I basically did away with the whole in-game UI mod since Blizzard is too important to be bothered supporting backwards compatibility for mod authors. This means the combo editor and such are now resident in the app itself (it draws an overlay in front of WoW’s window as you enter keys).

As is the style these days, since I don’t want to be responsible for any bugs, I’ve labeled this a beta build (thanks Google!) .

Please feel free to email me or comment back with any suggestions

WoW 360 v2.0 beta

Here’s a screenshot of the new combo mapper:

If anyone has any ideas for how to revive the app, lemme know, or feel free to do it yourself (the source code is posted just a few entries down).

It works best with black on white or white on black text (which are really the most common) and scales down from there as you approach the primaries. In any case, the improvement is marked. Check it out.

It’s bittersweet leaving Kinetics after so long though. The people there have always been really nice, and the hours are great. That being said, making games is something I’ve wanted to do since I first saw a computer, so the decision to go isn’t that hard. Same goes for moving to Orange County. I’m actually really excited about moving out there… well, excited and aprehensive. See, I only know one person and, while we’ve known eachother since we were little kids, he’ll be living about 1.5 hours away, so I’ll be on my own for the most part to meet new people. I’m ok with that for the most part, but the unknown is always a bit intimidating. I’m hoping to get some interesting room mates at least, heh, that should start things off on the right foot.

My friend and current roommate Alex Hamrick is coming along for the drive out there and I can’t thank him enough –it would be one shitty drive by myself. On the way, we’re going to stop at New Orleans and Las Vegas, and also see the Grand Canyon, which I’m really excited about. When last I roadtripped we didn’t make it to Vegas or the G.C. but I promised myself that would be for another trip. We did get to go to New Orleans pre-Katrina. It was the first time Pete had been and I consider it a hilight of our trip, even though it was only one night. It will be interesting to go back to the city a few months after Katrina having been there a few months before.

While I’m certain this will be an awesome road trip, it’ll also be an exercise in logistics for me. This is because, in order for me to move “successfully” each the following needs to complete in order: I arrive in CA, Alex takes his return flight home, I find an appartment, my stuff gets there, I start work. All of which, have begun or will have begun at different times in the past. Two of these (Alex’s flight and my start date) are fixed, and at least one of them (the movers) is, for all intents and purposes, completely out of my control. This should be fun, kids.

Check it out.

Now that this part is done, my plan is to make a WoW interface mod which will act as a companion to the router application. Right now, the number of useful hotkeys is limited to six (X,Y,B and their shifted counterparts). What I’d like to do is design an interface where rather than being bound to a single buttonpress, spells are cast using button combos. I figure if I only bind to combinations of two, I’ll get 36 (6*6) usable combinations which is just enough to map the bottom three action bars (12 buttons per bar). This also lends itself to an intuitive interface. I’d like to display the ABXY pad in the upper or lower right corner and show, on top of each button, a two icons representing the spell that will be cast (or secondary menu that will be accessed) if that button is pressed (with or without shifting). The A-Button would be reserved for jump,while shift-A could be used to back out of a sub menu. I think I would also use Start to toggle on and off the regular spellbar (to switch into mouse and keyboard mode).

I’ll post again with a download link when the mod is done.

Despite my process patent qualms, I can’t really argue with NCR’s stance. Companies today see IP firms cropping up all over the place just acquiring patents and then sitting on them. Existing solely to litigate, they never intend to produce a product of any kind (the very definition of a drain on society). The only defense against this seems to be to have your own portfolio of patents showing prior art and possibly turning the tables should any of them get challenged. It may end up that they are infringing on your patent, but since these IP firms don’t actually make anything, it’s hard to show legitimate loss, so their flank is unfortunately covered. It’s pretty rediculous the state of things these days. Hopefully when someone with half a brain finally gets in the white house, this might get sorted out. Microsoft and Google have both separately been pressing for changes in the way the patent system works for some time now, so maybe if the rest of the industry gets behind them money will make change (no pun intended) where common sense, so far, has not.

In any case, I’ve managed to piece together the beginnings of my attempt at adding specular bloom and motion blur to a test project. This is what I have so far:

The picture on the left is the true color output, the center is visualization of the offset image, and the right is a visualization of the light intensity map. I say visualizations because the actual maps are floating point textures (the offset image is R16G16F and the intensity map is R32F). All three are generated in a single pass using multiple render targets. Right now, you can use the X,Y,and B buttons to switch between views. I haven’t yet finished the process of combining them all together.

I have been reading around and I can’t find or think of a good way to do motion blur on the GPU. Because each pixel in the input contributes to an unbounded number of pixels in the output, the only way to do it via GPU (that I can think of) would involve doing a grid search and finding the correct pixel to blur from. This seems like it would get expensive. I will probably try this as well as a CPU approach. I’ll post more later as to whether or not this was a success.