@Addon Developers - What are you missing

[Deleted]

Hey folks,

i am looking for "things" or thoughts, that disturbes and annoys you on developing an addon or plugin for World of Warcraft.
What do i mean with that ?
On writing an addon you sometimes come to a point or a situation in which you say to yourself:
Damn, it would be sweet if there would be something that could help me with that

And thats exactly what i am looking for

What do i have in mind ?

My plan is to write an IDE or Editor to support you in writing addons for wow.
Aim to accomplish is to union the planing, the implementation, the maintenance and the publishing in one single application.

Some of the features I am thinking of:

• CodeCompletion aka Intellisense
• Validation of code (precompilation)
• syntax highlighting for lua and toc
• standardizing of patterns
• localization
• modularization
• configuration (database and UI)
• integration and usage of media within the addon
• Usage of different interface versions and the corresponding APIs
• metalanguage to describe the addons behavior (structur, event, member and so on)
• table editor
• lua editor
• toc editor
• Code refactoring

and much more

If you like to contribute to my work, please make a post with your kind of obstacle in writing addons

Sorry for my bad english, i am no native speaker

Best Regards
Chris aka Moriendus

[HealTree]

Function Scanning
(for example, if im writing a layout for oUF, it would be neat to know all the functions the oUF core provides)
GitHub Integration
(as in Visual Studio maybe?)

i like your Idea! keep us updated!

[Azinath]

A GUI editor. Something that let's you graphically drag and drop and position UI elements around and then generate the xml for you. This would save so much time. I know there were a couple of projects that did this, but they are no longer supported.

[elmoe420]

Honestly what I want most is Blizzard to give us a sandbox server for add-on development. Developing addons on beta is actually not that bad because I can create pre-made max level toons of every class and raid testing is relatively accessible (albeit often offered at inconvenient times). Once we hit live testing is a nightmare. People have bugs with different classes that require specific talents and gear which I don't have. People have issues with certain boss mechanics which I don't have access to (have not raided mythic since MoP). This is beyond frustrating for me at times.

As far as writing actual code I find the existing Editors/IDEs support for Lua is pretty good. I just use primarily VIM, GNU screen, bash like normal. If we could get a nice GDB-like debugger that would be extremely helpful. Debugging with print statements is very inefficient.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

[Deleted]

Function Scanning
(for example, if im writing a layout for oUF, it would be neat to know all the functions the oUF core provides)
GitHub Integration
(as in Visual Studio maybe?)

i like your Idea! keep us updated!

I thought of Git, subversion and tfs integration.
So you will be free in your choice of taking your code under SourceControl and particularly where

Currently i am working on a prototype to gather feedback.

Updates are coming Soon (TM) :P
Chris aka Mori

- - - Updated - - -

Honestly what I want most is Blizzard to give us a sandbox server for add-on development. Developing addons on beta is actually not that bad because I can create pre-made max level toons of every class and raid testing is relatively accessible (albeit often offered at inconvenient times). Once we hit live testing is a nightmare. People have bugs with different classes that require specific talents and gear which I don't have. People have issues with certain boss mechanics which I don't have access to (have not raided mythic since MoP). This is beyond frustrating for me at times.

As far as writing actual code I find the existing Editors/IDEs support for Lua is pretty good. I just use primarily VIM, GNU screen, bash like normal. If we could get a nice GDB-like debugger that would be extremely helpful. Debugging with print statements is very inefficient.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

That would be great yeah.
But knowing Blizzard this will not happen.

So i came to a simple idea.
There will be a testing environment.
You can select the kind of action that should be performed (like LogIn, ZoneChange, Sell Item and so on)
These action can also be configured
Then you will be able to run your addon within this action.
It'll be a kind of testing runtime.

What do you think about this idea?

- - - Updated - - -

A GUI editor. Something that let's you graphically drag and drop and position UI elements around and then generate the xml for you. This would save so much time. I know there were a couple of projects that did this, but they are no longer supported.

I agree.
These outdated projects are the reason why i started implementing my own IDE

A WYSIWYG-Editor of UI is planned. But not at first edition.
The whole IDE will be extensible so you can easily write your own code if you like to

But as i said - it is planned

[ComputerNerd]

Will you be using an existing editor, or creating a new one.
Something like Atom would already have a lot of the common functionality there, and is meant to be extremely "hackable" in terms of modifying it.

[Drauer]

Will you be using an existing editor, or creating a new one.
Something like Atom would already have a lot of the common functionality there, and is meant to be extremely "hackable" in terms of modifying it.

+1 for writing a plugin for Atom - it's quite simple to hack it, so that may be the easiest solution - also Atom is platform-agnostic and quite nice as an editor in general.

(We seriously need reactions for posts)

I'm using IntelliJ IDEA + LUA Pugin for writing addons, but the Atom would be much nicer.

What I need? API Documentation (even if it's just for Blizzard API) and testing environment - and we probably won't get that from Blizzard anytime soon (for testing stuff as on beta), so simple syntax check would be nice for the start.

[Flexie]

My text editor is great, my basic Lua environment works really well (when using it for things outside of warcraft), what I lack is tools specific to warcraft. If you fixed those issues then I wouldn't need to download a text editor that is ultimately going to be worse for me than Vim/Emacs/VisualStudio/Eclipse/or whatever I normally use.

This basically.

As a developer by profession, I do a lot more then just create addons/custom code for WoW. I'm used to my editors. Which is Atom for anything that isn't Java/C#.

I don't believe you're going to make a better editor then for example Atom/Sublime/Vim/... which is backed by an amazing community of many many many great developers. Things like autocomplete, syntax highlighting, git integration, ... it's all been invented before and is already available in so many different flavors.

What I would love to have is a way to run my addon/custom code snippet without having to be logged into WoW. It would be awesome if invoking a function like UnitName("player") would actually return something that could be real, but I feel that such efforts require support from Blizzard developers itself because it basically requires them to make the lua environment that runs inside wow, available outside of it. Or something like a hook that could let me debug code that's running based on in-game events.