How To: Edit Global Strings

How To: Edit Global Strings
Current Wowcraft build: 4.0.6

You know what I don't like? Spam. You know what is spammy? All this crap:

Your share of the loot is 2 Silver, 14 Copper. (21 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 12 Silver, 27 Copper. (1 Silver, 23 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 12 Silver, 56 Copper. (1 Silver, 26 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 12 Silver, 22 Copper. (1 Silver, 22 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 9 Silver, 11 Copper. (91 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 13 Silver, 35 Copper. (1 Silver, 33 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 9 Silver, 27 Copper. (93 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 2 Silver, 92 Copper. (29 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 10 Silver, 25 Copper. (1 Silver, 2 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 13 Silver, 16 Copper. (1 Silver, 32 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 5 Silver, 12 Copper. (51 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 6 Silver, 51 Copper. (65 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 10 Silver, 92 Copper. (1 Silver, 9 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 12 Silver, 16 Copper. (1 Silver, 22 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 6 Silver, 93 Copper. (69 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 6 Silver, 24 Copper. (62 Copper deposited to guild bank)
Your share of the loot is 7 Silver, 38 Copper. (74 Copper deposited to guild bank)

You know what's not spammy?
Your share: 7 s, 38 c. (74 c to gbank)

Look how much less space that takes up. This is done by editing global strings. At first the task might seem daunting, but just remember you don't have to edit all the strings, only the one you want. Here is a quickie tutorial on editing global strings.

First, somewhere like maybe your desktop, or maybe a small storage folder next to your main Wow folder, make a New Text Document, then rename it to something like EditedGlobalStrings.lua (make sure it does not end in .txt). You will end up with 2 copies of this file, one in a 'safe' place like this where it won't get over-written, and the other will be your 'active' copy. Open up your file in Notepad or your favorite text editor.

Next, go to
http://wowprogramming.com/utils/xmlbrowser/test/FrameXML/GlobalStrings.lua
Do not be afraid of all those strings. You don't need to worry about most of them. Think of something you wish to alter, like "Your share of the loot". Use the find function (in MSIE you still need to use ctrl F, in Firefox you can just start typing /your share, and it will start the search) to look for the text you want to change. You may need to use F3, but you should pretty quickly find these lines:
LOOT_MONEY_SPLIT = "Your share of the loot is %s.";
LOOT_MONEY_SPLIT_GUILD = "Your share of the loot is %s. (%s deposited to guild bank)";

Copy that entire line into your EGS lua. Now, make the non-variable part (the %s part) say whatever you want. Mine look like
LOOT_MONEY_SPLIT = "Your share: %s.";
LOOT_MONEY_SPLIT_GUILD = "Your share: %s. (%s to gbank)";

This line is for when you are not grouped and loot money:
YOU_LOOT_MONEY_GUILD = "You loot %s. (%s to gbank)";

Save your EditedGlobalStrings.lua. Now we need to put it someplace where the game will know how to read it. You do not overwrite the base global strings in the core code of the game; those are always there. What you do is 'fool' the game into using your strings instead of the base strings. Sort of like having an apple on the counter every morning that you eat for breakfast, but one morning someone has put a banana right in front of the apple, and you take the banana instead. Mm, potassium.

The easiest way to do this is to choose an existing addon that you know you will run on every character that you want to be affected by your edited strings. I use Altoholic on every.character.ever. So I save my EGS.lua and close the Notepad, and open up my Interface/Addons/Altoholic folder and just drop it right in the main folder. Now we have to tell Altoholic to load that lua.

Open the Altoholic.toc (or the .toc file of whatever addon you are using). Go down to the very bottom and just add the name of your file, mine being EditedGlobalStrings.lua. Save the .toc, close the Notepad, and fire up Wowcraft. Now, all characters that have that addon enabled will use your banana-strings instead of the default apple-strings.

Just make sure to always edit your safe file and then drop it into the addon that you've told to use it. Whenever you update the addon that uses your active file, it will wipe out your lua and your edited toc, and you'll have to go put it back in and re-edit the toc. This is why you want a safe copy, one that is not in danger of being over-written.

As you play through the game, you can keep an eye out for things you wish would take up less space in the chat box, then search through the list up there, find the string, and play around with how you want it to look. Happy customizing!

How to: Install Addons

How to: Install Addons.
Current Wowcraft Build: 3.3.2.

I debated if i should title this "how to: installing addons" or "how to: install addons." I'm too tired to go into the grammatical differences, but yes I'm aware that either way, it just doesn't sound quite right. So I opted for the title that would make the shorter URL.

I thought about writing up a post on how to download and install addons. Then I went, wait, NoStockUI already did it just fine.

The single addition I would make to their post is that I would say: I have a certain folder on my HD into which I save all the .zip files when I download them. That way, a) they are timestamped so if an addon has been updated, I can tell by comparing the dates so I don't waste bandwidth by DLing a file I already have, and b) if I ever have to do that horrible thing where I have to delete my whole ui and start over, I don't have to re-DL everything, it's already there.

So if my Wowcraft folder is
d:/games/Wowcraft
I might have a folder like
d:/games/Wowcraft-addons
So I always know where to save the .zips and where to find them.

Other than that, the NoStock UI post did a bangup job. Check 'em out. b^_^b

How to: RSS

What is this RSS stuff and why/how should I use it?


This RSS stuff is awesome, that's why. And the how is much simpler than you might expect (or fear). Let me dissertate on the why for a moment more.

If there is ANY content on the internet that updates on anything resembling a periodic basis that you follow, be it a webcomic, a news site, or a Wowcraft blog, chances are it has an RSS feed. (Unless it's Dominic Deegan. I think Mookie avoids RSS just to annoy people : p.) Any individual post on a site will be an individual post in that feed.

You, the reader, can use an 'aggregator' to collect all these feeds from various sites and organize them for your consumption. It's like designing your own personalized internet newspaper. Some aggregators allow you to share posts from the feeds you read with other users of that aggregator, so if your friends find something funny or interesting, they can share it with you. Also, the aggregator will remember what you have and have not read, so if you go on vacation for a week and come back, you don't have to paw through a ton of sites trying to figure out what you've missed; the aggregator says "here's what's been posted since you were last here!" How handy.

Are you sold yet? If not, give this a whirl anyway. You just might find yourself hooked.

There are many aggregators available. Since I have my Gmails open all the time, I'm most familiar with Google Reader. If you're not a Gmail user, poke your email provider of choice and see if they have an aggregator available (I'm fairly certain Yahoo has something that will do the job); if not, consider searching for a plugin for your browser (Firefox has many such plugins). All my screenshots, however, are based out of my Gmail and Google Reader tabs.

In the upper lefthand corner of Gmail, there is a link to Reader.


Open this in a new tab, and you will see (a slightly larger version of) this.


No subscriptions in there just yet! Next, go to your favorite webcomic or Wowcraft blog, and look around for one of two things. Usually, what you should keep your eyes peeled for is the orange RSS icon, like this:

Most websites will have their RSS feed link somewhere within the top screen's worth of their site, and it shouldn't be hard to find. However, Blogger.com blogs (of which this is one) and Blogspot.com blogs are slightly different; you will want to scroll to the absolute very bottom of the main page (make sure you're not looking at a single post within a Blogger blog) and look for
"Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)".
(If you're looking at a single post, you will see "Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)". You very specifically do NOT want this! You will be subscribing to a feed of comment-replies to that post only, and while that could be educational, it's not really what you want.)

In either case, right click the RSS icon or the Posts Atom link, and choose "copy link location" or the equivalent command.

Then go back to your Reader or aggregator of choice.

Click the blue "Add Subscription" button and paste in your copied feed address.

Reader will query the server and import the last little chunk of posts for you to read and enjoy. Repeat for each site you read, and say goodbye to clunky, chunky bookmark lists and the hassle of trying to remember when your favorite webcomic or blog posts their updates.

You can also sort feeds into folders. In Google Reader, in the very lower left corner, click 'Manage Subscriptions', then click Add to a Folder, type in the folder name you want, and voila:


Any further Wowcraft blogs you add, you can simply drag them into that folder without going through Settings. If you have non-Wowcraft blogs, click 'Manage subscriptions' again and make a new folder for one, then go back to the main page and drag the others into the desired folder.

A nice thing that Reader does (others may or may not do this) is, if you had 5 blogs in your 'Wowcraft Blogs' folder and they each had 1 new post, you could simply click the folder itself to read all the new posts in that whole folder. Or, if a single blog has many new posts since the last time you read it, maybe you want to read each blog one at a time by clicking its name.

You can add dozens, even hundreds (if you're /really/ nuts and have nothing better to do than read RSS feeds alllll day) of feeds. Mmo-champion.com has an amazingly-difficult-to-find-a-link-for feed (general Wowcraft news, ie patch notes and commentary), and I also read TankingTips.com (a warrior-centered-but-not-entirely-exclusive blog that talks about tanking in Wowcraft). Some feeds put the entirety of their post right into the RSS post; some feeds only provide a teaser amount of information and you must control-leftclick the link to open the post's individual page in a new tab in order to read the content.

Livejournal communities also have built-in RSS feeds, with the following format:
http://community.livejournal.com/communityname/data/rss
Replace 'communityname' with the name of your comm, copy that into your Add Subscription, and away you go. Warning: while it's not technically true that "only open posts are viewable in this fashion", this post in LJ FAQs kind of went over my head.

Even a casually-used aggregator can save you lots of time and lots of brainspace. No longer do you need to try to recall how long it's been since you checked a certain blog for an update. No longer do you need to comb through three weeks of webcomic backlog, searching for the last strip you read, and spoiling yourself in the process. No longer do you need to sit on someone's site, hitting refresh until you see their new post. The aggregator does the footwork for you. Just input the feeds, organize them into folders as desired, and let it do its thing.

Happy Reading!