More WoW Machinima

I love me some machinima. “The Device Has Been Modified” is very stylish, very cool, and I really like the music:

Baron Soosdon has done some super work here, and seems to have quite a few other pieces under his belt. Well done, sir!

Me != Teh Innernets

I don't hate John Scalzi. In spite of our political differences (and holy crap there's a bunch of those), I think he's a smart, funny, respectable human being. I also enjoy watching him whip out the ClueBat(tm) because I'm like that about private property and taking authority over maintaining same.

You go, John. Kick 'em twice. Fargin' kneebiters, all of 'em.

Who Watches The Watchmen?

I do. It was really pretty good; both Kathy and I gave it 3.5/5 stars. I'm not sure how much it will appeal to people who aren't comic book types, but Kathy and I both enjoyed it.

It's dark ... make no mistake about that.

But holy christ, Jackie Earle Haley did a phenomenal job. Whenever he was onscreen, you could feel the controlled anger from Rorschach, and he was a serious serious badass. Mad props.

All You Need Is Hot Chicks and iPhones

More Proof My Wife Is Smarter Than Me

I was resisting publishing my addon because it seemed more work than it was worth. Kathy, though, insisted I should put it up on Curse. I figured other people already had something to deal with the neverending influx of trash loot while questing; certainly I couldn’t be the first guy to keep having to throw crap away so I could loot the stupid mob so I could skin it.

So anyway, I published it: MakeRoom on Curse.com. To my complete astonishment, people downloaded it immediately without me even trying to market it. Then they started adding comments and suggesting good improvements.

As of right now, there are 463 downloads, and three people have marked it a favorite of theirs. Woo hoo! Go me!

As an aside, if you can translate the messages into other locales besides U.S. English, it’d be a big help: MakeRoom Localization. Thanks.

In Case You Find This Useful

Kathy was on me to put my addon up on Curse. So I did. It’s at http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/makeroom.aspx. There is a bug with the release version that’s posted that I can’t fix until I get home tonight, so if you want to check it out, do that tomorrow.

One Down, 15 To Go

I just completed my first week of the “20/20 Lifestyles” weight management program. For the first week, my diet was restricted to meal replacement shakes (sold by them, ‘natch), berries, and very lean protein. I was really glad to finish that first week and get to add some vegetables back into my diet.

The good news is that I lost 7 1/2 pounds that first week. Woo hoo! Go me!

Looks Like Trent Gained Some Weight

Most realistic depiction ever.

Weight Loss Program Woes

So I’m on this weightloss program for (counts on his fingers) four days now; nothing but meal replacement shakes and lean protein. When do I get to go back to Fatburger? I’m dying here.

World of Warcraft addon development is teh suXor

I’m leveling up a whole passel of toons. Six of them to be exact, and many of them have skinning as a profession. You can’t skin a corpse until you have looted it. Put those two together and you get “inventory is full”. A lot.

So I started writing an addon to notice when my bags filled up and destroy the cheapest grey item in my bag to make room for the new crappy loot item. When it was just that (find the single cheapest thing and get rid of it), it was all easy: just a bit of Lua code and Bob’s your uncle. Then I ran into the situation where I needed to loot two things before I could skin the mob. My addon destroyed the first item okay, but I was irked that I had to manually run the addon again to make room for the second crappy loot.

My friend SeanK suggested I open a window with some number of crappy grey items so I could easily click-to-destroy several of them at once. “No problem” I thought, and continued to think that right up until I actually tried to write the damned thing.

The documentation for the API is okay, such as it is, at WoWWiki. Blizzard of course doesn’t publish the API docs although I’m completely sure they have docs. But at least somebody is publishing something.

The big pain is the actual UI work. The UI is written in their FrameXML dialect (rather like XAML except really really poorly documented). The only saving grace was you can download a tool from Blizzard to extract all of the Blizzard-authored UI crap so you can see how they did it because really that’s all the docs they’re willing to share. Hmph.

The second big fly in the ointment is when you try to test the code. Lua errors in-game pop up a nice debugger window with stack traces and everything (from the !Swatter package, I think .. some addon I got as part of some other addon I wanted). But XML errors and your addon silently vanishes. Nothing. Nada.

And is there a schema file so you can validate your XML? Well, there’s a local copy embedded into the game files that you can extract via the Blizzard download tool, but why in the world does anybody do XML development environments without putting their schemata online at the URI where their namespace lives? Seriously … are you short the bandwidth or something?

Bah.

Anyway, I finally got a release candidate after about two hours of honest effort embedded over two days of full-time cursing/researching/ReloadUI() iteration. Man, I wish we (MSFT) would take on addon development seriously because we would put out some serious motherf*@#!ing tools because THAT’S THE MICROSOFT WAY.

They Both Screwed Up

Kathy and I watched the inauguration on teevee, and had a quick discussion about which of them screwed up the oath of office. I think we agreed that Roberts dorked it up, but the Language Log says they're both guilty. For extra bonus points, there are even Constitutional references in there! Win!

Recruit-A-Friend: A Post Mortem

On Thursday, the 90 days of my triple XP from Recruit-A-Friend (RAF) expires. I didn’t make the best use of my time, and at this point I really wish I had gotten serious about using it sooner. I wanted to scribble down a few notes in case I can save somebody else a bit of trouble.

First, let me say that I was trying to level up alts via dual-boxing. My wife and oldest daughter were just normally questing (they’re also RAF linked), and they got up to the low 40’s without much difficulty, but also without really working on it. If you just want to level up normally but faster, then go right ahead. Have fun. If this is you, then the rest of this won’t really apply to you.

Fun With Dual-Boxing

Like I said, I was trying to level up multiple alts. My original plan was to play two characters at a time, and then do paid transfers to get them from the linked account to my account after it was all said and done. I set up my environment  as suggested by WoWWiki and rolled up my first pair: a warrior and a rogue. I set the rogue on autofollow and drove the warrior. When I got into combat, I’d click back and forth between the windows furiously clicking and typing. It sort of worked until I got up to about level 10, where I was overwhelmed by the complexity of playing two reactive melee classes.

I looked at what was making things difficult, and it was that the follower needed to stop following to start fighting. Clearly I needed a caster as a follower instead. I also wanted to reduce the workload in managing the follower, so I wanted him to have two or three useful things to do.

I got a key broadcaster, so that any buttons I pressed in the main window would be duplicated into the follower’s window. I setup a handful of macros (follow the leader, assist the leader, heal the leader, get on/off your mount), and rolled up a rogue with a priest follower.

That worked much better. I drove the rogue, and when I ran into combat I’d hit the “assist the leader” button and the priest would Smite. I’d hit the “heal the leader” button and the priest would heal me. That worked great until about level 20 or so, when occasionally the priest would pull healing aggro and then I couldn’t kill the mobs before the priest ate it.

I refined the macros a bit to use “[target=focustargettarget,nodead,help][target=focustarget,nodead,help][target=focus,nodead,help][]” and to set the leader as focus. That worked almost perfectly almost all the time. I still died occasionally, but it was rarely from not getting the priest to do what I wanted him to do.

Leveling Guides

I am a big fan of Jame's Leveling Guides. I fdllowed his guides to level up my main from about 20 to 74 and was very impressed with the speed of progress and with the completeness of the guides. I also liked the price (free).

When dual-boxing, of course, you have to complete the quests for both toons. I never found a good way to automate the quest turn-ins, or to automate the looting, so I would have to click back and forth between windows to turn in quests, loot kills, and get the occasional quest that couldn’t be shared.

Also, I didn’t do all of the quests. In fact, I skipped over a whole lot of them, and skipped entirely doing quite a few zones. That’s because collection quests with drop rates that aren’t close to 100% really suck, and with 3x XP I didn’t have to do them. So I didn’t. Even with skipping collection quests, I still hit the level cap for the 3x XP well before the end of the guides.

Near the end, I gave TourGuide a try. This is an in-game addon that automates a leveling guide. It has a very minimal display normally, automatically tracks your progress through the guide with per-toon records, and is generally a lovely tool. Jame hasn’t posted most of his guide in TourGuide format, so there’s that to consider, but where the TourGuide guide matched the quests I was doing, it made it significantly easier to do (I did all of Dustwallow Marsh using TourGuide).

Conclusions

I enjoyed this, and will enjoy my new alts. I wish I had started seriously leveling them up as soon as I started the RAF instead of waiting until it was almost over because then I would have had a full set of toons at level 60+ instead of just the seven I’ve got now.

The dual-boxing was a fun challenge, and I enjoyed using my followers to help level up. I am looking forward to not having to use them, though, as they still represent a certain amount of duplicate effort (getting two full sets of loot items, clicking over to get/turn in quests, etc).

I also really enjoyed skipping all the stupid collection quests since I didn’t have to do them. Yay!

If you’re considering dual-boxing to leverage your RAF bonus, then I say “go for it.” If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to try to answer them.

Exciting new audiophile technology

Check out these new products from the Intelligent Design Team at Elemental Voice. They’re spectacular.

There’s a word for that?

English is written left-to-right, or LTR in programmerese. Arabic (among others) is written right-to-left, or RTL. And, it turns out, some languages are (or more precisely “had been”) written both RTL and LTR on alternating lines.

There’s a word for that: boustrophedon.

So now I have inflicted YET ANOTHER worthless piece of trivia upon your poor unsuspecting brain. Ha ha. I win.

Tournament Scrabble(tm) players, you already knew this one because it’s supposedly on your list of acceptable words. But you know what isn’t? “Boustrophedonically,” which is a real word but won’t fit within the confines of a Scrabble(tm) board. Neener, neener.

How do you people FIND these things?

Elizabeth Bear points you to the Best! Amazon review! Evar!

I Never Thought I’d Miss Mary Murphy

I hate hate hate her incessant screaming and neverending quest for catchphrase immortality. That said, we watched the premiere of “Superstars of Dance” last night; it was fun seeing more dance on television, but I would really have liked to hear the judges explain their votes at least somewhat. I especially would have liked them all to explain why they gave the Russian soloist such low marks. At least on SYTYCD the judges have to provide some commentary whereas SoD just has them spit out a number and nobody knows why they rated the dancer 6/10. Bleah.

It also took me longer than it should have to realize that the judge from India wasn’t negating everything the Argentinian judge was saying, he was just prefacing his vote of 9/10 by saying “nine” in some-language-not-English. Sometimes I are a dope.

Rock Band 2 Is Teh Awesum!!!!

Holy crap, Rock Band 2 is awesome. I've been playing it, both solo as well as with my two daughters, and it's been a whole lot of fun. It's awesome, covered in awesome sauce. In addition to all of its merits as a solo game, the fact that I can play it with two kids, one of whom is only 6, and still have good results says a great deal about its family-friendliness.

I'll now be telling everybody I know to upgrade. So far, that means ... um ... you.

Happy New Year!

Have a happy New Year, and I hope this year finds you and yours healthy and prosperous, or at least as prosperous as you can manage given what the hell is going on in these United States.

Merry Christmas

Or, as we call it around my house to my mother's grave disappointment, "Atheist Kids Get Presents Day."

Cheesetastic video + Choose Your Own Adventure

Equals WIN!!!! Thank you, Megan Messinger and TOR.COM. I feel complete now.