Sunday, March 07, 2010

Shenmue - Nozomi's Confession (piano)



You can find the sheet music here:
http://www.squaresound.com/arrangements/file.php?id=1048

Shenmue was the only game where my wife actually sat down and watched me play through the entire game (both 1 and 2).

Posted by ARogan at 3/07/2010 03:07:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

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Friday, March 05, 2010

World of Warcraft Plush Toys






- Got my plush toys in yesterday. The kids immediately took them. They liked them so much they took them to bed with them.
- The in game pets are pretty neat and fly along side with you.

Posted by ARogan at 3/05/2010 01:38:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

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Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Dropbox: Sync World of Warcraft and other save game files

- I've talked about dropbox (here is my referral link. I would appreciate it if you use that to sign up.) a few times on this blog in the past. It's a great free service that lets you store 2GB of pretty much anything in the cloud. You install a little service (windows or mac, there is also a web interface, mobile web interface, and free iphone app) and it will sync your files with the cloud and from there to all other computers that are linked to your dropbox account. You can also create public links to the files which is how I host most of the files I have available here on my blog. The backend is Amazon's S3 storage system.
- It's great for backing up files and even more sensitive stuff if you add a layer of encryption like truecrypt depending on how much you trust the cloud.
- Another great use is keeping your World of Warcraft addons and other save game files in sync between different pc's and even macs. If you are like me I have Wow installed on my gamer pc, my server, my htpc, my laptop, and my macbook. If you mess with a lot of mods, tweak their settings often, and like to keep them updated it can be a pain to keep it all synchronized on all your wow installs. With dropbox and symbolic links you can make this synchronization process completely automated and seamless, and it even works between windows and osx.
- Another advantage is dropbox has undelete and also keeps a history of multiple versions of a file as it changes. This is great for save game files not only as a backup but also the ability to restore a previous version.
- I got a lot of my ideas from this article and this one.
- First, a little background on symbolic links will help explain how this will work. Here is a pretty good article:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/howto_master_your_file_system_mklink
My preferred windows tool for creating symbolic links:
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html
- So the basic idea is we are going to move some key Wow directories into your dropbox folders. We will delete the folders in the original location. Then we will create a symbolic link in the Wow folder point back to the ones in the dropbox directory structure. The cool thing about symbolic link folders is wow (and most games and programs) can't tell the difference between that and real folders/files. It will treat them the same. As files get updated in those folders, they are actually being updated in dropbox which will then sync out to all other linked computers.
- Here's another tip. Once you've got wow setup on one machine there is no need to install it from discs/patch on any other pc. Just copy the entire World of Warcraft directory and create a shortcut to "C:\games\World of Warcraft\Launcher.exe". That's pretty much it. The Wow install is really quite portable.

Windows 7
1) Pick a machine that will act as your "main/master" machine. It should be the machine you play wow the most on and where you do addon updates and tweaking. For me it's obviously my gaming rig. Install the dropbox service and make sure it is up and running.

2) There are two key folders in wow that we need to keep in sync with all other installations of wow. I installed into a games directory but you might have it under Program Files. Either way you get the idea.
C:\games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
C:\games\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\YOURACCOUNTNAME
Back those folders up right now before you start. Zip them up or copy them somewhere just in case.

3) I like to organize my dropbox folder as such:
\My Dropbox\Save Games\World of Warcraft
Now MOVE (the two wow folders should no longer exist in their original locations) the two folders (addons, youraccountname) under the dropbox world of warcraft folder so it looks something like this:

At this point those wow files should start uploading to your dropbox account. You should see the status in the dropbox system tray icon. This initial upload could take some time depending on your upstream connection speed and how many addons you have.

4) Pick the first folder (addons) as your link source by right clicking it and selecting "Pick Link Source"


5) Now go navigate to your wow installed directory where addons was originally: C:\games\World of Warcraft\Interface\
Right click an empty space and choose Drop As... and SymbolicLink


- After that AddOns should appear like it is back where it belongs except only one copy of the files in addons exist in the dropbox folder. As far as wow client is concerned it is none the wiser. When anything gets updated/added here it really is done in the dropbox folder through the symbolic link and then silently uploaded to the dropbox cloud.


- Now, repeat the exact same steps except this time for YOURACCOUNTNAME (steps 4-5). Go back to the dropbox folder, pick youraccountname as your link source, navigate to C:\games\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\, and drop a symbolic link there. It should look like this when you are done:


- For each additional computer you have wow installed on you will want to install the dropbox service and let it sync so that all the wow files are downloaded into your dropbox directory. Once that is completed go ahead and delete these two folders:
C:\games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
C:\games\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\YOURACCOUNTNAME
and repeat steps 4-5 for AddOns and YOURACCOUNTNAME.

OSX
- I use this tool which has nice Finder integration for creating symbolic links. The process is pretty much the same as PC with a few small differences. The cool part is the files in AddOns and YOURACCOUNTNAME are operating system agnostic.
- Install the osx version of the dropbox service. Watch the menu icon until all the dropbox files are done downloading.

1) Delete the AddOns and YOURACCOUNTNAME folders which hare probably in /Applications/World of Warcraft

2) Pick AddOns in your dropbox folder which will be your link source and right click "Make Symbolic Link":


This creates a symbolic link in the same directory as the source with symlink tacked on the end.


3) Copy the "AddOns symlink" folder to /Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface. Then rename "AddOns symlink" to "AddOns"


4) Go back to /Users/username/Dropbox/Save Games/World of Warcraft and delete "AddOns symlink" since you no longer need it.

- Repeat steps 2-4 except for YOURACCOUNTNAME.

That should just about do it. Now you can make changes to your addons, add new ones, update them, tweak them and those changes will sync automatically to all your wow installations on pc or mac. Just make sure when you first turn on a computer let dropbox sync first before firing up wow. Also, after playing a wow session let dropbox upload/sync before shutting down the computer. This usually takes < 1 min and is a small price to pay for the convenience.

- I also do this for other save games and even steam games like Dragon Age, Borderlands, Peggle, Plants vs Zombies, World of Goo, etc. It just takes a little research to find out where the save files are and follow basically the same procedure outlined above to get them to sync through dropbox. Until more games use cloud storage for save files (like torchlight) this works pretty well if you play the same game on multiple computers.

UPDATE: 3/4/2010
- Tips on computers with different screen sizes and resolution. First, get all your UI elements sized and positioned properly on your main computer. On all other computers and laptops that may have a different screen size/resolution you will have to check the scale UI option and move the slider. For example, on my macbookpro 13" it's only 1280x800 but my desktop is a 24" 1920X1200. If you scale the ui down it will be smaller but fits perfectly and looks exactly the same on my 13" as on my 24" just tiny. It's in options, video, check use UI scale, move the slider around until everything fits right. The best part is all these video/audio options are stored in the World of Warcraft\WTF\Config.wtf so it is NOT in a folder that is synced in dropbox. This works out perfectly since those settings should be specific to each computer.
- Be careful not to flip the link source and the location of the symbolic link. In other words don't use the wow install directory as the link source and create the symbolic link in the dropbox directory. At least in windows dropbox service for some reason when you create the symbolic link in dropbox and have the source be the original wow directories sometimes dropbox doesn't know the files were updated and therefore it won't update the cloud (you have to actually stop and restart the dropbox service before it notices the files have changed). Maybe dropbox has fixed that in the latest release but I found it unreliable. By moving the addons and youraccountname to the dropbox folder and then creating the symbolic link in the wow install directory, dropbox always picks up any updated files and properly immediately uploads the changes to the cloud.

Posted by ARogan at 3/03/2010 07:42:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post

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Monday, March 01, 2010

World of Warcraft: Combat Log Fix

http://www.arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?t=151814

Every once in a while the combat log bugs out and is just blank. This basically kills msbt, omen, recount, etc and is really annoying. If you quit the game and restart it, that usually fixes it.

This macro:
/script CombatLogClearEntries()

works great. If your combat log ever bugs out just run that macro and it should fix it right up without the need to restart the game. I've tried it twice now.

There is also a mod that does it but I didn't bother installing it since it doesn't happen all that frequently.
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info16001-r20100217.html

Posted by ARogan at 3/01/2010 10:39:00 AM 2 comments Links to this post

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Sunday, February 21, 2010

World of Warcraft - A guide to creating a custom arcane mage UI



Here is a before shot for comparison:


So now that I'm starting to raid a bit more I thought I would redo my entire UI from the ground up. Most of these addons I download from curse using the curse client. I looked at some of the custom ui's at other sites like tankspot to get some ideas but of course I have a lot of my own personal preferences. I didn't really care too much about artwork or aesthetics. I just wanted to place as much information as possible on screen with the more critical stuff centered. The UI has been designed with 1920X1200 on a 24" monitor in mind but it does scale ok down to lower resolutions (I also play on my macbook 13" 1280X800, but you have to enable UI scaling in the options to get it to look right). One general thing to keep in mind is you will want to resize, scale, and position so all these mods don't overlap each other. Pay special attention to dbm, quartz, pitbull, and power auras. Oh and if things ever get wacky type /reload ui

Power Auras
- This has to be the most important mod I have for combat. It basically lets you place any texture, anywhere, any size or orientation, triggered by almost any condition. It's very flexible and works great for any class. I mostly use it to track procs, critical buffs/debuffs, cool downs, and health/mana. Note: These screenshots are a bit dated but my Auras haven't changed.


- The wiki has some pretty good info:
http://powerauras.wikispaces.com/

- The first thing you want to configure is Arcane Blast. I borrowed some ideas from this arcane mage export.You need to track when you get 4 stacks of debuff plus a timer for when the debuff expires. You also need to know when Arcane Barrage procs (orange teeth above the toon) so you can cast Arcane Missile. I also have a timer on Arcane Barrage so I know when it expires. So the basic idea is I have a purple semicircle divided into three segments. Each time I add a stack of arcane blast to the target part of the circle gets filled in. When the 4th stack is applied a larger glowing outline of the semicircle appears and I know it's time to cast arcane missile if arcane barrage has proc'd. If it hasn't then I can fish for it or clear it depending on the situation.



You can import these settings if you want to see how I set them up.
1 stack:


2 stacks:


3 stacks:


4 stacks:


Missile Barrage:


Arcane Power:


- I have little triangles that appear that tell me when I have low mana or health. The problem is the low health is a pretty critical warning and it was just a bit too subtle. I changed it so the triangle means below 50% and then I flash a big red "Danger" message when I get below 33%. At that point I'm ready to ice block if the healers can't get to me in the next few seconds.


Health at 50%


Health at 34%


Mana at 80% (time to pop a gem)


Mana at 34% (maybe time to evoc)


- Getting the slowed target to work was a bit tricky because there are so many things that can trigger this effect. I basically had to create two yellow arrows and lay them directly on top of each other because there were too many conditions to fit in one aura.

slow 1:


slow 2:


- The rest of the things I did with power auras are pretty straight forward like the trinkets, icy veins, arcane power, wards, gems, evocation, etc.
icy veins:


trinkets (you'll have to customize the name to match the trinkets you have equiped)



Mirror Image:


Presence of Mind


Mana gems


Evocation


Fire Ward:


Frost Ward:


Pitbull v4
- This is probably going to be one of the more time consuming mods to configure. But once you get it all setup the way you like, it is well worth the effort. I highly recommend you read the faq and guide first. My objective was to get my player unit frame and target unit frame lower and centered on the screen where my eyes are usually focused instead of the upper left hand corner. Instead, I use the upper left corner for focus and focus target frames.
- I put a hotkey on focus target which I usually slap on the tank. Then I use this macro /target focustarget to easily target what the tank is targeting. Click on nothing and hit your hotkey for focus target to clear focus. This also has implications if you use a sheep macro. I'll have to look into it a bit more.
- I still use grid for when I raid though I could probably setup pitbull to look a lot like grid. I do use pitbull for 5 man instances.
- The main changes I made is adding a 4th bar just for level class information and changed how health and mana text are reported to be formatted basically the same way the default wow frames are. I created a separate layout for target since I like Health:Smart for the text in that case. I also moved my pet frame to the upper left corner underneath focus unit frame but scaled a bit smaller. I also increased the size of critical icons like raid target markers.
- For party unit frames I scaled them down a bit and have no pet frames.

5 man instance:


Bartender 4
- What I did to save some screen real estate is I created two full bars of buttons that stay hidden all the time with all of the buttons hotkeyed. These are my most frequently used spells and ones I have the keyboard shortcuts committed to memory and have developed that muscle memory needed for best performance.
- One thing to note is that bar 1 is treated special and is the bar that is visible during vehicle combat encounters like in the start of ulduar or malygos. Since I have bar 1 with my first set of hotkeyed buttons and is usually hidden I had to use a custom condition for visibility. First I position bar 1 near the button overlapping my already existing bars. Then, I use this custom condition: [vehicleui]show;hide
- This way the bar is usually hidden unless I'm in a vehicle fight. I suggest you go joust or try the quest Aces High to make sure it is all configured properly.
- Other than that I used two groups of 9 buttons on each side for less commonly used actions which do not require a hotkey scaled down to 90% size. I use buttonFacade to make them look a bit different from my main set of buttons. I also do duplicate a few of my hidden buttons here if I care to see their cooldown. OmniCC really helps with that superimposing a countdown over the button.

Here you can see the 2 bars that are usually hidden. Note that where bar 1 is positioned overlaps the other bars because it is usually hidden except when I'm in a vehicle:


I temporarily moved bar 1 up for easier editing:


Vehicle Combat:


- I also have 2 vertical columns of buttons on the right side that are always hidden until I mouse over them. These are actions that I usually don't need in a raid but often use like teleport, switching weapons between main/lance/fishing, cooking, etc. Yes, I like having a LOT of buttons:


Sunn Viewport Art
- That big black area on the bottom is the sunn viewport art. I really didn't care about the art but just wanted a viewport mod. A viewport mod lets you change what area of the screen the world is rendered to. So basically I exclude the area at the top where titan panel is and the area at the bottom where all my buttons and data are. This allows you to place all those informational and UI controls outside the rendering area and see more of the world.

Without Viewport


With Vertical viewport checked (also this is how it looks out of combat):


Grid: I still like these unit frames for seeing the status of the entire raid. The main changes I made were having the health bars be horizontal instead of vertical. I also added mana bars. I use grid to track arcane brilliance/intellect and focus magic buffs. Under status|auras you can easily add your own buffs to track. So I have a little square in the upper right corner on the frame for everybody in the raid who has arcane brilliance/intellect and a square in the upper left corner if they have focus magic.
Sexymap: I like square maps and the ability to hide the buttons until you hover over the map.
ElkBuffBars: Nicely sorted, easy right click to remove a buff.
DBM, Decursive: Must haves for any mage that raids.
MikScrollingBattleText: Just a cleaner look instead of all these numbers floating everywhere. It gives you nice control on where combat text is displayed.
IceHUD: It's kind of nice to have mana, health, and threat data all right there but now that I have Pitbull configured it's a bit redundant. I might drop it but but for now I'll leave it.
Omen: Make sure you have an alert set to report to MSBT. That really helps get my attention if I'm about to pull aggro.
Recount: Damage/dps meter.
Prat: I like having a bit more control over my chat window including scroll wheel support.
EavesDrop: I just added this one. It's a nice compact little combat text window with summaries.
Shieldmonitor: I love this for gauging how much fire/frost ward/x shield is left. Good if you run with Incanter's Absorption and like to live life on the edge a bit.
TitanPanel: Lots of info in very little space.
Wow Instant Messenger: Handy to make sure you don't miss a whisper. I configured hotkeys to easily hide/show all chat windows.
Cowtip: Handy to resize and move tooltip text so it doesn't overlap anything critical.

Older shot during 10 man icc raid (before I got sunn viewport)


Recent 25 man ulduar raid (some minor tweaks: Moved cowtip lower so it is just above the black area, moved quartz focus buff bar to the top left corner just below the focus unit frame because that is what it belongs to):


- I do run quite a few other mods but these are the main ones that impact the UI.

UPDATE: 2/24/2010

- So I did a little bit of rearranging. After adjusting the viewport it threw all my power auras off so I've re-centered them around my character.
- I also wanted a bit more space for the chat window so I could fit a few more lines. To do this and increase the bottom black area I collapsed the two groups of 9 buttons on either side, made them horizontal and scaled them down a bit. I actually scaled all the other buttons down to 90% too. This gave me more vertical and horizontal space to play with. I was now able to squeeze Eavesdrop down in the corner and still give more space to the other windows.
- I also decreased the font size to 12 on the buff bars and also decreased the height so more buffs could fit.
- MSBT static text area is now above the player quartz and shield monitor bars instead of below it.
- Disabled focus target unit frame in pitbull. It had an * symbol next to it meaning it uses a lot of CPU. Granted I'm running on a core i7 860, 8gb ram, hd 5850, win 7 x64 but still I noticed a bigger hit in framerate in the last 25 man raid than I would have liked. I'll see if this makes a difference.
- Disabled all icehud bars except threat. It's the only bar I still glance at. For all health/mana information I rely on power auras and the pitbull frames.
- Overall, I think this is a much better split between the panel at the bottom and the viewport.

UPDATE: 2/27/2010
Here are a few more raid 25 shots

- I added one more mod: SexyCooldown on the lower left hand side and made it vertical.

Posted by ARogan at 2/21/2010 10:10:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

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