World of Warcraft "Legion" and the future of Aloft
 

So, with the advent of "Legion" (tentatively assuming Summer 2016 delivery, presumably to correspond to the release of the Tauren-free/Worgen-free theatric feature film... I cry with sad that my favorite race(s) seem entirely absent!!!), I am giving some consideration to returning to WoW.

Assuming I decide in favor of this, I would probably be interested in resuming maintenance of Aloft (it seems like the thing to do). However, while it seems the people who expressed a desire to take over maintenance of Aloft in my absence have not been particularly active in that role, I am not sure to what extent this is due to simple loss of interest, versus Blizzard "borking" nameplates generally and rendering nameplate addons somewhat obsolete (or at least very difficult to do properly).

Are there any active maintainers of nameplate addons out there willing to talk me through the current state of things? Are there any UI customization "super-users" and/or general addon authors willing to render an opinion regarding whether something like Aloft might still be of interest/utility to the community?

Finally, I am thinking about a comprehensive "rewrite" of Aloft ("Aloft2"?), starting with stripped-down (with emphasis on performance) and passive "reskin" addon that grants the user relatively comprehensive control over nameplate placement/appearance (with minimal-to-none "replacement" of nameplate graphical elements), but adds no new functionality or the ability to override existing Blizzard default functionality... then proceeding incrementally from there into mana/threat/crowd control/target tracking, and other such "added" functionality.

Regardless, Aloft would not be resurrected in any form very soon (it would be months, possibly into Autumn 2016, before there was anything useful on offer).

Thoughts?

If you're plannning on re-writing Aloft, I would recommend checking out the nameplate addon Blizzard is making in Legion.

This is especially true if this won't happen 'til after Legion is out, since the nameplate creation process will be completely different from what it is now.

Good to know! Under the circumstances, it would probably be best to wait on Aloft.

In the meantime, I will pull this and take a look at it, see if I can intuit what, if anything, it does (and to what extent additional functionality could be plugged into it).

Thanks!

Update: LOL!!! How often I wished for a coherent set of events for nameplates, and an explicit ability to associate nameplates with unitids. I am also going to go out on a limb and guess that Blizzard will be protecting nameplate frames, along with all of this, so that people can't add "targeting aid" functionality of any kind (in the form of sizes, colors, etc) via addons.

Nameplate frames are already protected, but as with all protected frames, it's only the frame itself you can't resize/move/etc. in combat. You can (and will still be able to) change the size of its child regions -- health bars, font strings, icons, and whatnot -- and of course you can always change the color of anything at any time.

I am confused. Is this new?

Not too long ago (MoP), you could resize and offset the nameplate root object, etc. Weird things happened (related to mouse sensitivity), but that was all. It was not precluded.

Certain things couldn't be modified in combat (enabling/disabling clickability), and there were a lot of refresh-timing-related issues surrounding frame borders, target selection, etc... but no obvious taint (or related) issues.