect.
Locked movies in the Movie Library UI will now appear to be grayed out.
Fixed an issue with fading out the player at the end of swift travel.
Fixed an issue where some effects that are applied to the revived target weren’t included in the tooltip for revival skills.
Fixed an issue where newly-added swift travel routes would be unavailable until you talk to the destination stable-master again.
The Social/Who panel could get into a weird state where it wouldn't update until it was closed and reopened. This has been corrected.
Fixed a skill UI issue where companion skills would not grey out when using a non-combat companion skill.
You can now chat using the Numpad enter key. If you have the Numpad Enter key bound to another action already, you may have to rebind it.
Fixed /damagetext to allow floaty damage from other players to be seen.
Floaty critical damage text is more obvious now.
Floaty damage text doesn't overlap with entity names anymore.
Sound device names in the drop-down menus for Voice Playback and Voice Capture no longer get cut off.
"Report as Spammer" option changed to "Report as Gold Spammer" to reflect its intended functionality. All other reporting issues should be filed via ticket.
You can now use the "revert" button on the options/key mappings UI after you've mistakenly removed a key mapping.

Maps/Radar

Crafting Vendors now show up as their own map note type, so you can filter them differently than other vendors.
You can now track quest escort NPCs on both the radar and map.
Festival NPC's map notes will no longer display when the festivals are inactive.
Fog-of-War on the Map Panel for new areas added to the game since launch (Evendim, High Pass, Tal Bruinen, etc) were not functioning correctly and were sometimes revealing portions of the map they shouldn't. Shame on them! Players may notice some previously discovered map portions become undiscovered. Visiting those locations again will rediscover any undiscovered locations that were previously discovered.

Chat UI

The command "/lff" is now used to chat in the Looking For Fellowship chat channel. To toggle your "Looking For Fellowship" flag on or off, you must now use the command "/lookingforfellowship"

Deed Log/Quest Journal

Fixed the fact that the tooltip for the Add To/Remove From Tracker button in the Deed UI erroneously referred to the Deeds as Quests.
When you receive an invitation to join a fellowship you will now see the members of that fellowship before you join.
The quest journal and tracker "ready-to-turn-in" checkmark now appears only when the quest is ready to turn into an NPC (or in some cases an item); it will no longer appear early when you still have something to kill (such as the Captain-General quests in the Ettenmoors).

Tooltips

The tooltip for channeled skills now calls them Channeled Skills and not Toggle Skills.
Monster player "Corruption" and "Appearance" traits will now be labeled correctly in their tooltips.
Fixed an issue where typing characters in the chat window alongside embedded items could occasionally cause text corruption.
Tooltips for locked movies are now disabled in the Movie Library UI.
When a trait/virtue is equipped, it will now be labeled as “Equipped” in the tooltip and have a clear distinction in the UI from traits/virtues that are not equipped.
The word “Equipped” will now appear above an equipped Instrument when you cross-compare it.
Fire and light oils, among other potions, now show their duration in tooltips.
The mysterious "Minimum Rank: #" tooltip for some items is now more clearly written as "Requires: Glory Rank #" (or "Infamy" for monster players).
Skills which have an additional effect when you attack from the correct position now show that in their tooltips.
Fixed spelling and grammar errors for the Tentacle of Helchgam's tooltip description.