Google's WEBP image format and World of Warcraft

I got my hands on Google's new image file format today and started testing it on some images I had lying around. I specifically wanted to see how it did with bad JPEGs of rendered sceenes. Hard edges and re-processed artifacts are something that JPEG traditionally handles very poorly, so there's some real, practical benefit to having a new format that can do these things well.

I took 9.5MB of input screenshots from my library and got 3.9MB of images out at 75% quality. Now, 75% in JPEG is pretty poor, but these don't look all that bad at all. At least not worse overall than the input (WoW compresses its screenshots pretty heavily).

More interestingly, however, here are some visual comparisons. All of these images are PNG format, converted either from the original JPEG input or from the converted WEBP at the given resolution.

Original screenshot (cropped region saved as PNG from original JPEG). Full file size: 541KB.
This is the 75% quality version of the same image as WEBP. Full file size: 257KB.
And this is the same WEBP conversion again, this time at 85%. Full file size: 347KB.
A second original image, again cropped and saved as PNG from a JPEG original screenshot. Full file size: 189KB. (re-compressed at 75% quality as JPEG, it was 132KB).
A 75% quality WEBP conversion. Full file size: 72KB.
An 85% quality WEBP conversion. Full file size: 109KB.

The lessons I learned from this are:

• WEBP does have some visual loss, even at 85% when it comes to highly saturated color, especially red.
• The file size drop is quite dramatic, even over a re-compressed JPEG at a lower quality.
• Overall, the look of the WEBP files is impressively smooth.
• I noticed (not in the samples, above) that splotchy regions of similar color, but varying value were sometimes flattened to the point that information was clearly being thrown away. At 75% quality this was a substantial change, but at 85% quality, it was hardly noticeable.

I really look forward to this format being available in the majority of browsers, so I can safely start using it!

An Open Letter to Blizzard: Add a Battle.net Authenticator Option

Recently Blizzard (vendor of World of Warcraft as well as the upcoming Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 titles) has switched over to their networked gaming platform Battle.net to manage all accounts for their games. In doing this, they've also pushed out an authenticator that's much like many high tech employees use to work from home. These little gadgets have a secret formula that they use to produce the next number in a sequence every time you press the button. Battle.net knows this sequence, and can verify your identity by making sure that the code you enter is the next (or nearly next, just to allow for mistakes) number.

Recently WoW.com has been suggesting that Blizzard might be on the edge of making these mandatory for the game. I understand this move, but there are two primary reasons people don't agree with it, and that it may well hurt WoW. First I'll cover those reasons and then I'll discuss the ways to work around them without giving up on account security.

(more...)

Occulus and How WoW Can Make Vehicles Fun

World of Warcraft's Occulus is a beautiful instance. It's wide open to the sky, designed in 3 dimensions and otherwise breaks the mold that much of WoW's 5-man instance stable has set. And yet, it's widely considered to be a failure. I recently read one blog post about this that made some excellent points about why it was a failure. I'd like to analyze that a bit deeper and then discuss what I think the future of vehicles could be (yes, I think they have a promising future in 5-man instances and even raids).

Occulus often starts this way: 5 people zone in. 2-4 of them immediately drop group and port out. Why? Because they've done this before and they know that on average, even if they know what to do, they'll probably die at least once trying to finish the final encounter because someone won't. You see, having to get to know new abilities is a pain, but it's a one-time pain. Once you know what to do, you're all set. The problem is that you run a high probability of getting people who don't know what they're doing. They won't be like the warlock who's inexplicably doing half the dps they should be. They'll fail utterly to execute their role because they don't know what it is.

So, how do you fix that? There are three ways:

1. Vehicles have no abilities and role is easy to understand (e.g. you're in a chopper... drive away from the boss until it fades)
2. Vehicles have very simple abilities and are used only for a small part of the fight (think DTK final fight, but even slightly simpler and only once per fight).
3. Vehicles are an optional element of the fight (e.g. one player must get on a giant and use a complicated set of abilities during a boss fight). This is the Wintergrasp model.
   

Players will appreciate these roles for vehicles because it doesn't violate the value proposition of having learned to play their class. Right now, lots of players are gun-shy of vehicles because of Occulus, but if they continue to be as fun and optional as Wintergrasp or as intermittent as DTK, I think that it will be a fun and enjoyable part of the game.

3 or 5-manning Blackrock Depths (BRD) Post 3.3

A long time ago, my World of Warcraft guild, Saturnalia, leveled 3 characters by doing dungeons together at appropriate level. I don't know if we were the first to 3-man all of the old world dungeons at appropriate levels, but we had a blast. I originally posted a guide to Blackrock Depths for other 3-man groups, but now it seems appropriate to update this for the post-3.3 era of the random dungeon finder. I'll keep all of the 3-manning notes just in case you want to try it, but this guide should now be even more helpful to those who want to do BRD as a random dungeon.

 

Read on for the full guide...

 

Random dungeons in WoW

World of Warcraft's 3.3. patch added a new feature called random dungeons. This allows characters of abotu level 14 and higher to place themselves in a queue for a dungeon. When you do this, you'll be in queue with everyone else in your battlegroup (a related set of realms that typically only saw each other in PvP battlegrounds and Arenas). If you're doing random dungeons, here are some tips:

• At low levels, make sure you loot the last boss. The reward is apparently on a boss, not given automatically. I lost out due to this.
• If you don't zone in automatically, you can click the "transport to dungeon" or whatever it's called button after the party is formed.
• Don't sign up as leader unless you're familiar with the dungeon and willing to walk people through it
• The penalty for leaving is just a 15 minute time-out. If you get a really bad group, just bow out politely.
• The new zone map is awesome. Use it.
• This will probably be the new way to power-level, since it gets you tons of dungeons faster than you could run to them.
• If you die, you have to run back in. Make sure you know the layout outside the dungeon before going in.
• If there is an option to disenchant, don't hesitate to use it. It's the same priority as "greed." Of course, check sell price for the item first. Greed might be better.
• If someone wants to leave the group, don't get upset. They're automatically replaced.
• If someone is linkdead, give them some time (e.g. a few minutes) and then initiate a group-kick vote.
• When new people come in to an existing group, ask if they need an escort. Don't assume they know the way to where you are in the dungeon.
  

It's a lot of fun at lower levels. At high levels, it finally makes pugging worth doing for me. I never wanted to pug before, but I think that's because there was so much emphasis on not pugging for players who were good. Now the good and the bad all want to get the rewards from random dungeons, so you're more likely to get an evenly mixed group.

First Flight in Dragonblight

World of Warcraft is a beautiful game, but sometimes the grind-heavy aspects of the game make it easy to forget that. Today I took my Turbo-Charged Flying Machine for a spin for the first time (my engineer finally got around to making one), and I decided to Fraps up a movie of the experience. The music is by Celestial Aeon Project, from their albums Aeon 2 and Mind's Eye, both of which are distributed under a Creative Commons license at Jamendo.com.

Get that Candy: World of Warcraft Halloween Quests

This article was written on my old blog in 2008, and may be slightly out of step with the 2009 event, but should still prove a useful reference

If you're playing WoW, and and not getting the Hallow's End (Halloween) event candy from the various inns around Azeroth and Outland, you really should! Not only is the candy really nice for stackable stat buffs (defense, hit rating (which includes spell and melee hit now), and two kinds of spellpower), but it also gives experience for every inn you get candy from. Here's how I went about collecting them all. (more...)

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm: No Neutral Goblins; Lots of Flying

Goblins and Worgen as depicted on worldofwarcraft.com's Cataclysm site

The word is out, and some of what I've predicted here is right, and some is wrong. Goblins won't be a neutral race, sadly (I really think this would have helped WoW by implying that at least one race is capable of dividing politics from the color of their skin....)

However, Goblins will be one of the two new races. Worgen will be the other. There will be flying mounts in the old world, which we've been asking for forever. Also many of the long-in-the-works items will be in Cataclysm:

• Uldum
• Gilneas (home of the Worgen)
• Rated battlegrounds

The really exciting part about this expansion is that it will re-shape most of the old world, and place high and low level players in the same continents again. For PvP servers, this may not be a win, but for the rest of the servers, it's going to be nice to get a sense again that there are other players around, and not just glimpse the occasional other leveling player.

There'a lot of art samples up on MMO-Champion (who have been predicting a lot of what's coming up over the past month or two) and they've also put up a FAQ that's quite helpful, though they don't explain where it came from (something at Blizzcon, one imagines).

WoW.com has a really cool map up and a liveblog of the whole announcement panel.

C|Net tried to cover the announcement, but they can't even keep the links on their brief WoW article working. I'll get more info and add it here, as I can.

Other details:

• Level cap 85
• Worgen will be able to transform to/form wolf form
• Goblins will save Thrall after being decimated by Deathwing, which is why the remaining goblins join the Horde
• Large scale use of phasing (where your actions can place you in a different version of a zone than others see) will be part of the expansion
• Every raid encounter will have a hard-mode

Icecrown: More Bosses Than Ever Before?

Today, Ghostcrawler (the enigmatic and trivially trolled lead designer for World of Warcraft) announced that the final (announced) raid instance of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Icecrown, will have at least 31 boss encounters. That number may not mean much at first glance, but here's what came before. This is the complete list of all previous WoW raids and how many bosses they had:

• Zul'Gurub 13
• Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj 6
• Onyxia's Lair 1
• Molten Core 10
• Blackwing Lair 8
• Temple of Ahn'Qiraj 9
• Naxxramas (pre-TBC and WotLK) 19
• Karazhan 14-18 (depending on how you count Chess and Wizard of Oz)
• Zul'Aman 6
• Gruul's Lair 2
• Magtheridon's Lair 1
• Serpentshrine Cavern 6
• Tempest Keep 4-5 (depending on how you count Kael'thas Sunstrider's advisors)
• Battle for Mount Hyjal 5
• Black Temple 9
• Sunwell Plateau 6
• Eye of Eternity 1
• Vault of Archavon 3
• Obsidian Sanctum 4
• Ulduar 14
• Trial of the Crusader 5

You'll notice that these barely crest above half of what Icecrown is going to have. Truly, Icecrown is going to be the largest time sink ever to hit World of Warcraft. But there's something else to it... It's also likely to be the stop-gap to the next expansion. Many have speculated that there would be another raid after Icecrown, the way there was in Burning Crusade with the Sunwell, but if they're going to push out their largest dungeon ever and then have an expansion sometime early next year, I don't think they're going to have time for yet another raid instance after Icecrown.

More to the point, I don't think the vast majority of the player base will be able to get to anything after Icecrown. They'll be too busy taking advantage of the new raid lockout extension feature in order to complete Icecrown.

Update: as WoW.com points out, BRD has more bosses than this, depending on how you count. However, BRD was also meant for a radically smaller number of players. How this will play out for a full raid is yet to be seen. Personally, I think it will be a lot of fun.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm: Worgen and Goblins?

MMO-Champion's data-mined image of the Goblin and Worgen masks.

Yet more news pours forth from Blizzard's best marketing outlet: datafile updates. In this week's data-leak extravaganza two new masks for the Halloween event were put into the datafiles. For those who don't know, every Halloween, World of Warcraft holds an in-game event known as Hallow's End. One of the items that players can randomly get from participating is a mask that they can place over their faces in order to disguise themselves as another race (the masks look like masks, they don't transform your character or anything). These come in flavors of each of the playable races, one male and one female. In the recent update, two new races were added: Goblin and Worgen (werewolves). I've touched on the reasons that Goblins will likely be a playable race in a previous post on Cataclysm. However, Worgen are a bit of a surprise.

If true, this would throw current speculation about factions into question. If Goblins were going to be the only new race, then it was clear that they would be able to choose which side they'd play on. However, with two races, they could choose a faction for each race or proceed with two neutral races. There's no way to be sure, so we'll just have to await the Blizzcon announcement.

A Worgen as they appeared in the original game. Image from WoWWiki

Again, for those who don't know: Worgen are imports to Azeroth from another world, summoned to Azeroth by a mage who wished to use them as an army to fight the undead Scourge. It's not clear what their society is like or if more of them are coming to Azeroth. They cannot transform into humans by default, though some were cursed with such transformation by Arugal, the mage who summoned them. Their natural form is that of a large, humanoid wolf with a muscled, but gangly appearance. In the masks that have been datamined, it's clear that Blizzard has come up with a much softer appearance for the female version. So far, only male Worgen have appeared in Azeroth.

One other hint that suggests that Worgen are being added as a playable race would be the interview given by one of Blizzard's designers, in which he said that prior experience had shown that players need to be eased into new races and given an attachment to them in the game before they appear. Note that Worgen appeared in Northrend for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for what appeared to be a throw-away return of the arch-mage Arugal as a servant of the Lich King. Certainly if they were being "seeded" as a playable race, then this sub-plot makes more sense.

Starting Off With World of Warcraft Lore

Recently someone asked me how they would get started learning about the story behind World of Warcraft. It's a good question, and one I'd like to preserve the answer to for others.

First off, the basic answer is W0Wwiki. This site is the one, comprehensive resource for everything related to the story parts of WoW. When it comes to gear or specific quests, it's often not the first place you want to look, but lore is WoWwiki's thing.

For some excellent entry points to WoWwiki, try:

• History of Warcraft (published in-game in various books found throughout the world)
  
• History of the Horde
• House of Wrynn
• Azeroth (one of the two worlds where the story thus far has taken place)
• The Third War
• And the heavy hitters: Sargeras, Azshara, Malfurion Stormrage. The Dragon Aspects, The Titans

As you can see, the story is huge, and once you have a taste for it, there are books and comics that take off from there and tell several stories that parallel the in-game events.

Enjoy!

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, Maelstrom and Goblins

So the scuttlebutt is currently that the next expansion to World of Warcraft will:

* Be announced at BlizzCon in August
* Be titled "World of Warcraft: Cataclysm"
* Involve the Maelstrom (that big swirly thing and associated regions in the middle of the world map of Azeroth)
* Be released sometime in 2010

So, what do we know about the Maelstrom? Well, it's one feature left over from the so-called "Great Sundering" which occurred about 10,000 years prior to the current day in WoW, and currently houses the city of Nazjatar, home city of the Naga and Queen Azshara. They are, in turn, opposed by the Makrura in their capital city of Mak'aru.

Outside of the Maelstrom lie a few locations of interest which would likely be a part of any expansion involving this region. Collectively these are known as the South Seas and include a number of interesting locales, but none more important to the rest of Azeroth than Kezan, home of the Goblins of Azeroth's main city, Undermine.

So we have the greatest of the Night Elf antagonists (now that Illidan has been killed), Azshara. We have the Goblin capital, and we have the numerous islands of the South Seas. So what can we tell about an expansion involving all of these? Here's what I think is coming:

Goblins will be a playable race. I'm not the first to think of this, but I'm pretty sure it's coming. I believe that this will be the case because they have very explicitly been a huge part of WoW since launch at every level. They have outposts in starter areas like the Barrens, mid-level areas like STV and Tanaris, Outland, Northrend... everywhere! They exist as level 1-80 NPCs. This makes them unique in WoW in terms of being a non-playable race that are heavily involved in every area of the game. Their homeland was also one of the earliest concepts for the game.

Now that Blizzard has added faction-switching to the game, it seems pretty clear that they're clearing the way for a future with more fluidity between the factions, and a neutral Goblin race would definitely be in line with that. Of course, players can't be neutral (PvP would be rather messy). Instead, some factions of Goblins will have to ally themselves with the Horde and others with the Alliance, while the bulk of them continue to maintain their neutrality. I suspect that Undermine will be a Dalaran/Shattrath-like hub city, supporting a thriving population of players and NPCs, and perhaps solidifying the neutral auction house as the primary venue for trade in the game?

But, I digress. Back to the Goblins. I suspect that there will be no new hero class in Cataclysm. Why? Because Blizzard is bending under the weight of balancing PvP as it is, and every class added represents 3 new talent trees full of possible over-powered or under-powered PvP and PvE interactions with the existing classes. A new hero class would also allow players to have high-level Goblins on day one, making all other Goblin classes far less likely to be played during the first few months of release. Instead, I expect they're going to skip an expansion or bring in a hero class in a later patch. The Goblins will certainly be Warriors and Rogues. Those just make obvious sense. Priests, Mages and Warlocks are also likely. Beyond that, we can clearly say that they won't be Druids or Paladins. Shaman isn't in keeping with the lore, I believe, but they could probably come up with a reason to do it. Death Knight is possible, but unlikely for the reasons stated above.

They will likely start in new areas, specific to their chosen faction, and will either end up going to Undermine or directly to the old world via airship around level 20 (similar to the way Blood Elves and Draenei worked in The Burning Crusade). This means that, outside of Undermine itself, Blizzard will only have to create four zones (or perhaps two large zones with Alliance and Horde sub-areas) to support the new Goblins as they level.

Now, the big question: when? My guess is aggressive to say the least: early 2010. Let me lay out a likely timeline:

August 2009: 3.2
October 2009: 3.3 / Icecrown raid on the Lich King
December-February 2010: 4.0 alpha/beta testing begins
February-March 2010: 4.0 lands
March-April 2010: Cataclysm lands about 1 month after 4.0

My guess would be that they will raise the level cap 5 or 10 levels (I don't think they want to keep cranking it up 10 levels every expansion, though... it could even be zero!) Then there will be a series of patched-in dungeons much like the previous expansions. At least one of these will be Uldum, wherein we will learn that Goblins were actually created by the Titans, much the same as Dwarves, and that they too suffer the "curse of flesh". Note that this was foreshadowed by Blizzard's Drysc who said, "I find the door still interesting as something has obviously broken out. Was there something meant to be contained within Uldum, to be forgotten, that's escaped?" Yes indeed, folks, something was contained therein, and it escaped.

The Eye of the Maelstrom itself will probably be an open zone, but Nazjatar will likely be the final raid dungeon of the expansion with the fight against Azshara culminating the content.

So I've stuck my neck out far enough... I'll sit back now and see what comes.

Note: images in this post are owned by Blizzard, with special thanks to WoWWiki, which is where I got them.

World of Warcraft: Lokholar the Ice Lord

A few weeks ago, I was involved in an Alterac Valley (AV) battleground in which Lokholar the Ice Lord was summoned. This doesn't happen very often, and I think it may be the first time I've seen it (though some of the multi-hour AVs I took part in back in the early days are a blur to me, now). Sadly, while this almost caused us to win on reinforcements, the Alliance used the cover of confusion to go kill our general while this was going on. But it was down to the wire, and a real blast.

If you want to know how to summon Lokholar in AV, bring 150 blood (looted from Alliance players and NPCs) to Primalist Thurloga back in your base. Once you turn in the quest, have 9 other players ready to assist you. Ride out with her to Galv's side of the Field of Strife and help her summon. Once he appears, he'll be fairly weak and will need you to kill Alliance players nearby. When you do this, he gets stronger and will eventually be nearly unstoppable.

Ideally, you will do this only in an AV where there's a turtle on the Alliance side, and everyone is fighting north of Icewing Bunker. In this case, as soon as he's summoned you want to pull your forces back to the Field of Strife and just make sure to snare or kill anyone trying to run past Galv. Lok will take care of the rest...

World of Warcraft: New Druid Cat Models Are Identical

Except for racial attributes like horns, ears and nose-ring, the models for the new cat forms for druids appear to be pretty much exactly identical to eachother, which is a fairly radical departure from the large racial differences (lion vs. puma) that existed before. Looking at the two side-by-side, you can see that there are some differences in the shape of the mane, but I suspect that's actually in the "skin" (coloration) where part of the model is marked as transparent. In fact, the models might actually be exactly identical with horns being slightly re-shaped with transparent regions to appear as ears and nose rings being marked as transparent for the night elf model.

It's kind of cool, but at the same time, I think it does remove some of the sense of individuality that these races had between their druids. Ah well, all change is bad and all change is good....

Himalountain of the Undercity

It took far too long, but I finally got the "of the Undercity" title for my Paladin. Why was this important to me? Well, the pragmatic reason is that gathering reputation and tokens from the Argent Tournament will be valuable when the 3.2 patch lands and Blizzard expands the Argent Tournament tasks and rewards. But the real reason for this effort was the purely roleplaying-oriented joy of having a screenshot of my paladin on top of a skeletal warhorse with the "of the Undercity" title hovering over his head... it's just a delicious irony that I couldn't avoid.

Anyway, here's the screenshot. I'll probably be backing off a bit on the Tournament for a while, and focus on PvP when I'm on. The arena has been calling to be lately, and I'm working on switching my gear over to dps from healing (my teammates just love me, I'm sure ;)

Wrong Again: The WoW Arena

Long ago I swore I'd hate World of Warcraft Player vs Player (PvP) combat. Then I discovered battlegrounds. They're fast, fun and a great group activity. I was hooked.

Years later I'm doing the arena for the first time, and though I still feel that tactical play is not as fulfilling as strategic play, I was wrong about the arenas having no appeal for me.

Blizzard did a great job putting this together, and the only complaint I have is that your first day will suck, as the system callibrates your level of skill and gear. Once again, WoW is a better game than I gave it credit for.

The Ultimate World of Warcraft Boss: Open Source Software

This is going to take a bit of explaining, but the sad state of affairs in the World of Warcraft community appears to be that open source software has been branded the enemy, not by some powerful corporate machine, but by the users that play the game.

It all began with a language called LUA, you see. LUA is a wonderful little language designed for embedded scripting. Blizzard adapted this language (ironically enough, an open source project, itself) to their immensely popular game. It serves as the scripting interface for nearly everything that a user can control in the game from user interface to casting spells to communication with other players. There have been thousands of addons written in LUA for World of Warcraft, and the vast majority of them have been released under open source licenses, though that may now be changing...

You see, these addon authors need some way to distribute their addons. Blizzard provides no official support in this area, though they condone and even encourage the authoring of addons. Instead a number of hosting services such as Curse and WoWInterface have sprung up. There were others, but some shaking out occurred during the downturn to the point that really only those two remained. And then along game WoWMatrix. They indexed all of the extant mods, provided a universal downloader that worked with everyone's site and generally seemed to be solving the problem. The problem was they were also rather unscrupulous. It's not clear if they didn't understand what they were doing or simply didn't care, but the allegations from several quarters ranging from simple failure to credit authors to modification of licensing terms on addons. This went on for some time, and eventually the hosting sites started to notice the bandwidth drain from users who were not using their sites to browse for addons (no ad revenue) nor were they using these sites' services to update the addons (no subscription revenue), and so the financials were not working out as well as they had. Was it actually a critical problem? I'm not sure, but the net result was that they clamped down on all external updating software, kicking off a storm of controversy.

Having contributed to Slashdot for years in the 1990s and early 2000s, I know what happens when you have a large community of technical and non-technical people who engage in debates that involve software licensing: insanity. However, this insanity reached new heights. Here's one example of a user trying to explain open source licensing on the official forums:

Open source is a LICENSING scheme that, like all licensing, relinquishes part or all of an author's copyright. -Nyxia

But, it gets worse. Because of this debacle and the arguments over how or if WoWMatrix violated copyright and various licenses (which is actually quite difficult to judge given that they did not, at least in some cases that I'm aware of, host addons themselves, but only hosted index information), the villain in the conversation came to be open source licensing itself. Time after time, users have been lept upon for attempting to discuss addon authorship in terms of open source development models because of the WoWMatrix incident. Worse, many authors who were distributing their addons under open source licenses have now moved to a cryptically blank, "all rights reserved," entry in the required "Licensing" field in the index information for their code.

This is a sad move, not only because it hampers legitimate attempts to maintain outdated addons by third parties (something that has been done time and time again in the WoW addon community), but because it doesn't actually address the problem. Any addon licensed under the GNU General Public License, for example, must retain all authorship, copyright and licensing information, unchanged, with every version distributed by the original source or any downstream recipients. If WoWMatrix changed this information, then they were obviously already in violation of the terms of any addons distributed under the GPL. Changing to a more restrictive license doesn't change that fact, and only hurts the community.

I found out about this because I made the mistake of trying to solve an orthoganal, but related problem: the lack of a decentralized distribution mechanism for addons in the wake of these recent changes. Hopefully, as I get my prototype system working, some of the ire will have died down, and addon authors will come to realize that they didn't want to shot themselves or their fellow developers in the feet to spite WoWMatrix.

World of Warcraft: Toward a better addon infrastructure

[ note: this proposal has been updated in order to improve tone and add in some additional material that resulted from conversations with WoW addon developers and users ]

It used to be that there were a fairly large number of sites that hosted WoW addons. It also used to be that there were 4-5 reasonably well-maintained programs for updating them. Some, like WUU, worked well with all manner of sites. Some, such as Curse, provided download access only for their own service, others were open to all services.

That's changed of late. Consolidation was followed by exclusion of external download clients which was followed by reduction of non-pay functionality in the proprietary download clients. Some of this happened because of abusive third parties which I don't want to discuss here. Many addon authors are fine with this. Many users are fine with this. I don't question their wisdom, but I do see an opportunity for a better way, and because I have considered distributing my own addons someday, I'd like to make there be more options and flexibility for developers while improving my lot as a user.

Here is the proposal:

Developers of addons sign up with the hosting service of their choice. Services that are not purely WoW-related, and which have more liberal download policies than existing WoW hosting services include:

• http://github.com/plans
• http://code.google.com/opensource/
• http://sourceforge.net/
• http://www.codeplex.com/

Each service will have to be analyzed to make sure that the intended patterns of access won't violate their terms of service, but I'm pretty sure that services like Google simply won't notice the impact while Sourceforge might. We shall see. Some mod authors already use some of these services, so there's nothing terribly new, here, so far.

Anyway, returning to infrastructure. The next phase is to build a map of these addons. This is not an end-user consumable item, and shouldn't be confused with existing attempts to make lists of addons. Instead, it is a structured document (in JSON, XML, whatever) that represents a method for developers to communicate with their users and inform them of what they provide and how they wish to provide it.

A short list of items to be included in this structured document include:

• Name of addon
• Official URL
• Bug reporting URL
• General public release direct download URL
• One or more pre-release direct download URLs
• Logo direct download URL for display in download clients
• List of addons enclosed (for UI bundles and addons in several parts)
• Licensing type
  

There need to be two points of access for this file: one is a read-only point that allows addon download clients (such as Curse or WUU) to pull down the entire list. The second must allow read-write access in a secure way that allows addon authors to update their hosting and versioning information. A simple RESTful interface should be sufficient to provide both interactions, and could easily be hosted by a small GAE or EC2 service. Someone might even donate the resources to run such an app, but the cost should be nominal even if it has to be hosted on donations because it's not providing access to individual addons.

[ side note: previous versions of this proposal suggested that the document/database should be licensed in such a way that one valid use was to create a third-party Web site based on it. I now believe that this would be a mistake, and that it should have a license more like the IMDB database: allowing free access to it, but not use in creating Web sites. This is to improve communications between users and developers and avoid hurdles in users providing feedback and bug reports. ]

For the service, we must establish authorship in a secure way. There are many ways to do this, but I think we'll have to start by placing all existing addons into the database as dummy entries, but establishing that a given authorship claim is valid can be complex. Most likely this will have to be accomplished in much the same way as search engines validate ownership of Web sites: by providing a "cookie" that the owner must place within the addon. This means that only addons which have a working direct download link will be "claimable". All others will remain dummy records, preventing other users from claiming authorship of a new addon of the same name.

The last component would be modifications to popular downloader clients such as WUU to enable access to the central data and developer repositories. This would need to include the ability to play nice with each hosting provider's means of access (perhaps as simple as downloading via HTTP or as complex as cloning a repository and extracting a given version, depending on the service). Along with this, we would also need a simple command-line tool (preferably that works under Windows, Mac and Linux) that allows authors to submit their updates without having to cobble together their own queries.

I think the benefits of such a system would be massive. For starters, end-users wouldn't have to go to several different sites in order to update their installed addons. For users with 50+ addons installed, this is a great boon. For developers it provides a way to initially select whatever hosting service best suits their needs (note that existing developers may not, at this time, see any direct benefit, nor particularly care; that's ok). For hosting sites, the situation is more complex. Of course, they would prefer not to have more competition from sites that have been doing project hosting for years. However, I believe that in the face of strong and open competition, these services will be made better and stronger. In the long run, I think it will help them as much as developers and users.

The linchpin is the centralized repository. [ note: can even the repository be distributed... sure, but I think that's version 2, as it introduces lots of complexity ] It needs to be rock-solid and very, very simple (complexity breeds downtime). I intend to start working on a prototype system, running from my home network for now. That prototype will be released to a few friends. If you're an addon author or download site maintainer, please let me know if you want to get involved by posting to this article on essays.ajs.com (I'm going to mirror this article in a few places).

World of Warcraft Mod Review; Carbonite

From Aaron's Gaming Blog

World of Warcraft is the only MMO I know of that provides tools for overriding the entire user interface. This has lead to a profusion of "mods" that are unlike those for most games. Many games will let you write content such as levels. Of course, in an MMO that's not practical. In EverQuest, you could replace the user interface specification, but that only let you move elements around or re-skin them. In WoW, for example, there's a number of mods that help manage quests in a variety of ways. Some are simple. Some are rather gigantic. The most sweeping that I've seen to date is called Carbonite.

Originally a for-pay mod, recent changes in Blizzard's policies resulted in Carbonite becoming free to download in full. The mod provides most of the features that I used to get from QuestHelper, Cartographer and SimpleMinimap, but it does quite a lot more in some areas. The features I've been using include:

• A re-vamped quest tracking UI
• Guides to most quest locations
• Auto-rescaling minimap that shows quest destination and current location
• Waypoint arrow showing direction of next objective
  
• A trailing line on the minimap that shows you where you've been
• Google Maps-like world map (like Cartographer 3)
• Integration with Atlas for instance mapping
• Detached and freely movable minimap button bar

These are just some of the things it can do, and I'm still learning to use the mod. It's very slick, and really feels like something that's being done professionally. However, there are some problems.

For starters, the UI configuration is a mess. Learning how to lock any given window is an adventure, because it's different for each. The main configuration menu is a maze of options, and it's not always obvious what's being referred to. For example, "minimap" sometimes refers to their replacement minimap and sometimes refers to the classic minimap which can be optionally embedded in theirs or left as a stand-alone along side Carbonite.

Outside of configuration, gathering is difficult with Carbonite at first. You really have to get used to the rescaling of the minimap and learn to control it. I've also had some problems with importing my various gathering node maps into it, although the options are there. After a night of frustration, though, my miner was back to top form and mining away, though still populating some nodes in Icecrown that had gone away.

One really positive thing about Carbonite: footprint. I saved about 30MB of overhead going from Cartographer/SimpleMinimap/QuestHelper to Carbonite.

Overall, I'd say this mod is worth the pain of transition from something else, but it's a huge time sink to adapt. I'd suggest that you try it out at a time when you're not being asked to lead a raid or otherwise rely heavily on your UI for anything important.

Repost: World of Warcraft: Guide to Leveling Skinning to 350 for Wrath

This article originally appeared on the old essays site, but has been re-posted here, as I think it's still relevant and useful.

Last night, my hunter dropped enchanting and switched to skinning in order to help level his leatherworking through Wrath of the Lich King. I figured I'd just do some of the skinning required and then get back to it later in the week, but it was so fast that I finished it all in two hours. Here's how I did it. (note: I'm Horde, but at the end I give some notes for Alliance players to use this guide also)

Before you start

First of all, this is a guide for a level 70+. While you could start this at nearly any level, some of it really does require that you be at least 65, and better to be 70 since there are level 60 dungeons involved that you'll need to solo.

Also, I'm horde, so your mileage may vary if you're alliance, though you could go to all of these areas (it's just less convenient). To prepare, you really do want to be bount in Shattrath or Dalaran (unless you're a mage and can easily flit around from city to city).

Near Undercity and SFK

OK, so to start, get the training for apprentice skinning and get yourself to Brill, outside of Undercity. Kill the dogs and bats around that area until you get to 50. The trainer is between Brill and Undercity, on the road that leads to the Bulwark. Go train at 50 and go back to the dogs until you start skipping skillups (this is the pattern throughout: you go to an area until you need to train or you start getting less frequent skillups). At around 90-100 skill, you'll want to move on to Silverpine Forest to the southwest. Go all the way past the Sepulcher to the werewolves and wolves between the Greymane Wall and Pyrewood Village. These can all be skinned, and if it's night Pyrewood village is full of mobs that can be skinned (during the day, they're human). Once you get to 105, dash up to Shadowfang Keep and slaughter everything until you get to 150.

RFK and Feralas

Welcome to your next training level. Go train in Orgrimmar and then fly to Camp Taurajo and run south to the entrace of Razorfen Kraul. Enter the dungeon and take your first right and then a left off the ledge. You should be able to pass most or all of the Quillboar, but kill them if you have to, then get down into the area with the boars. Kill all of the boars and skin them. it's a long path that turns left at the end. Once you've wiped them out, leave the instance and reset it (right click on your unit frame and select "Reset all instances") and then do it one more time. You should be at or near 225 by now, so leave the instance and head to Feralas on foot (through Thousand Needles). Don't bother flying.

Go to Camp Mojache if you need to sell/mail items off. If you have not yet hit 225 skinning, then you can kill a few wolves and bears near the Thousand Needles border. These should be at the limit of your skinning ability. Once you hit 224, train in Mojache and continue to skin the bears and wolves near the camp until you start to green out. At that point, go sell to free up inventory and then on to the Dire Maul area to the west and then travel south to find the Hippogryphs. Skin these until you start to green out and then head into Dire Maul to the north.

Outside of Dire Maul, kill and skin the patrols of dogs until you hit 290 (you should already be quite close to this) and then go into the northern most entrance from the large courtyard. This takes you directly into Dire Maul North. If you take the western of the two doors along the north wall you will come in directly above a pit area with a boss and several packs of non-elite dogs. You will have to kill the packs of dogs in groups since they all come when one is pulled. If you're not an AoE class, this might take some time, but you'll get through it. Kill them and skin them until you hit 300.

Outland: All Hellfire, All the Time

Now that you've hit 300, go to Outland and train in Thrallmar, sell whatever you need to and leave Thrallmar and go east to the hellboars outside. The red-skinned hellboars are skinnable at your level. Skin them until you start to green out (which happens quite fast) and then go to Razorthorn Trail which is at the very southern edge of the rampart wall that divides the zone down the middle. There are ravagers in this area which you can kill and skin until you hit 350. You just want to march up and down the path. I ended up killing ravagers on one side going up and on the other side going back down, which worked out well, since anyone who was leveling in the area could keep to the other side and not be bothered by me.

Grand Master training

Now you're able to train Grand Master Skinning in Dalaran or Vengence Landing to begin in Northrend. Welcome to the two-hour 350 mark! From here, if you're level 70 you can just skin as you level. If you're 80 already, then you'll have to wait for my Wrath skinning guide...

For the Alliance

Alliance characters can probably substitute Loch Modan for Silverpine Forest and then go to SFK after. Everything else pretty much maps to the Alliance except for where they train in Feralas.