MOGS

GTFO – WoW Addon Author Interview

GTFO is a very simple mod that does one primary thing and does it perfectly, alert you when it’s time to GET THE **** OUT of the fire or damaging AOE during a Raid or Dungeon Encounter in World of Warcraft. While it may be one of the most basic principles of End-Game raiding, Fire (and AOE in general) is still the main cause of Orc and Human orphans everywhere. Zensunim, a Feral Druid from Malygos, stepped up to the plate and provided half-afk raiders everywhere the perfect tool for notifying them of imminent failure.

What attracted you to WoW in the first place? What other MMO’s have you played?

I was watching a friend play on his computer and was extremely impressed by the overall design and polish of the game. I was also amazed by the fact that if you didn’t like the game’s UI, you could download an addon and completely change it to something else. I used to play Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online and when I first looked on the WoW forums, I remember thinking about how the issues people were griping about were so petty compared to the concerns other MMOs had.

• UO: Someone used a break-in exploit on my house and stole everything I ever owned and the GMs basically said “sucks to be you!”
• SWG: The server crashed and deleted millions of credits worth of the items I put into my store vendor and the GMs can’t or won’t fix it.
• WoW: Flight paths are too long and boring!

What class do you play and why?

My main character is a night elf feral druid with tanking and DPS specs and my primary alt is a blood elf disc priest, but I have played just about every race and class out there. The versatility and flexibility of the druid easily makes it my favorite character. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been able to “save the day” by switching into bear form and tanking in DPS gear after the real tank went down. I also enjoy tanking because it allows me to take charge of the situation, not to mention the instant queue times from the Random Dungeon finder!

What’s your primary/favorite pastime in WoW when you’re not coding? Raiding? PvP?

I used to do some PvP, but I’m big into raiding. Apart from being a lot of fun, it’s also a great way to test my mods. My guild (Dilution of Malygos server) is working on regular 25-man Lich King, but the Low Attendance debuff has been kicking our asses for a while now.

What led you to write GTFO?

Back in BC, I was a fire tank for the Illidan fight. In phase 2, I was having difficulty judging when I was taking damage from the fire on the floor (Blaze) because the fire animation was much larger than the actual damage zone. To help me out, I programmed a mod with an audible alert to let me know when I was taking Blaze damage. This allowed me to optimize my kiting path on that fight.

Our guild recruited some new members and one of our new healers was having serious difficulty staying out of the AOE during the Illidari Council fight. I realized I could use my Blaze alert mod to warn about other stuff. I recoded the mod, sent it to the healer, and it worked! She stopped dying in that fight.

Did you have any prior scripting or programing experience or did you just dive into it? What resources did you find to be the biggest help in developing your first World of Warcraft Addon?

Apart from being a programmer professionally, I had developed a few other WoW mods prior to GTFO, but most were never released. SmartError is the only other mod I wrote that’s available publicly. That mod allows me to switch off the character error speech (which bugs the hell out of me) and replace it with more of my custom beeps and boops, along with audible events for other annoying but easily missed error messages/events like “that object is busy.”

I built an automated raid healing program I designed for two-boxing in 40-man raids. You spam one button continuously and the priest character would triage hurt players in range based on overall health, the rate they’re losing health, the type of character they are, and how much I liked them (jackasses had lower priority for heals), do a bunch of calculations, and then cast the appropriate heal, stop casting if another person healed the target, dispel debuffs, manage mana, etc. Eventually, I was coming close to building a hive-mind: multiple healers linked together as one massive healing machine, but Blizzard nerfed what add-ons could do with the 2.0 patch so I abandoned the project. It was fun while it lasted.

When it comes to developing mods, the API reference lists at wowwiki.com are very helpful, but the best resource I found was just from looking at other people’s mods and taking them apart and seeing how they did things. The Official WoW Add-ons forum can be a great place to find help, but it’s hit-and-miss depending on who’s browsing the forums that day.

By now, or at least sometime in the near future, your mod will be recommended by most guilds next to Omen or Deadly Boss Mods. Do you see yourself continuing to play and update GTFO through Cataclysm? Or would you allow the project to be passed on should your interests take you in other directions?

I’m constantly making updates and look forward to updating it in Cataclysm (or before that if I can score a beta invite). One of my plans is to start going through some of the old dungeons and start adding alerts for them, along with a level cap for some alerts (standing in a level 20 mob’s Flamestrike is dangerous at level 15, but completely ignorable at level 80).

If I were to quit the game, I would want someone to pick up the project and continue with it. It’s pretty easy to maintain as it’s just identifying and classifying new alerts for various spell IDs.

You have been keeping a very active presence on your curse.com page for the Addon and it’s allowed both you and your users to get a lot of feedback. Do you feel their comments have influenced the direction you are starting to take as far as implementing a wider ranger of alerts and tank friendly options?

The biggest request I get is to have some visual indicator built in because several people play the game without sound. A little known fact is that GTFO is actually integrated in the latest version of Power Auras Classic today, but it requires some set up and it doesn’t distinguish between the three types of GTFO alerts. I’m putting together a manual on how to set it up.

Unfortunately, the way it’s set up in Power Auras, tank-friendly alerts will break how Power Auras displays alerts, so I’ve been holding off on releasing that. I wrote a patch for Power Auras for improved GTFO support and I’ve been trying to get a hold of the latest Power Auras author to get it added to the official release, but I think he disappeared a couple months ago.

Comments and feedback help a lot! I usually have to do all the testing myself and make guesses based on spell data I find from online fight logs and data mining sites for fights I haven’t had a chance to do (like Heroic ICC).

Thanks for taking the time to answer a few of our questions Zen, is there you have anything else you want to say or any tips you can give any potential modders and addon authors out there?

Put comments in your code! Not only does it help others understand your code, it helps YOU understand your own code when you have to go back and update something you haven’t touched in months. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go follow my own advice.

- Zensunim of Malygos

Visit curse.com and download GTFO now.