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My AddOns
Summary
Lulia's Portal!
Welcome to my portal, a repository on WoWInterface for my AddOn's. You can use my portal to communicate with me, whether to submit bug or feature requests, to thank me, or to simply ask questions. My portal can be used to research information on my AddOns or to simply check out the latest news and see what's going on and what I'm working on.

Quick AddOn List
Power Bars [v0.5](beta)

Power Bars is designed to be a customizable, easy-to-use Resource & Power display AddOn. With Power Bars you can design your own layouts for the various resource systems in the game, such as Holy Power, Soul Shards, Eclipse and more. In addition, Power Bars offers features to help assist you in tracking and being aware of various states within your resource system, examples include: Holy Power display throttling, choosing to display Holy Power only when it exceeds a certain threshold; Foresee Eclipse, an idea taken from Balance Power Tracker which allows you to see what your Eclipse will be from all spells in-flight and that you're currently casting; Rune cooldown timers and more. Power Bars also deals with giving you customizable power bars: mana, rage, energy, etc... allowing you to adjust how the text is displayed and even letting you use your own custom images to display your power resource in the game in a manner that you want.
Thank You!
Thank you for using my AddOns and thank you for believing and trusting in me. Spread the word, share, and, most importantly: Play the game and have fun. I'm glad that I'm able to help people with my AddOns, and I hope I will be able to well into the future.
News
Lulia's Avatar
01-07-11 09:13 AM by: Lulia
In other news... a new car soon? Well, maybe not. But hey, a car in decent shape for 1k is probably a better deal than I'm going to find for awhile, so I'll try my best to figure out a way to get my hands on that 1k.

Anyways, I'm sure you guys don't care if I have a car or not. (I do though, it could mean a lot of good things for me).

Power Bars
Hey, hey, I actually got some work done on it this week! I know it's going slowly, but at least it's going. What really scares me is going to be what happens when I finish the rewrite, and all of the broken things I'll likely have to fix.

If you're a code sort of person and you like making things efficient, you're certainly welcome to PM me and I'll give you a look at the new code for your perusal and commenting.

Not much was added this week. I finished up the stuff that initializes the basic display frames and am now working on the Options panel in Interface Options. I expect that the Options panel will take much of this week, it's a rather large endeavor. However, perhaps if I can find some new things to learn in the rewrite of this section which will make it much smaller.

Other News
Warrior is 84. Deathknight next. Paladin going to pick up Alchemy. Warlock possibly switching mining to Enchanting.

As for AddOns? Nothing new here!
Lulia's Avatar
12-31-10 11:38 AM by: Lulia
Happy New years! Well... not quite yet, but this will be my last post before the new year so I'm celebrating with all of you now. A new year will hopefully mean a lot of good things and I'm looking towards the new year with optimism and hope. But, let's get into the news...

Power Bars
Yeah, if you haven't noticed... the rewrite is at a stand still. What's wrong? Well, nothing really. I'm not stumped on anything or otherwise having coding issues, those are likely to happen around the last 10-20% when I start testing the rewrite of the AddOn in the game and get to deal with all the happy bugs that spawn as a result of my insanity.

The stall is more a combination of a number of factors, the most meaningful to you guys being that my WoW time has recently been spent leveling my Warrior. I'm fairly poor at time management, and I really need to be better at it. However, for now, I'm still just god awful at managing my time and my tasks. Thus, when I'm on WoW I'm either doing something with my characters or I'm working on my AddOn.

At the end of the expansion there was little to do with my characters, so I worked on the AddOn. At the beginning of this new expansion there's a lot to do with my characters, so I haven't had much time to work on my AddOn. However, while I play the game to play it and have fun, I DO have fun making my AddOn and I WILL find a way to better balance the time I'm spending doing what needs be done for my characters and pushing out the "first" release version of this AddOn. I know some of you guys are restless to see the next update, because it has features that you've been looking forward to, and I want to be able to give those things to you.

Other News
There's really nothing else to talk about right now. The "next" AddOn is still just stewing in my thoughts until I push out this "release" version of Power Bars. I've been leveling my Warrior, working, and worrying over stupid things. Bleh!
Lulia's Avatar
12-24-10 05:03 PM by: Lulia
The Push to v1.0
What!?

That's right, I'm pushing towards v1.0 of my AddOn. When looking at streamlining the code I've decided to go through an entire code rewrite. I'll be going through and hopefully making the code easier to read, more optimal to run, and smaller.

To help me do this I will be using a couple of Ace3 libs.

What about Combo points!?
Anything that I said I would add in v0.6 or v0.7 I will try to add in this release of v1.0. In this way, the release version won't simply be a formality with a few minor script differences, instead, it will be the largest, most ambitious update yet with plenty of new features for everyone. I'll post specifics of what I hope to change in v1.0 on my Power Bars page soon.

ETA?
No idea. This update is going to be huge, and I'm liable to break quite a few things in the code rewrite. That, combined with all of the life stuff mentioned in previous post, means I will likely be sort of slow to get this out.

Above all else, I want to make sure that any bugs are minor and minimal when it's released, so I will take plenty of time to thoroughly test all new code, and since all of the code will be new...

Beta?
I'll keep you guys appraised and let you know when I get a "beta" up for version 1.0, it will probably be labeled as v0.6 when I do, but when the release happens it will be v1.0. Thanks for all your support, happy holidays!
Lulia's Avatar
12-23-10 05:13 PM by: Lulia
Hello there!

First off, Happy Holidays to those who celebrate, whatever you celebrate. I personally celebrate Christmas, and while I won't derail this too much by talking about it, I do want to mention that I'm excited. Why? Because I get to see family and spend a day enjoying it with just them. I'm sure I'll probably sneak in WoW and such as well, but, I'll get to enjoy some time with my family and that's important to me.

In any case, let's get to the news.

Power Bars
Version 0.5 is out and I haven't heard of any major bugs yet, I'm sure they're out there, but they haven't been reported yet. Hopefully it's functioning for everyone and that people are enjoying the new features added to it. As I mentioned before I began work on it, the primary focus of v0.5 was Eclipse stuff, so Balance druids will have seen the most changes.

v0.6 is not yet begun. Sorry! I've got a part-time job at the local Deli right now so I can catch up on bills and begin to look toward my future in life and what I want to do. That job, combined with the grind of setting up my characters in Cataclysm, combined with getting out a guide for Holy Paladins on TankSpot, combined with life in general means I haven't found much time to begin on 0.6, but, fear not, it will begin.

What should you look for in v0.6? Well, as I mentioned in a comment response on the Power Bars page, v0.6 is going to be all about the power bars: mana, rage, energy, focus, and runic power. I added them quite early in my development of Power Bars, but haven't done much with them. I intend to really develop them in this version, adding features for customizing their appearance with your own images (and aspect rations to suit them). I'd like to give you control over how the text appears as well, from how it appears, where it appears, its size, and what the text tells you.

I'll also be streamlining code. This is something I've tried to do at the beginning of every version so far in the beta. Bit by bit I've gone through and tried to make the code more efficient, easier to read, and easier to work with. This has not been easy, and it takes time, time during which you guys wait to see the exciting new changes, but, instead, nothing is actually being added.

This time around, before v0.6 I really want to overhaul as much code as possible. What does this mean? It could be awhile before you really start seeing updates for v0.6 and before you see a beta go up for testing the new features. So, even when I do begin work, it might be a bit before you can appreciate it, and I'm sorry about that but I feel it's necessary.

Other News
Next AddOn?
Technically I have four files uploaded right now, with two AddOns. I have a set of "hi-res" images for Power Bars, a "beta" for Power Bars and then Power Bars itself. In addition to that I have an AddOn called "Blizz Compact Raid Frames", the name makes it sound like a lot, but it really isn't. Blizzard introduced a new default raid UI and a lot of people didn't like the fact that a little bit of it stuck out on the side of their screen even when "minimized" so I made a small AddOn to deal with that.

Of course, I don't like to go "small" on anything, so the AddOn is open to expansion later should I choose to go with it. For now, however, that is not my planned "next" AddOn and I only consider myself to really have one AddOn right now, Power Bars, which I still consider to be in development or "beta" stages.

So what's next?

I've been toying around with the idea of making an AddOn that I would like to call Waypoint. The basic premise of Waypoint is to work in a similar fashion to TomTom, however, it would have some notable differences. First off, I want to make Waypoint less of a resource hog. This is probably the most daunting task since Cladhaire is a great AddOn author and far better than I if I'm to give my own personal opinion, so, doing something similar to what he did, but to do it better is a fairly intimidating prospect. But it's more than just making it effectively "lighter", otherwise I would just suggest TomTomLite and move on. Waypoint's design is not to direct you to quest locations, but, rather, to be a modular AddOn which other AddOn's can tap into (this is how TomTom is commonly used) in order to direct you.

Thus, Waypoint could work with WoW-Pro's leveling AddOn, just as TomTom does, but with more options on how you would setup the layout, and hopefully just as easy if not easier to work with from the AddOn author's development perspective. But I don't want to just stop there. I want to implement a "route" feature into Waypoint. What's a "route"? A "route" would be a graphical representation of several coordinate points. A "route" could either be "open" or on a "closed circuit".

What's the purpose of a "route"? Ever find that if you followed a specific path in a zone you could hit all of the right mining nodes or the right herbs? Or perhaps you're using an AddOn like gatherer and you just want to be directed to the nearest node. Perhaps you're using a questing AddOn and it points to a specific location that's actually underground, so you're traveling along, reach the spot it's pointing to, and don't see anything. With a "route" you can more easily make paths to give solutions to all of these problems. You can make closed circuits which emulate the paths that popular gathering-profession leveling guides use, and thus be able to follow that circuit in the game without having to refer to the map constantly to see that you're on course. AddOn's like gatherer could hook in to point you with an arrow to the nearest gathering node. Or, AddOn's like WoW-Pro's leveling guides could create a route from where you are to the entrance of the cave that leads underground and THEN to the point of interest for the quest, thus saving you time backtracking.

In any case, those are my thoughts on a possible new AddOn, let me know what you think and whether or not you'd want something like this.

Miscellaneous
I don't work again until Sunday! thus I'm trying to get my Warrior up past level 80 so I can mine ore and send it to my Holy Paladin to prospect so I can get my JCing up without spending a fortune!
Lulia's Avatar
12-01-10 06:55 AM by: Lulia
Hello there.

I wanted to update you all on where Power Bars is and why I haven't yet released the update to version 0.5.

First off: I've been working intensely on getting this version out, however, I've also tried to give myself more breaks and forced myself to push away more so that I can look for a job, etc... since I have real life pressures and bills to deal with it certainly takes a priority and slows my Warcraft time both for fun and for the AddOn.

So, onto why the update has been delayed...

Short Answer: I've been having a persistent and rather bothersome internal error with my addon in dealing with the new virtual Eclipse system in Power Bars. The explanation for this is rather complex, but, in short, it's reporting the error quite frequently, which could get annoying very fast.

Long Answer: (Solution to follow). The new Eclipse system which checks for predicted Eclipse was a rather ambitious and challenging addition to the AddOn. This is my first AddOn and my first experience with lua, coming only from a Novice (at best) level of C/C++ and some minor scripting experience with another client in its own language.

However, I hadn't added any options for Balance druids, and I was told that the predicted Eclipse, as offered in Balance Power Tracker, was an option that a lot of Balance Druids were looking for. I was excited to add it and so I did. My approach may not have been what others would have done, but it was sufficient for my purposes.

I created a "Spell Table" in the AddOn, which dynamically tracks casted spells so that it can "predict" the Eclipse you would have, assuming your currently casted and in-flight spells will land. At first the Spell Table had a lot of issues, but, through thorough testing on the PTR with a pre-made Balance druid, I was able to get it functioning and, accurately predicting Eclipse.

I was excited and released a "beta" version (of the beta version, silly, I know) of my AddOn to Balance druids to test even more thoroughly. A few new errors were caught and solved, but then more internal-addon errors occurred.

Since this is the long version, I'll explain what these "internal" addon errors are. They're not WoW errors, they don't pop up a debug window from WoW and complain to you and stop running AddOn code, which would result in other things not functioning in the game. Rather, internal addon errors are the result of my placing things in the code, often in logic statements, which let me know that something unexpected is happening.

These internal errors were firing and printing statements to people's chat frames, resulting in undesired "spam" from the AddOn. Thus, I immediately began working on finding solutions. I found some of the potential problem-causers, but couldn't find everything, and that's what's held back the final bug-testing of the AddOn.

Since the PTR is down, I can no longer test for these errors myself, since they don't show up on my little level 10 Balance druid, made for the sole purpose of testing Eclipse stuff for my AddOn. I've had to rely on others, and while those others have been extremely helpful (Nobgul and a boomkin on my server in particular, along with the Moonkin repository people), it's not the same as being able to test, make changes, test, and make changes myself.

I've added a whole new portion to my AddOn to better track internal messages so that I could get the info that I need. However, the system is not complete, and while I know more about the errors that are plaguing me, I still don't know their source and I don't how I'm going to fix them yet.

Solution: Right now I'm thinking I may just hide the error and keep it to the message console (and not in the chat frame). This is not the ideal method, however, the "error" has no effect on WoW itself, and seems to have a minimal impact on the AddOn's ability to predict Eclipse. In the mean time, I'm going to improve the internal messaging system in my AddOn and level a druid in Cataclysm, hopefully getting it to a level where I can better test this error.

Thus, over the course of this week, I will be finishing bug-testing, hiding the error and cleaning things up for a release.