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ROCCAT's new Lua three-button mouse is thirty dollars away from your FPS
How many buttons does a gaming mouse need? If you ask ROCCAT -- for today at least -- the answer is three. Evidently not happy with the current choice of tri-buttoned peripherals, it's launching a new "Lua" model at both Computex and E3. As well as the aforementioned triplet of clickable appendages, it houses a Pro Optic R2 sensor which will let you jack the DPI setting from 250 up to 2000 and back again on the hop, battlefield, or wherever you may be. The ambidextrous device launches internationally sometime in late July early August, with a $30 price-tag.
Daily iPad App: Codify
I've been diving into some rudimentary (very rudimentary, trust me) iOS coding lately, and as soon as I picked up an iPad, one of the first thoughts that occurred to me was the idea of having a version of Xcode (the IDE that Mac and iOS developers use to make their apps) available for the platform. There are plenty of text editors available, and even some designed to actually write code on Apple's tablet. But I haven't seen a way to actually run that code -- until now, that is, with Codify. To be clear, Codify isn't a Cocoa development tool like Xcode, so you still can't write and run iOS apps right on the device (though I have to believe Apple is indeed working on some sort of Xcode for iPad, somewhere in the bowels of Cupertino, right?). But it is a development environment for Lua, a lightweight and simple object-oriented programming language used in all sorts of places. You can basically write and run Lua right inside Codify, which gives you a very powerful tool for creating your own small apps, prototypes and games right there on the iPad. There are a few advantages and drawbacks to this. The advantage here is that the iPad of course uses a touch interface, so Codify has really smartly invoked touch in a few different ways while you're coding. To see coordinates or colors, for example, you can just drag your finger around on the screen. And you can scroll right through your code, your objects, or Lua's documentation just like browsing through anything else on your iPad. While I'm not hugely familiar with Lua (yet), the whole experience seems really great, and should hopefully convince other app makers to start looking at using iPads in this way more. The biggest drawback, however, is that as far as I can tell, there's no real way to get your code out of the app, other than just cutting and pasting it off to email or somewhere else. There's also no (official) way to get other files like sprites and sounds into the app, though the FAQ says that's being worked on. These are more obviously issues with the iPad and iOS itself, of course, rather than the app, though it would be nice at least to see FTP or Dropbox integration. But I do like the idea of using my iPad for actually writing code. That bigger touchscreen just seems to encourage creativity, and while most code writing in the past has been the domain of the desktop, why shouldn't there be apps designed to bring code and app creation to more and more people with simpler and better tools? Codify is a great first step in that direction -- it's $7.99 on the App Store right now.
Reader UI of the Week: Coding, Lua, and Efn's UI
Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com. Reader UI of the Week is jam-packed with Lua goodness today, and if any of you master coders out there want to share some resources for the budding developers out there, now is your time to shine. We're looking at Efn's UI today, one that relies heavily on his own coding and simple addon creation in the spirit of Grid, Pitbull, and more. For the perfect tweaks, though, there is nothing better than doing it yourself. %Gallery-19902%
Lost Pages of Taborea: Do-It-Yourself Combat Engine
When I first started playing Runes of Magic and other MMOs, I never used addons because they broke my perceived immersion. Fast forward to today and I have well over a dozen different addons to enhance my user interface and interaction with Taborea. There are quite a few addons that I'd now highly recommend. The collection has both evolved and stayed basically the same over the months. The collection does grow, but a lot of the new addons that come along don't see any love once uploaded. Some of the great classics -- like Advanced AuctionHouse -- are constantly being updated and are very useful. Many others that come along are variations on older popular addons or they aren't popular because they are small fluff addons. Basically, there's a core of great addons that are still being updated, but good new addons are coming at a slow pace. One new addon in particular is the Do-It-Yourself Combat Engine. DIYCE is a robust combat engine that can allow players to pre-script entire combat encounters with the push of a button. There are some ethical questions about the ability to easily program what some would call a cheat code. Is this going too far and skirting the boundaries of hacking? Let's take a closer look at the pros and cons for this program.
Age of Conan's Morrison talks tech upgrades
Age of Conan's Craig Morrison is back with his latest monthly development update. The October edition is very tech-heavy, with a lot of emphasis on the tweaks and additions that Funcom engineers have been making to the game's Dreamworld engine. While a lot of the details may go unnoticed to your average player, the goal is to continue improving the game's performance as well as add tools to further content creation down the road. Of particular note are the additions of Lua scripting capability (to facilitate dynamic events), improvements to the game's collision detection (and the implementation of nVidia PhysX), and tweaks to both DX9 and DX10 clients. Morrison also confirms that Guardians will be the next class to receive a substantial update. He also clarifies the upcoming PvP minigame changes. Check out all the details on the official forums.
The Road to Mordor: Pippin's top five plugins
This past week in LotRO's been a bit like riding river rapids: There's been a lot of rapid ups-and-downs, violent lurches to avoid dangerous objects, and a whole lot of noise that's drowning out the calmer waters ahead. For every piece of good news and positive word-of-mouth, there's been a lot of unfortunate bumps, such as server queues, dynamic layers, mouthy trolls and Codemaster's launch delay. However, I believe it's all going to settle down in a couple more weeks, and LotRO will emerge the better for it. So if this is your first week in Lord of the Rings Online, welcome! Find a great kinship, take time to smell the flowers, and hunt some orc for me. Today I'd like to take a look at one of the unsung heroes of the recent content patch -- the ability to create and use plugins (also called mods and addons) to enhance your user interface. While the system is still in beta and has a rough-around-the-edges feel to it, it's already shown great potential, particularly though the creativity that mod designers are pouring into it. While there are only a small number of plugins available as of right now and Turbine has yet to expand the scope of these Lua scripts beyond constrained limits, it's not too early to beef up your UI with these spiffy additions. Read on, free peoples of Middle-internet!
LotRO F2P launch day roundup
Volume III, Book 2: The Ride of the Grey Company is upon us, a massive Lord of the Rings Online patch that is functioning as a virtual relaunch of the game. In addition to adding loads of new content, Turbine is transforming LotRO into a hybrid subscription/free-to-play model in the hopes that this choice will draw fresh crowds to the game. The company's even opened eight new servers for the launch -- four for US and four for EU. Unfortunately, we have received word that Codemasters is going to release the patch in Europe "later than expected." Hit the jump for a roundup of our LotRO F2P news and discussion!
LotRO UI implements Lua, preps for extreme makeover
The upcoming free-to-play conversion isn't the only big change coming to Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online over the next little while. In a new dev diary released yesterday on the European community website, Games System Engineer Narrel provided a glimpse into what began as the "pet project" of three developers and has now morphed into a full-fledged extreme makeover of the game's user interface capabilities. Using the venerable and lightweight Lua scripting language, Narrel, Agiclaw, and ForsakenArcher are closing in on their stated goal of bringing extensive customization possibilities to LotRO's UI. "The future of Lua in LOTRO is a bright one," Narrel writes. "While the current functionality is certainly limited, we fully intend to continue the development of this system so that both existing and new game systems will expose functionality to the user, allowing for a much more personalized user interface."
The Road to Mordor: Near-Death Adventures (NDA) lifted!
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Lord_of_the_Rings_Online_F2P_player_beta_impressions'; In case you were wondering, I'm part of the crowd that doesn't really believe in non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Oh, if I agree to one I'll stick to it and keep my word, don't get me wrong. What I mean is that I don't believe in the usefulness of NDAs, particularly in a day and age when all the information is available anyway -- this is, after all, the omniscient internet. Not to mention that by trying to keep a lid on testers and prevent them from sharing their experiences, companies tend to suppress the positive accolades (those are the people who want to keep playing, after all) while letting the badmouthers escape to tell their tale (they don't care if they break the NDA, because they're not going to play anyway). But my personal feelings aside, the brief NDA lockdown on the upcoming LotRO F2P edition (hey Turbine, can we get a name for this yet? LotRO Unlimited? Free-Range LotRO?) has lifted and testers have swarmed out from under its veil to share their stories and thoughts. I'd be remiss if we didn't spend some time this week looking at what people have to say about all of the changes, additions and updates to the game -- not to mention the looming specter of the LotRO store. Let us see what is to be seen as we scout the forums and blogosphere: LotRO exposed, uncovered, dissected and digested for the good of all. I've pulled salient quotes to help give you an idea how the beta is progressing thus far -- and remember, it is still in beta. Everything here is quite subject to change by the time LotRO II: Hobbit Boogaloo launches.
Anti-Aliased: Modding your way out of a paper bag
If there's been a theme to this week, it's been interfaces and modding. Both EverQuest II and Lord of the Rings Online have had announcements related to their interfaces, be it re-skinning or new Lua functionality being installed. However, it was these two articles that set off the Rube Goldberg device in my head. They reminded me just what I thought about mods. My relationship with mods has always been iffy. While I certainly appreciate what they do for us in our many MMOs, they also irk me to no end. While I understand (and totally support) some mods, there are others that I'd rather offer to Zuul. Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate the mods because they're not useful. It's quite the opposite, in fact. Sometimes, I think mods are too useful. When you start skipping social interactions in favor of an e-peen number, that's the point where mods are going over the line.
Turbine expands on LotRO's Lua scripting
Ever since hearing the news that Turbine will allow players to create mods for Lord of the Rings Online using the Lua programming language, the community's been abuzz about what this means for LotRO -- good and bad. Would this allow for the creation of game unbalancing add-ons, or perhaps the rise of a LotRO edition of WoW's controversial GearScore? Or does Turbine have a specific vision in mind for the scope of mods? Yesterday on the LotRO forums, Narrel, Turbine's Games Systems Engineer, posted a clarifying note about why the company chose to implement this and where it plans to go with it. The devs' main priority with Lua scripting was to empower players to tweak and modify the user interface more to their liking, as the default UI cannot be all things for all folks. While it is going to prohibit mods from botting or macros, Turbine will open the field for players to work with the inventory layout, information that the HUD displays, quickslot bars, target info, fellowship info and raid vitals. "We are very excited about this feature," Narrel said, "and look forward to the day when it goes live allowing players to have a much more customizable experience with our graphical interface."
LotRO and Lua: Turbine gives the mod community a thumbs-up
The winds of change are blowing swiftly across the lands of Middle-earth, as we've just gotten word that Turbine is going to allow the use of Lua scripting for Lord of the Rings Online. A Casual Stroll to Mordor reports that Meghan Rodberg announced the change on a recent episode of The StunCast!. On the podcast, Rodberg confirmed the upcoming implementation of Lua scripts: "We historically have not allowed any modding of the UI other than skinning it. Hope I'm not blowing anything here, but there is a Lua scripting project going on. I don't know if we've talked about it that much, but people will be able to do some mods. I'm not sure to what extent they'll be able to do it. It seemed like enough of our players were looking for this that we decided to do it." Lua is a programming language that allows for the creation of add-ons and mods for MMOs, which has seen extensive use in titles like World of Warcraft. It allows for players to design useful (or not-so-useful) UI features, such as auction house enhancements, timing bars and even mini-games. While player response to this announcement is mixed, it hopefully will make many budding modders happy to hear. [Update: Meghan clarifies: "It's not guaranteed for a launch with F2P - it may be in the testing stage for a while!"]
360iDev: Ansca Mobile's Corona SDK
There are always a few SDK vendors lurking around any developer convention, and 360iDev is no different. However, unlike a lot of programs that work as a go-between for the iPhone Software Development Kit and some other language ("middleware," in developer-speak), Ansca Mobile isn't worried about their SDK at all. While there was a bit of a scare about non-Apple development kits earlier this week, Ansca assured us that Corona SDK is good to go; it allows a developer to write up an application directly in Corona with Lua (which is very similar to ActionScript), and then the app will deliver an iPhone, iPad, or even an Android application that is ready to go on the App Store. What does this mean for us gamers? It doesn't mean much -- there's not a lot of difference between a game written in Flash and ported across (like TapDots, out on the App Store right now) and a game written natively in Apple's Xcode, according to the Ansca folks (who actually worked as engineers on the original Flash Mobile implementation). The difference is much bigger for developers, though; they basically have to write just one app, and they can then port it across to another platform in just a scant few hours.
Creative rolls out X-Fi 2 SDK, developers now free to craft games and apps
We're going way out on a limb here and guessing that Creative's X-Fi 2 doesn't exactly have an insane amount of the PMP market share, but for those obsessed with its boyish good looks and world-beating user interface, we've got some thrilling news to share. The company has just made public its ADK (Application Development Kit), a Lua-based system where devs are able to "code their own interesting applications and customize the ZEN X-Fi 2." You're also able to "create and debug games and applications right from one's Windows PC," so any Mac loyalists in the house will have to fire up Boot Camp (or similar) in order to dive in. Hit the source to get your download on, and be sure to drop us a line when your riveting new title is ready for public consumption. [Thanks, Gavin]
Workaround for WoW.com addon's /note issues.
Since we launched WoW.com late last night, we've had numerous people writing in about an issue that has cropped up regarding one of the aspects of our tracking addon. We'll continue to respond to those reports personally as necessary, but we figured it would be wise to get the issue and the fix out in the open right off the bat.The command that's used for the WoW.com addon's Adventurer Notes function, /note, is a fairly common command used in various addons. For example, Cartographer makes use of it. Since the command overlaps between addons, it causes conflicts and one addon ends up blocking the others from using it. If you've run into this issue, there's a very easy workaround if you're not afraid to look at a little LUA. Don't worry, you won't need to do any serious coding. It's a simple fix, I promise.
Sony PSP hacked for use as PC status monitor
No money for a secondary display? No use for that worn-down PSP? There's hope for the future, friend. Hacker avi has discovered that Sony's handheld makes for a wonderful status monitor, providing a clean look at your PC's CPU usage, memory allocation and system temperature levels. All you'll need is a bit of training in Python, Lua for the PSP and a sister willing to stop watching UMD movies long enough for you to give this a go.
Vehicle controls in Wrath
WoW Insider tipster Dinnerbone sent in some interesting findings about the siege vehicles in Beta while spelunking through the LUA files. He notes that these are all viewable -- if you get those lines of code, at least -- in the current Wrath build. Here are a few tidbits about vehicles and how they might work in the expansion: Right-clicking character portraits have the option to "Leave vehicle," just like when players are in a party. This suggests that vehicles aren't buff-type spells like mounts but actual, physical vehicles you can enter and exit. Vehicles need fuel. There're no clear details on how vehicles can be refueled or what happens when it runs out of fuel. Vehicles have an "ammo slot"; Dinnerbone isn't quite sure whether this means siege vehicles will run out of ammo or if it simply means they fire different projectiles. Pets and vehicles don't mix. Vehicles apparently replace Hunter or Warlock pets and have their own set of controls or abilities. New ability buttons or bars will appear when inside a vehicle. There might be an entirely new UI frame for vehicles, with sliders and other new interface mechanics. The sliders "power" and "angle" range from 0 to 100 and can be seen in the LUA files. A developer note on one of files says, "Placeholder for eventual vehicle controls, currently just two sliders," so there may be more controls. I'm imagine a third person Worms with the power and angle controls. Blizzard has stated that vehicles can carry passengers, and Dinnerbone seems to think it, too, although he can't seem to find indications of it in the code just yet. If you're experienced with LUA files, you can poke your head in through the current build and see if you can find out anything new about the siege vehicles. We're always excited to see what's up with the Beta.
How to fix the Parrot Scrolling Combat Text Addon
If you're an Ace mod fanatic like I am, you may use Parrot for your scrolling combat text needs. If you've used Parrot since 2.4, you've noticed, like I have, that the dang thing just plain doesn't work. Even though the ever handy WoWAceUpdater continues to update it, there's some block of data it's missing. And that means that when I get into combat and look for my scrolling information... nothing happens. There's no pretty numbers to the side of my characters. Hey, that's fair enough. 2.4 was the patch of the great combat log change, and it's understandable that not every addon is quite caught up. That said, I like how I have Parrot set up, and I didn't really want to try to find and install a new mod, or heaven forbid, use Blizzard's base system. So, I went searching, hoping to find some way to bring back my beloved Parrot.
Have you hugged your mod writer today?
This week's issue of the Escapist has an excellent article by Greg Tito discussing the difficulties of being a mod writer in World of Warcraft. And we're not just talking about learning LUA or fixing bugs after Blizzard has released a major patch, but about the community itself. You've all read the official forums, so you know the community isn't always friendly. And when a mod you've written goes from being something you coded for yourself (and uploaded on a whim) to something used by thousands of people (each of them asking -- or demanding -- different bug fixes and improvements), I'd say things stop being fun. Mod-writer Gello explains some of the stress of the situation when he tried to help his users out by writing a German localization:I had spent a couple very intense months working on the localization of Recap. It got so I could understand combat logs in German.... It was just causing way too much stress and time for something I would never see or use.And when French players began requesting a French localization of mage water-summoning mod WaterBoy, Gello refused, suggesting that native speakers could make a localization themselves. And then, as Gello says, the flames began:When I stood by my position (probably not in the nicest terms), they continued in earnest. I got an email with an attachment I thought was safe and apparently it wasn't.... I basically abandoned the email address, formatted my pc, ditched the mod and didn't look back.Really, people: go give your favorite mod writer a hug. It can be an immense amount of work to maintain a good mod and most of it is thankless.
The coming addon apocalypse
While we've talked about this before, but with the announcement of the patch 2.0.1 rollout, it's worth a reminder. On December 5th, 2006, you'll log on to World of Warcraft and download the 2.0.1 patch -- and then all of your addons will stop working. I know what you're thinking, "But Elizabeth! There are addon issues with every patch! How will this be any different?" Well, WoW 2.0 completely changes the LUA code that current addons are written in, or, as Blizzard puts it:WoW 2.0 represents a major change in the UI code, and as such ALL AddOns will need to be updated before they will work, if for no other reason than the Lua 5.0 to Lua 5.1 changes. Some AddOns will be more seriously affected, and a few will have to be redesigned.Tobold predicts -- not inaccurately, I think -- disaster. As everyone begins to realize their addons are no longer functioning, they'll rush to Curse Gaming and WoWInterface. These sites, always sluggish on or around patch day, will all the worse for the complete failure of every addon that currently exists. Some addons will be abandoned by their authors, as the work to rewrite them would be too great. Others will be abandoned because the ability to make them functional will no longer exist. And yet others will simply take time to rewrite and not be immediately available.So what's to be done? Well, you could always stop using addons. Or take a week's vacation from the game. Or if you aren't willing to do either of those, check up on your addons in advance -- look them up and see if there's a WoW 2.0 version already available. (If you don't remember where you downloaded it from, use the search functionality on Curse Gaming or WoWInterface to find them.) If not, WoWInterface has lists of mods that are confirmed to work with the 2.0.1 patch, so perhaps you can find something you could live with (don't try to use any of these with the live game, however -- they won't work). So while everyone else you know is tearing their hair out in frustration trying to find working addons while Curse Gaming is down, you can be sitting back in your chair, sipping a martini* and raiding the night away. * No, the patch does not ship standard with martini. You're on your own Mr. Bond.
