New addon - Raid Spy

[Feenikz]

Hey all, I just dropped by to tell you about an addon that I made, called Raid Spy.

I made the addon because I got sick of manually armorying people in my group, especially when trying to get a PuG together. I wanted basic information about the people I was playing with without having to look them up myself, and without needing to inspect them.

So what Raid Spy does is automatically keep track of that information in your browser, so you only need to glance at your second monitor to get info on your group members (or I guess alt-tab if you only have one monitor ).

Its context-aware so if you go into (for example) HFC, it will tell you which group members have killed which bosses in HFC during the current lockout, as well as listing every group members highest PVE progress, item level (average and equipped) and other cool stuff.

In PVP it displays every group members current rating and gear level.

You can get it at: raidspy[dot]com

PS: I have thought about maybe also showing PVP information about the enemy team in arena/BG but I have a feeling that Blizzard might construe that as a TOS violation. Maybe I can get hold of Blizzard and ask them about it if people here are keen for that?

PS2. I am open to suggestions for improving the app.

[Woogs]

From your description it doesn't sound like a WOW addon, and more like a windows application. Use at your own risk.

[wowaccounttom]

sounds totally legit.. would visit the page and even install this random program

[Jaydenkor]

sounds totally legit.. would visit the page and even install this random program

/10char+afewmore.

[ComputerNerd]

From your description it doesn't sound like a WOW addon, and more like a windows application. Use at your own risk.

I have to agree, as that is not functionality available to an addon.
And having access to that from an external application would mean breaking the terms of service.
An on-screen display alone would have potentially been possible, even on a second monitor but not in a browser.

[Deleted]

It's obviously a program, how are you people so clueless?

[ComputerNerd]

It's obviously a program, how are you people so clueless?

"Obvious" isn't universal.
Some people can be mislead as to what a download is, so we think its only right to discuss that we think it shouldn't be touched and why.
There are genuine examples where an application will update or install a specific addon.
ElvUI I think has one, and the now unfortunately long dead MobMap had one.
This one just sounds dodgy.

[Deleted]

Yeah the addon just writes to a file, the program monitors. This is within the ToS; nice job OP this looks very slick. What's the program made in?

Not even that actually, it reads your screen and the addon puts the information in a texture at the top of your screen.

[ComputerNerd]

Yeah the addon just writes to a file, the program monitors. This is within the ToS; nice job OP this looks very slick. What's the program made in?

I could understand it writing to the saved variables, on a reload of the UI - but the description made it sound like it was being done in real time.
So this is an addon with a complimentary application which upon reload of the UI will update the information in the browser ?
Because that is actually do-able, as the MobMap I mentioned earlier in addition to the wowhead client can take information from saved variables and do something with them externally.

[dean771]

Yeah the addon just writes to a file, the program monitors. This is within the ToS; nice job OP this looks very slick. What's the program made in?

Because thats what he tells us? who knows what this program does

use and get keylogged at own risk

[Deleted]

Because thats what he tells us? who knows what this program does

use and get keylogged at own risk

Unpacked the MSI and looked around, nothing suspicious. Being cautious is wise but leave screaming keylogger to the people who know what they're talking about.

- - - Updated - - -

I could understand it writing to the saved variables, on a reload of the UI - but the description made it sound like it was being done in real time.
So this is an addon with a complimentary application which upon reload of the UI will update the information in the browser ?

He's bypassing a reload by encoding the information in a texture, pretty clever imo.

[ComputerNerd]

Unpacked the MSI and looked around, nothing suspicious. Being cautious is wise but leave screaming keylogger to the people who know what they're talking about.

- - - Updated - - -



He's bypassing a reload by encoding the information in a texture, pretty clever imo.

I do recall an example of that, but it was I think done in a sequence on a single pixel.
Yeah that is pretty clever, though they perhaps could have been a bit more open in how it worked to clear that up.
A random program being advertised by someone on their first post isn't giving the best first impression.

[Deleted]

OP, your application.css is very bloated - you should minify it when you compile from sass!

[Feenikz]

I understand that people will be skeptical as it does indeed include a windows app. This is because there is no way for WoW addons to do realtime communication with the outside world (sandboxed). My app creates a one-way communication channel by using the same kind of technology as X-Split etc to read the screen directly from DirectX. It would also have been possible to get the information from the WoW game engine memory, but I think thats against ToS, and also would be less reliable.

Yeah the addon just writes to a file, the program monitors. This is within the ToS; nice job OP this looks very slick. What's the program made in?

Not even that actually, it reads your screen and the addon puts the information in a texture at the top of your screen.

Thank you! The web interface was done with AngularJS, the backend is Haskell (scotty + mongodb), and the client application is WPF, C# and F#.

You are right, thats exactly what it does. The addon writes a thin strip of pixels to the top left of the screen and the group data is encoded into the red and green channels of those pixels (blue channel is used for indexing because WoWs rendering system can create some aliasing issues). The windows app reads those and provides them to your clientside angularjs app in your browser via HTTP. You can actually view the raw data by going to localhost:32001 while the app is running.

EDIT: Reglitch(css) - Yep I am a real dinosaur when it comes to web programming, I mostly do financial software now so I dont really know whats what these days with LESS and SASS and all that cool stuff.

[Sierra85]

sounds suspect but interesting if legit

[ComputerNerd]

sounds suspect but interesting if legit

That is what I thought at first, but now that has been cleared up by Reglitch then I have changed my mind.
As demonstrated by pixel-perfect UI's then you can have on-screen elements down to the 1-pixel width.
As I mentioned earlier there was an example a long time ago which did similar changing perhaps one pixel, so there is no reason why you can't just have more frames, each covering one pixel.
I suspect the real issue is less the technique, but what information it makes available.
In PvP if that information is influencing your decisions, then that could be a problem.

Other than that, I have no legitimacy issues any longer and would like to apologise for an unfair judgement earlier.

[HordieJah]

This is such a cool App!! could you add an average ilvl for the Group that you are in i think that would be a nice bit of information to have and perhaps a way to order the ilvl of your party?

keep up the good work.!