AVR
Note: AVR will be broken in patch 3.3.5. See this
AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality) allows you to draw and add lines, circles and other markings on the 3D world itself. All markings may also be shared with others. Suitable for example to mark locations when explaining raid tactics. These marks can even be left visible for the fight itself.
Other things you can do with AVR:
- Draw range circles around you or someone else at any range
- Clearly mark players close to you
- Mark any location relative to player position and rotation, for example mage blink landing spot
- Measure distances
- Boss encounter warnings (using a separate addon)
Boss encounters
AVR does not contain a built in boss encounters module anymore. They are now done by a separate addon. At the moment there are two options.
- AVR Encounters adds AVR warnings for various boss abilities. It does not require any other boss encounter addon to work. It is not a replacement for traditional boss encounter addons as it does not do ability timers, sound warnings etc. It can be used with any traditional boss encounter addon such as BigWigs, DBM or DXE.
- Raid Watch 2 is a full boss encounter addon much like BigWigs, DBM or DXE. It has built-in support for AVR and also does timer bars and other kinds of warnings.
Whichever you choose to use, you will also need to install AVR.
Important note: If you have installed a previous version of AVR which contained the AVR BigWigs module then you should delete that. Simply delete your Interface\Addons\AVR_BigWigs_Citadel folder.
Limitations and known issues
There are some fundamental limitations caused by what information is available to addons. These are mostly related to the exact position of camera and lack of unit Z coordinates. In particular you should note following:
- Drawing works best on a flat surface (note that for example Dalaran has very uneven roads).
- Camera getting stuck in a wall or ceiling will cause any markings to go out of sync with rest of the world.
- Any kind of stairs/slopes and such cause troubles.
- Jumping and other kinds of vertical movement causes the drawings to move with you.
- Everything is drawn over the 3d world. This means that things that should be behind walls or units will appear in front of them.
- Camera auto follow causes some problems. See also this
Some other known issues are:
- All vehicles (like the ones at the start of Ulduar) are a bit problematic.
- Lifts, moving platforms and in particular Gunships in Icercown Citadel raid have some problems.
- Player map coordinates are unavailable in Icecrown Citadel raid on Lich King platform after the edges have collapsed. This means that any markings tied to zone coordinates or other players than yourself are unusable there. (Lana'Thel's room was fixed in 3.3.3 though the ramps leading there are still a bit odd.)
- Player map coordinates are also not available in arenas or instances released before Wrath of the Lich King and so most things don't work in either of those.
How to use
See How to use.
Frequently asked questions
See FAQ.
you can use avr without avr encounters, but you won't get auto detection stuff like circles around frost tombs, you'd just get painted scenes only like where to put the tombs with avr by itself.
So AVR seems like a pretty nifty mod and would be great for Sindragosa for my guild. Can anyone clarify what exactly needs to be downloaded for me? Does the Raid Leader need AVR and AVR Encounters? And do all raiders have to download AVR and AVR encounters to see the shapes or just AVR Encounters? Any clarification would be great.
set a localization pages for other language localization。
Yeah, so after seeing the idiots in my guild try to figure out scenes in AVR, I don't think I'll be implementing the "pick a scene to toggle" thing in AVRE. That's just asking for trouble. Sigh.
i love AVR by the way, very good idea this addon :)
Oh of course, that makes sense. I fail at math. So the 10 yard range is useful mainly during P3. So, I'll leave it where it's at and it's configurable now.
Circles are overlapping but that doesn't mean two people are closer than 10 yards of each other. When one circle reaches the center of another then the two players are within 10 yards of each other. They are cutting it very close though. If the circles had 5 yard radius then you could tell that people are closer than 10 yards when circles overlap even slightly. However then it'd be harder for the people not having beacon to determine when they are too close. I can see some people preferring 5 yard circles though so making it configurable sounds good.
Olog, take a look at the video n3vaevar posted. You can easily see how much they're overlapping the 10 yard version of the Frost Beacon, and they're not getting multiple hits.
can highly recommend this addon. specially combined with "avr encounters" help us on our firstkill on sindragosa 25 hm.
help us downing sindragosa 25 hm.
I'm afraid camera auto follow problems won't get fixed unless Blizzard makes some changes in the API, which seems unlikely.
Can you provide some more detail about the issue with Camera auto follow. Is this an issue that you intend to work to resolve or would users be required to change their camera control settings in order to avoi dit? Last night I required my guild to install this add-on (and it's great BTW, thank you), but 3 users in particularly were bitten by the camera auto-follow issue, to the extent that I told them they could disable the add-on and we'd address it later. They are accustomed to having camera auto-follow turned on so it would require them to get used to a different camera setting.
I didn't mean that much customization, more like changing the line texture to maybe be dotted, outlined or just thicker by supplying a different version of line.tga.
Else maybe use what Saiket suggested, just really want to see a lib-version :D
The textures aren't really used in the same sense as textures usually in 3d modelling. Wow api doesn't have simple functions to draw lines or triangles. So instead these are done using WoW widget API Texture objects on screen, then setting the texture to a line or triangle. The triangle texture is a white triangle at the upper left corner of the texture, rest of it being transparent. (See line.tga and triangle.tga in textures folder.) Then SetTexCoords is used to transform the texture so that the three corners in the texture file end up at desired screen coordinates.
You can't really do texture mapping of polygons simply by changing the texture files. This is because SetTexCoords only does affine transformations and you can't do perspective at all with those. Trying to add real textures to anything even slightly larger ends up looking quite awful. If you subdivide your polygons small enough then you can get adequate results but that then increases cpu usage quite a bit and it's already a bit high.
Recently I added the option "use texture" in filled circles and unit markers. This renders the whole mesh using only a single texture instead of several triangles. For one colour circles this works very well because any circle (or ellipse) ends up being an ellipse after perspective projection. And I can transform a circle texture to any ellipse with an affine transformation. So I can draw a 3d circle using a single circle texture exactly as it should appear. However, the perspective becomes a problem again if the circle texture contains any details at all. You can see this with unit markers. Make one on yourself, tick the use texture check box and and increase the size to 10 yards or so. Then rotating around it you can clearly see the perspective error. When you try to combine several polygons it ends up being even worse.
Wikipedia has a good picture at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping . The one with three checkered planes labeled flat, affine and correct.
@Saiket That might be a good idea.