I was looking forward to this panel quite a bit for obvious reasons. By the end of the discussion I felt as though I was not dissapointed. The discussion began with a tutorial on how to write an addon, based on the ShowMeTheMoney tutorial included with the UI Extraction tool. Most of us had the background already from writing addons ourselves, but we felt as thought it was a ncie touch to lead any new people in the audience into the process involved in making a simple addon.
After the tutorial they began talking about things we will be seeing in upcoming patches. This started with the introduction of an addon authors dream, the Frame Inspector. This tool is an addon that can be used to inspect frames for theri existing parent, and attachment points, as well as other information about that frame. Think of it as a task manager for UI Frames. You can find it
here.
They also introduced the new Combat Log that will be added to the game soon. This will replace the existing system of verbose chat messages with an in-depth and responsive combat log. The data provided by this log will then be queryable with various flags, such as filtering data for only things happening to you, your group, your raid, or those in your sphere of influence. Think of it as an advanced statistical analysis tool for combat. Obviously this will be something that can be expanded upon and used by addons such as CombatStats and others that analyze combat data.
The audience was allowed to ask questions, and some of the questions posed were as follows:
- When asked if the new combat log will differentiate between targets rather than the current method of only knowing a target by name, they answered by saying that the new api associated with the combat log will expose unique identifiers for each target in your sphere of influence. This will allow you to identify each target individually, even if all have the same name. This system will also allow other details be exposed, although specific data that would be available is yet to be revealed.
- When asked if any features currently associated with addons might be integrated into the default UI, as hinted by the raid discussion panel, they responded saying that they are currently looking at implementing certain features such as a simple threat management function that might show your threat relative to others in your party or something similar. They do not plan to actually replace full blown threat meters, but merely provide simpler functionality by default.
Link to the YouTube video can be found here.