1. Posted by moyyom on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 06:09:56

    I'm an experienced programmer, just not so much in the Wow field. I've had a sudden need for an addon and I can't find anything that can do what I want, so I've started learning the language and it's really not super complicated. I just have a few questions.

    There an addon called Healers Have to Die. It does something similar to what I want to do, I want to be able to change individuals name plates on the fly and adjust them as needed. I was just wondering how I would be able to hook onto a specific name plate(preferably based on UNITID) and append some information to that specific nameplate.

    Also, the ability to clear it back to what it looked like before would also be nice.

    TL;DR. Simple way to hook onto a nameplate and append information to it.(or just an image etc would be nice)

  2. Posted by jnwhiteh on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:38:22

    I'm an experienced programmer, just not so much in the Wow field. I've had a sudden need for an addon and I can't find anything that can do what I want, so I've started learning the language and it's really not super complicated. I just have a few questions.

    There an addon called Healers Have to Die. It does something similar to what I want to do, I want to be able to change individuals name plates on the fly and adjust them as needed. I was just wondering how I would be able to hook onto a specific name plate(preferably based on UNITID) and append some information to that specific nameplate.

    Also, the ability to clear it back to what it looked like before would also be nice.

    TL;DR. Simple way to hook onto a nameplate and append information to it.(or just an image etc would be nice)

    This is actually one of the hardest things to do in WoW. The frames that comprise the nameplates are not created by any UI-space code, it is all instead done directly by the game client. The general technique used by those sorts of addons is to scan the children of WorldFrame and then make adjustments to the frames. But its also complicated by the fact that unitids are not available for every frame, indeed they are often not available at all.

    It gets a bit easier (with unitids, for example) when you're doing this in arena, since enemy arena units have unitids.

    The best thing to do is look at one of the addons that already does this and see how to do it. There might even be a decent API provided by the addon to allow you to make the changes you'd like, it's tough to say!

  3. Posted by moyyom on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:54:35

    I took a peek into HHTD and most of the code was just redundant, it was repeating over and over and i just sort of got bored reading through it and hoped there would be a simpler way, There seemed to be a lot of extra nonsense that wasn't really needed in the middle that I would have no use for.

    So a Battleground for example would be pretty simple? That's my intended use for the code. Considering all units in BGs have UnitIDs. I think I'll have to go browse back through HHTD and see if there is anything I can pull out of it.

  4. Posted by jnwhiteh on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:30:02

    I took a peek into HHTD and most of the code was just redundant, it was repeating over and over and i just sort of got bored reading through it and hoped there would be a simpler way, There seemed to be a lot of extra nonsense that wasn't really needed in the middle that I would have no use for.

    So a Battleground for example would be pretty simple? That's my intended use for the code. Considering all units in BGs have UnitIDs. I think I'll have to go browse back through HHTD and see if there is anything I can pull out of it.

    I'm fairly certain that the opposing battleground team doesn't have unitids, they didn't last time I played one... which was a while ago.

    If you want a simpler example, check out Nameplates Modifier