As I mentioned in my Rotating immersion post, I’ve been rotating through various interests. The present one has been World of Warcraft. While probably not the best thing to be wasting my time on, considering the other stuff I had been working on and what I’m capable of, it’s important to me to be able to do this so that the next time I swing back to something “useful” I will be completely refreshed.
The basic idea is to have some “downtime which isn’t downtime”. I can either work hard on awesome stuff and then keep working out until I’m a burned out shell, or I can work hard on awesome stuff, then switch to working hard on less awesome stuff and ping-pong back and forth. My overall effectiveness is higher, plus it’s more fun for me.
So while I’ve been actually playing WoW for a while, I decided to rotate back into fiddling around with AddOns. This was one of my original attractions to the game, and it’s become the only way I can actually play the game at all. I’m so pissed off with interfaces that I really really need to see them updated. In the past a user would just have to deal with some shitty interface issue, but being able to modify things really helps out. Now all the interface issues are the userbase’s fault. Hey wait a second..
I had done a hell of a lot of experimentation with AddOns before this rotation, including a number of very detailed series’ of pages, with revision control done for my notes when playing with different sets of AddOns. I haven’t even gone back to those notes yet.. I’ve re-created a lot of the ideas from scratch, and I’ve assembled an entirely new kit. This is important anyways, since the game evolves. Blizzard changes things and breaks a huge number of AddOns every patch or so. Also, like open source software, which WoW’s AddOns must explicitly be, authors come and go, and projects rise and fall. Comparing general Linux open source with WoW AddOns is actually rather interesting to keep in mind when tinkering.
So here we have a new category being created for all things development.
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Customization
- Modifying game sounds and the config file, windows settings, outside programs. This includes stuff like ping/latency and FPS.
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Macros
- Lists of handy macros, AddOns related to macros, macro development.
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AddOns
- Lists of my currently-used AddOns, lists of alternate AddOns, lists of interesting and yet-untested AddOns, reviews and AddOn development.
Like everything else I’ve been doing for even the shortest while, I have notes already done. In this case, I have an enormous amount of notes which I’ll be tidying up and posting.
I won’t be working solely on this stuff, but this rotation will include many different WoW-related things including class and guild articles.
