Patch days... never have they been more of a bother and a worry then when it happens with a Beta. For me basically a full day blown. Well I guess it gives me an opportunity to update you on the addon.
As you should be able to tell CensusPlus is one of the elder addons for World of Warcraft. The addon and
www.warcraftrealms.com have been going since the end of 2004 about the time for patch 1.1 to 1.2 of World of Warcraft. Due to the long history of the addon there have been many changes over the years. Including many paths that had been taken and later abandoned as Blizzard made changes to WoW and to their battle.net websites and the CensusPlus code shows its age.
Much of the programming process for addons have changed over the years. Coding that was required back in the early days are now non-functional, deprecated, potentially damaging (to other addons) or just plain inefficient.
When working within the WoW programming space programmers have access to two data areas.. 'Global' which everyone can access and modify and 'Local' which is private to the scope of the variable definition.
The current beta the Global table on entering the world (with one very small addon to get the data) you get over 95 thousand variable items. When a barely functional CensusPlus finished a census run (with !Swatter a debugging addon added to the mix) the Global table had grown to over 222 thousand variable items. No these weren't all CensusPlus.. but with CensusPlus doing a census run and the tester wandered the (starting) zone finding things and killing mobs WoW keeps adding more active functional data into the table. The bigger this table gets the longer it takes for addons to find and update their variables, this is why you want to do as much as you can in your private data space.
But.. When WoW first started you had to work in two environments. First you had to make xxx.xml (extensible markup language) files to create the presentation for your addon. Then you worked in Lua language files to script all the interactions between your xxx.xml and the game UI (user interface.) The kicker.. is that all data defined by your xxx.xml files must live in the global space.
If you look at the newest created addons written by very good authors you will see that the xxx.xml is almost or completely non-existent in that the environment Blizzard now allows people to use Lua directly to create the presentation layer for addons. Unfortunately that isn't something we can do for CensusPlus with the time we have before MoP goes live. But I'm thinking that may be a future update down the road.
With each patch release of Wow (and even more each beta test patch) Blizzard adds, modifies and/or deletes API function calls that programmers use to work in the game environment. That fact is what makes the current CensusPlus nonfunctional in the Beta. Even the way addons access the global data table has changed [that change was announce long ago.. but went into effect with the Beta].
As you can tell from the above at one time(at least
) during the beta upgrade work, we did get live and functional data from CensusPlus.
We are still having issues with simple things like:
1- the Minimap CensusPlus button.
2- the /commands
3- and issues I have with the fact that since wholib was added to CensusPlus we have had friendly relationships with other addons that use the who service but at a penalty of duplicate processing in CensusPlus. Wholib does full processing but wasn't correctly connected to CensusPlus so CensusPlus had to go back and reprocess the data for each query done.
As of just before the testing cycle for today which got stopped by Blizzard doing patch updates the following are being investigated or integrated into CensusPlus.
1- All the actions that should have happened with the mini-map CP button either were not happening or were happening only by happy circumstances with the current live version of CensusPlus. The issue is that pressing and releasing your mouse button on the CP button generates multiple game events. If the events happen in a certain order then what Rollie wanted to happen did. But if they didn't it didn't.. and per Blizzard you can not depend on the order in which events get reported back to the game client. I looked at a number of different approaches that people were using for this problem and wasn't happy with any of them. We believe that as of our last test cycle.. we have a acceptable solution that will allow the same look and feel for addon users.
2- the slash (/) commands are still a problem.. we were in the middle of testing when they took the beta away from us. I have a couple of ideas as to what is causing the problem but we need more step by step testing to see the exact fail point. And boy does it fail Client crashes with divide by zero error. (yet I swear that all the forgotten places where a division takes place and the divisor could by mistake be zero have been protected against.) This is an issue that Blizzard has been noticing with a number of addons, so the problem might not even be in the CensusPlus coding.
3- Yesterday we had a successful run (in a debug testing addon) to simulate directly using the wholib data without resorting to duplicate work. After the the slash command issue is resolved this will be integrated into CensusPlus. Now that I know what needs to be done it won't be too difficult.
So with all that to do what is working.
The background artwork was modified to allow us to expand the number of races/ classes and levels presented in game.
The new Pandaren and Monk items are in an functional.
With this MoP expansion the levels displayed in game is changing from the current of 6-85 to 4-90 (having both new class and race gave us more room)
Data is/ has been collected, but we have a minor problem in that Blizzard has mixed all languages and character types into the same realm so our saved data has characters that Rollie can't handle in his database.
That is not a condition that Blizzard will have in effect when they go live so it won't be a problem then.. but I'll need to hand edit out the Chinese, Korean, Russian out of the data set before Rollie can start is web side processing tests.
And the big question you have.. when will it be ready...
When it is.
And NO SOONER
I think the updated addon will be able to continue to work with the current 4.3 WoW... but Rollie will need (if he decides to go that way) some logic changes in his update processing to be able to handle both the current CensusPlus for 4.3 WoW and the new CensusPlus for 4.3&5.x
It is a somewhat minor change.. in that with the added class there is a new counter item passed in the data file.. and Rollie needs to accept and then ignore that item until Monks go live.
There will naturally be a pre-patch, which will go live before 25th September, cutting down the remaining time.
Sometimes we have to take tiny steps and then check nothing got broke then do it again. Changing too many things at one time just leads to confusion when something breaks.. you don't know what caused the break.. or if it was anything we did.. maybe it was Blizzard.