PartyWatch Phase 1b

Not much to show since I last posted on PartyWatch.

I spent a bunch of time testing and optimizing code the last couple of days. For starters the Need icons where taking up way too many resources they way I had it coded at first. Now thanks to SpecialEvents-Aura by Tekkub and some other change on my part things are back under control.

I’m also considering tossing out the target frame buff icons I was planning on adding. At first I was thinking I would want/need to see the buffs/debuffs on my target during a fight but after using it for a while I’ve found that I don’t really miss them. The only time I really need to see active buffs is when I’m healing and I want to see if the player has my HOT spells ticking way or not. However with AceTimer running I can see that just fine. AceTimer also let me know if I need to re-apply a dubuff or DoT and I don’t even need to keep the same guy targeted.

Current bugs:

• When units die and come back to life they are still shown and dead.
• When units die and come back to life their health/mana doesn’t update till the next refresh, ie their health/mana changes.

ToDo:

• Add additional flags
• Collapse the pet frame when no pet is active
• Add targettarget frame

Here I am in a full party in the middle of a Barron run.  Notice the lack of buff icons?  Isn’t it great.  Also notice the bug where Alona our tank is still shown ad Dead even though she really isn’t, also there is the extra space where the pet frame would go if I had a pet which I don’t as a druid LOL.

Step right up to the bar.

It’s bar review day here at WoW Ace Review. I have 3 addons that add status type bars to your screen.

First we have ElkBuffBar and replacement for the buff icons next to the minimap.

Second up is AceTimer a spell timer addon that shows how long your spell effect have left.

And last I have oCD and different way to show you spell and action cool-downs.

Ace SVN for delvelopers only

Per this post.

The WoW Ace SVN repository will no longer be available for non-developers. Simply put Ace has become a victim of it’s own success. The number of addons either new or ported over to the Ace library system has grown to the point that direct access to the svn for everyone is more than the SVN server can handle.

Cladhaire however hasn’t turned the rest of use out into the cold. When an addon gets checked into the SVN by a developer the SVN will automatically ZIP it up complete with all libraries and post it for down load at the below location. (A link has also been added to the sidebar here for the zip files) This means you still have access to the more recent code all in a single location just now via zip files instead of direct SVN access.
Direct ZIP file acess location: http://svn.wowace.com/files/
I’d also like to take a moment and thank Cladhaire for providing the SVN repository for Ace at his own expense. Without people like Clad Ace and the now 100’s of addons that use Ace wouldn’t exist.

PartyWatch Phase 1

I got the basics of party watch working last night. There remains much to do which I’ll list in the todo section at the bottom of this post.

Lets start with a few Screen Shots of Party watch.

In the above SS we can see my little level 24 druid with Innkeeper Firebrew in the target frame. Just to the right of my frame you can see I still need to cast thorns on myself, remember I’m showing needs not current buffs. To the right of PartyWatch is ElkBuffBar showing my buffs. EldBuffBar is a buff bar replacement for the default Blizzard buff icons that show next to the mini map. I’ll do a review on it soon. Since Innkeeper Firebrew is a friendly npc, you can tell that by the green color to his name, I can also cast Mark of the Wild and Thorns on him if you wanted. The icons next to the health/mana bars are click-able to cast the shown buffs. In the above SS you’ll also notice if the name-level-class text gets too long for the area it simply work wraps around.

The making of an addon

After looking over the various options out there for a unit frame addon nothing really quite works exactly as I want. That’s not to say there arn’t some really good unit frame addons out there. But that’s the thing with this type of addon. Everyone wants something just a little bit different and thus the end result is unit frame addons end up having a ton of options. While options are good they also have a price is performance. The perfect unit frame addon would work exactly as you wanted it to work by default without the need for any options at all. But since no two people can agree on what that is you get lots of options so you can tweak it to what you want and pay the price in performance.

After looking over some of Industrial’s code and the advent of the library system in Ace2 etc. I came to the realization that writing my own unitframe addon that does everything exactly as I wanted without the need for any built in options might not be that hard at all.

So I started work on laying out and coding my own custom unit frame addon, PartyWatch.

Couple more Fubar addons Reviews

This time a have a couple of FuBar addons for ya. TopScore and ToFu.  Neither addon fits into the must have type of category.  However both and nice little utility type addons that are part of my list of addons.

TopScore keeps track of you top hits both diacriticals and normal.  It also tracks your heals for you support chars out there.

TuFu is a flight timer so you’ll know if you have enough just enough time to grab a cold one before the bird is going to land or enough time to brew a pot of coffee, take a nature break and do a little on-line shopping.

Clique Review Posted

As the title says my review of Clique has been posted. Link
I’ve debated about either getting a lot of short reviews posted just to get some stuff out there or taking some time and writing fuller more complete reviews. Clique simply deserved a longer more complete review thus it took a bit longer to get done. Hope you enjoy it.

Memory Usage in WoW

This past week I was reviewing one of those show us your UI posts and ran across a nice liking SS.  One of the most impressive parts was the performance monitor that shows under 13mb and 0 kb growth.  I thought dam I try to me my UI mem usage as low as possible and growth down to avoid garbage collection but I no way near that.

The post also including the list of addons he was using so I though I’d try it out and then tweak the final list of addons to my tast.  After downloading and installing most but not all of the addons listed in the post I logged into WoW and and my jaw just about hit my keyboard.  My memory usage was around 20mb and 3-4 kb growth.  It just didn’t make any sense.

I knew the guy who posted the SS and list of addons he wasn’t the type to lie and try to trick ppl so what the heck as going on.  Why was he getting under 13mb while I was sitting at 20mb and growing and I was using fewer addons than he was?  While I pondered this over I logged on my lower level mage that to work on a few quests and my jaw just missed my keyboard again.  My mem usage was under 13mb, 12.4mb to be exact, and showed 0kb increase.  I ran around a bit and even went out a killed a few things.  My memory stood rock solid at 12.4/0kb.  So he wasn’t lying after all.

So now the quest was why was my druid getting 20mb usage while my mage was sitting pretty at 12.4.  Then it dawned on me my druid was sitting in IF and my mage was out in Redridge mountains.  Could it be something as simple as location?  So I took druid out to someplace quieter and log out and back in.  POOF my mem was now at 12.4/0.  However as soon as I approached anything too busy like a major town it quickly worked it’s way back up to 20.

So the moral of the story is just like real estate keep you eye on 3 things at all times location, location, location.

Another interesting thing I found is you can’t go back to someplace quite and do a garbage collection to get back down to the lower memory numbers.  You have to reload your interface or log out and back in again.

Minimalist

New review of Minimalist posted along with screen shots.

Screenshots finaly

I finaly got around to taking a few screenshots in game.

OneBag and FuBarQuestsFu have been updated with a few pics.