[Kanegasi]

Townlong-Yak is great for sharing lines of code from nearly every build of WoW, but not great for raw searches of code.

The classic client is now able to be installed again, if you didn't before, in preparation for next week's test. However you won't be able to start the client from bnet since the play button is currently disabled. You can, however, start the client itself, which is all you need to extract the interface files.

1. Make sure the bnet client is not running
2. In the install folder for classic, right click on Wow.exe and create a shortcut
3. Right click this shortcut and select "Properties"
4. In the "Target" box, you'll see the full path of Wow.exe in quotes, after those quotes add -console, like these examples:
   • "P:\World of Warcraft\_classic_\Wow.exe" -console
   • "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\_classic_\Wow.exe" -console
   • "C:\Users\Foobar\AppData\Roaming\Games\World of Warcraft\_classic_\Wow.exe" -console
5. Click OK, then double click the shortcut
6. When the login screen loads in, do not login, just press the Grave/Tilde key (`~), usually top left of your keyboard
7. In the console box that drops down from the top, type or paste: ExportInterfaceFiles code
8. Hit enter, the client will freeze for a few seconds, once it runs again, exit the client

In the classic install folder, there is now a new folder named "BlizzardInterfaceCode" which contains all the Lua and XML files that run the UI. Using any program that can search inside files, including Windows itself if you have indexing enabled, you can search the entire UI for anything you want in order to figure out what Blizzard does with it. I personally use, and highly suggest, installing Notepad++ for this and any other code-related tasks.

If you're curious, this feature has been part of every WoW build since patch 4.0.6 (February 2011). Prior to that patch, Blizzard manually offered a downloadable toolkit, which is still available here, but hasn't been updated since October 2010. Also, using "art" instead of "code" in that console command will give you all the UI textures and art assets, such as loading screens. The client will freeze for a much longer time while this happens, long enough to log you out if you used this command while at the character selection screen.