Neuron 

You guys can follow along here if you want:

https://github.com/brittyazel/Neuron...StatusBarSplit

Hey all,

So things are churning with Neuron, particularly the new GUI. I've been wanting to work on the GUI for quite a while now, but unfortunately the way the code was built it was like a house of cards. I couldnt gut the old GUI without irreparably breaking Status bars, and I couldn't fix the Status bars without fully breaking the old GUI. Etc. Bleh.

So unfortunately I hit a wall where I could no longer piecemeal update the modules, and I had to bite the bullet to just gut and strip out all the old cruft all over the add-on, sledgehammer like. This involved rewriting the entire status bar codebase (which is now functionally done, but I want to clean and polish it further, and finally once and for all deleting the old GUI Lua and XML files. I have also added the first parts of what will be the new, unified GUI window, with it actually starting to look like something :-)

So the big change with the status bars is that Rep, XP, Cast, and Mirror are now all their own individual bar types, rather than all being one "Status Bar" with a separate menu to choose the type. This is a long requested change and it's much more intuitive imo. To make this work took more hours than I care to admit, but it's a huge weight off my chest having finally split these up, and in the process we modernized the code a great deal, and it will now be easier to maintain.

Lastly, for the GUI, I'm not a UX Designer, so I'm kinda just winging it. If anyone wants to get involved in this part, now's the chance. I did all the shitty work, so all that's left is to populate the new GUI with all the necessary options.

Yeah I can add a /neuron toggleall. Please add it to github and I can get it out this weekend.

Just curious, what was the macro you used before so I can know what I did that broke it

**Update** added this feature. Can you please download the Github MASTER version and test this for me. typing "/neuron toggleall" should disable and re-enable all neuron buttons. It was a bit tricky to make sure that the keybinds still work, as usually hiding buttons also disables the buttons keybinds.

This is fixed

Oh, yeah it seems PhP is locked behind the Ultimate edition paywall. I just use the Community Edition, and the EmmyLUA plugin is free and open source so I've never had to worry about it lol.

I do love IntelliJ Idea, but it's really the EmmyLUA plugin that I can't get enough of. It's the best LUA plugin for any software that I've used. It makes coding LUA actually fun, instead of a nightmare. I can't believe Maul just used a text editor for so many years. I could never, I'm too spoiled lol

IntelliJ is my favorite IDE by far, and I've used many. Eclipse was nice, but IntelliJ surpasses it in almost every way.

Also, IntelliJ is open source, cross platform, and portable, so that should address your issues. IntelliJ also has plugins for pretty much every language there is, and it is a very capable C++ IDE

Ok so Buju already got us started but here is a basic 2min lesson on addons haha.

The LUA code is read into memory while the game is loading the character in, and it's at this time that the entire addon is read from top to bottom. What I mean by this is the LUA engine begins reading code starting with the 1st .lua or .xml file in the Neuron.toc file, and goes down the list in the .toc file until the very end. Also, it isn't simply reading the code into memory for later, this is the literal moment that the code is run (which seems counter intuitive but it actually makes sense). Thus if I had an addon that counted from 1->1000 and printed the numbers to the chat window, this would happen at the exact moment it's read the first time, and the user would see the full list of numbers in the chat box right when the world finishes loading. So in essence, the program is run in its entirety before the character is even on the screen.

Now, to answer your other questions, or to pre-empt your question of "if the addon is run in its entirety before the game is even loaded, how does the addon work in real-time?" And the answer to this is 1) Frames and 2) Events.

Frames: Frames are the base UI elements of the game. A frame is anything that is visible on the screen, and Frames can have parent frames, and can be nested in one another etc. I.e. We have a Bar frame, with a bunch of Nested Button frames, and so on. The frames themselves have a number of properties belonging to them, and a number of scripts and events that you can "hook" onto to do work. I.e. a button has an OnClick event, and I can hook a function of mine to do something when this event happens. This function is 'hooked' to the OnClick event of this particular button during the pre-loading stage when all the LUA code is being read in initially. And this code is now bound to the button frame itself, and will be executed each and every time this button event happens so as long as the button exists or we choose to unhook this event. You can see all the frames in game by using the "/framestack" command in game.

Events: The game as far as an addon is concerned is a series of sequential events that are being fired all the time. If you use "/eventtrace" in game you can see all the events happening. Now, events are important because they're the only clue to the UI as to what is going on. So events fire when combat starts, combat ends, a spell is cast, channeling starts, etc. Now, the big trick to creating an addon like Neuron is registering the Neuron scripts to specific events in the game. The castbar for example is registered to the UNIT_SPELLCAST_CHANNEL_START function, so when this particular event fires, the castbar knows to spin up a series of functions that will lead to the castbar becoming visible and showing the cast happening. There are thousands of different events in the game, and they are a nightmare and a gift at times. Finding the correct events to register our scripts and frames onto is a pain in the arse, but it works surprisingly painlessly most of the time. Further, events come in two varieties, game events like "PLAYER_ENTERING_WORLD" that give you status updates on what is happening in the game itself, and object script psuedo-events like "OnMouseclick" or "OnHide" or "OnEnter", which are all functions inherent to frames that can be hooked and leveraged for our purposes. By default a button does nothing when clicked, it's only when we hook this function call and attach our own function that clicking the button actually does something.


So, in summary: The code that you see in the .lua files is very boring and just consists of creating a series of frame objects, setting up a bunch of functions and hooking them to specific events, and registering our frames to in game events. Once this happens, the code that exists and is running in the game is only the stuff that is tied to the frames and events (and any secondary functions that our called by the hooked/registered functions). At runtime during the game, everything that happens in response to player or game input is whatever we front-loaded onto those frames and events ahead of time.

Please see https://github.com/brittyazel/Neuron...ster/README.md particularly the section on Development. Getting a good development environment set up makes all the difference, and I can't rave enough about IntelliJ and the EmmyLUA plugin. It's a serious game changer. This guide in particular is incredible and is 90% the reason I even know what the hell is happening: https://github.com/Ellypse/IntelliJ-...E-WoW-API/wiki