top | item 24696120

Show HN: Ajour – A GUI application in Rust to manage World of Warcraft addons

90 points| culinary-robot | 5 years ago |github.com

55 comments

order

minimaxir|5 years ago

Some metacontext for those who don't know: Curse was the de facto WoW addon manager. Then Twitch acquired Curse and absorbed the addon manager functionality into their client.

Now Twitch sold off the Curse/addon functionality to a party with a much less-polished addon system.

Thus, there is now a new market for addon managers, since there is a new major expansion coming out, and playing modern WoW without mods is not great.

Joker_vD|5 years ago

Why did Twitch buy Curse in the first place? Why are they selling it now? Why did Curse agree to acquisition in the first place?

I mean, surely it must make sense from the business perspective, but from the user side of things, it doesn't quite do.

fareesh|5 years ago

I remember writing LUA scripts to alert people of certain encounter mechanics between boss attempts when my guild was among the US top 20 or so. The "boss mod" addons eventually caught up, but when you were among the first to get there, you could do a lot of additions/modifications yourself to make them better.

Great game, good times. Not anymore though from what I hear

bladegash|5 years ago

Yeah, when I was in one of the top guilds during vanilla, there was an addon that top guilds had that allowed for adding timers/modifications via LUA. I can't remember the name anymore, but it wasn't publicly available, just circulated amongst upper echelon guilds.

We would wipe dozens, if not hundreds of times, just to get all the timings down and scripted. It also helped that four of the people in our guild worked in QA for Blizzard (not so well-kept secret of many top guilds back then).

Like someone else mentioned, now WeakAuras more of less does that in a much more user friendly way. Still the same process of wiping hundreds of times to build the WeakAuras though.

jabroni_salad|5 years ago

The boss mod addons are still king, but over the past couple expansions a tool called WeakAuras has been getting really popular. It lets you make little displays that pop up or disappear based on in-game conditions. There is a whole ecosystem of these, you can share them via in-game chat, and they are pretty fun to put together between wipes.

bpicolo|5 years ago

> Not anymore though from what I hear

Still a ton of fun. I consider it better than the original - more content to enjoy.

avinassh|5 years ago

How was your experience with Rust for GUI and also using iced?

culinary-robot|5 years ago

I like it a lot. But by saying that, don't get confused by the overall state Rust GUI applications are in: immature[0]. I have a background in native iOS and macOS development and this is another game. However I have not regretted choosing Rust for this project. I wanted to natively support both Windows, Linux and macOS and at the same time learn the language. This was my first proper Rust application and I've learned so much.

The limitation Iced has have actually done something good for the simplicity of Ajour. People are liking this simple look because the application is just a tool. There is no need for fancy animations.

[0] - https://www.areweguiyet.com/

weinzierl|5 years ago

After looking it up and finding iced I'm curious too. There are so many GUI frameworks for Rust but I never have heard about iced before - looks promising though.

rob74|5 years ago

Ah, it's using iced, good to know! Would make sense to mention that in the project's README...

yoshuaw|5 years ago

Didn't GitHub spin off from Tekkub's hub back in the Burning Crusade days? Fun to see GitHub still being used to enable writing WoW addons a decade later.

Macha|5 years ago

As far as I can tell tekkub was an early hire and had a cgit instance for wow mods around the same time, but nothing suggesting they were a founder or GitHub was a spin-off of that site

nikivi|5 years ago

Last I played WOW was burning crusade and that was 2007-08. Amazing times for sure.

Curious how the game evolved over time.

LinuxBender|5 years ago

It has changed a lot and is about to change again. There is a level squish coming soon to prepare for changes that will make it much easier for new and returning players to level up and enjoy the game. The current system is a little overwhelming to some. The new changes should be live within a month or so. The release date slipped a little.

hombre_fatal|5 years ago

You should check out modern WoW for a day just to see the mechanics they've been able to add.

Before the WoW Classic release last year, I was in your shoes and decided to try modern WoW for a few days as a goblin. It had some pretty crazy quests/events/locations compared to just spawning in Goldshire and getting some "Kill N of X" quests.

bovermyer|5 years ago

Try it again one week from now (Oct 13).

That's when they're doing the prepatch for the new expansion. One of the things they're doing is making it so you can level from 1 to 50 in a single expansion's content.

Also, they're squishing levels back to the original 1-60 from the current 1-120.

lillecarl|5 years ago

They added a LOT of convenience features and made it possible to buy ingame time with gold.

als0|5 years ago

There's been a surge of activity in the last year or so due to the re-release of WoW Classic, also known as Vanilla. There are rumours that Burning Crusade will also be re-released soon. I suspect the potential revenue is too good for Blizzard to resist.

Bayart|5 years ago

Although the game remained good afterwards, you pretty much quit at the peek.

The last decade has been nothing but Activision-Blizzard abusing a captive audience.

fareesh|5 years ago

I played until the end of WOTLK. I heard Cataclysm had the best / hardest endgame.

ajmarsh|5 years ago

Nice, any chance you would expand it to manage Elder Scrolls Online addons as well? Great work.

culinary-robot|5 years ago

Thank you! I don't plan to support other games than World of Warcraft for now. But the code base is split into a core and gui part so it should be easy to fork and modify to your needs!

Thaxll|5 years ago

stefan_|5 years ago

It's a WndProc, feel free to split each message into a separate function but that's not actually helping anyones understanding.

ziml77|5 years ago

Ehh it doesn't seem to be a problem. Understanding the function doesn't require thinking about those 900 lines at once since the code for handling each message type doesn't interact with any other code in the function.

culinary-robot|5 years ago

I am very proud of the code base, but there's many places to optimize. I welcome contributions if you want to help out!

eandre|5 years ago

Awesome! I have lots of fond memories from the days of writing World of Warcraft addons (CTMod, CT_RaidAssist, ...). Great to see the community is still going.

mlindner|5 years ago

Why is there a Makefile? Can that not be done in the build.rs?

pcf|5 years ago

[deleted]