WowAce

Hi LS,

I think what I see flashing buy is actually ARL, and not LSW. I found this out last night by closing my GW box right after crafting an item. I got a whole spam of errors from ARL in my chat box. The funny thing is, ARL wasn't even supposed to be running, I hadn't clicked to use that plugin during this crafting session.

If I remember correctly, ATSW had the options in it's config menu that you could flag what sources to consider when determining what can be crafted.

[ ] Display the number of items producible with inv. contents and
    the number of creatable considering the following
    [ ] Consider items in your bank when calculating
        the number of producible items
    [ ] Consider items in the inventory and in the bank if
        your alternative characters when calculating the
        number of producible items
    [ ] Consider buyable items when calculating the number
        of producible items.

when you clicked the radio buttons on or off it would alter the craft-able count, lets say all were checked.

Bolt of Frostweave          [10/5/5]

Thus first number is what you have on you, second the bank, third alt's.

Might want to look at his code too see how he got his counts/filtering working.

It might give you a creative nudge.

Hey LS,

Your idea for a colorblind mode sounds like a good one. If it were me, I think I'd dispense with b/B for bag/bank, and just go with no modifier for items in bag, then v/b/g/a. You're definitely right that blanks are better than lots of zeroes.

I do think that my use case is a common one, where I'm standing there at a forge, maybe next to a vendor, and I really want to stick with stuff I can craft without leaving to go to the bank or (even worse) switch to an alt. Maybe some kind of filtering would be nice here? Or a way to highlight/dim entries. If you think of something.

I do think that inventory display counts might be a good area for a module system where you can plug in an alternative. I can imagine, for example, a mod that utilizes auctioneer data to shows how many of an item you can craft with those items cheaply available at the auction house. I'm not suggesting you need this feature, but it's the kind of thing i can imagine for why you might want to let people plug in code for the inventory column.

I haven't tested it, and WoW is down, but this discussion got me wondering about alts and craftability. For example:

• My warrior, who is a BS/JC, has a bunch of copper and tin ore (perhaps that she just bought from the AH with her profession-leveling allowance). She needs bronze bars to level her blacksmithing.
• My paladin, who is a miner/engineer, can smelt copper and tin ore into copper and tin bars, then combine those into bronze bars.

Will GW (now or eventually) identify that scenario as alt craftable? Help me mail the ore to my pally, smelt it all into bars, then mail the bars back? It's an expansion of my previous dream scenario (or torture case) that would definitely come in handy, though it's clearly pushing the edges of the design space pretty far.

I'm really hoping all these comments I've made are helpful, and not just wasting your time. I'm not a believer in XP, but I do believe that lots of people submitting various use cases helps the software design process. However, if you want me to back off and let you work, I will.

Thanks again for your excellent work,
Sarah

If I select an entry manually, close GN and reopen it the selection is gone and it now selects the topmost item instead. Iirc GN was able to remind your last selection and restore it when GN was closed and reopened (in the same session).

Thanks for the hint about the alt key. I do indeed tend to alt-tab out of WoW a lot. ;)

Hey LS,

It sounds like you're on top of everything I was thinking, so kudos and keep up the good work. The specific example that bugs me about the color coding, is there's a column in the GW main window called "craftable." If I don't have in-bag inventory to make any, there's no zero, it's just blank. But if I can 4 by visiting a vendor, or getting mats from the bank or an alt, all I see is a color-coded "4". Other than mousing over, or spotting the color, I can't tell whether that 4 is a "i can make it now," or "if i go to the vendor/bank," or "if i get some stuff from an alt." If I'm sitting back at a forge trying to level my BS (my latest profession project), something that I can craft without leaving the forge is often preferable to going to the bank or switching alts and back just to craft something slightly cheaper.

I also use altoholic, and never really noticed the jerkiness with the built-in TSW or with skillet—and I've definitely noticed it with GW. Maybe you're doing something slightly different than they are that makes its datastore indexing more aggressive? Or maybe I just never really noticed before. It doesn't really bug me that much but I've noticed that momentary stall too.

Seen when opening GW:

Message: Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\plugins\lsw.lua:111: attempt to compare number with nil
Time: Mon Jul 12 15:17:32 2010
Count: 1
Stack: (tail call): ?
Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\plugins\lsw.lua:111: in function `draw'
Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\ScrollFrame.lua:885: in function `DrawColumns'
Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\ScrollFrame.lua:176: in function `DrawRow'
Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\ScrollFrame.lua:222: in function `Draw'
Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\ScrollFrame.lua:392: in function `RefreshRows'
Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\ScrollFrame.lua:850: in function `Refresh'
Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\MainWindow.lua:1111: in function `ShowSkillList'
Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\MainWindow.lua:1135: in function <Interface\AddOns\GnomeWorks\MainWindow.lua:1134>
(tail call): ?
[C]: ?
[string "safecall Dispatcher[2]"]:9: in function <[string "safecall Dispatcher[2]"]:5>
(tail call): ?
Interface\AddOns\Ace3\AceTimer-3.0\AceTimer-3.0.lua:164: in function <Interface\AddOns\Ace3\AceTimer-3.0\AceTimer-3.0.lua:138>

Locals: Sometimes debuglocals() returns nothing, it's one of those times... (FYI: This last sentence (only) is a HotFix from Decursive to prevent a C stack overflow in the new Blizzard error handler and thus giving you the opportunity to send this debug report to the author of the problematic add-on so he/she can fix it)

Hey lilsparky,

On the highlighting thing, the problem is the *whole* window gets highlighted, and I can't move the recipe selection anywhere. I found if I log out/in, I can use gnomeworks again. However, I've had this highlighting issue happen multiple times. There were no LUA errors thrown at all when this happened.

On the LSW thing, I think you misunderstand. I always see LSW load up when I first open up the tradeskill window. I even watch its bar go to 100%. The problem I'm seeing is *after* I've opened the window, and I do any recipe making, I can literally see its cache bar pop up after every recipe is created. I even saw it pop up once last night when I did something else inside gnomeworks (I forget what, need to see if I can do it again). But either way, for some reason, LSW seems to keep re-running its caching function.

Hey lilsparky,

So I'm liking the recent patches, things in r44 are back to working well enough for me to keep testing. However, I'm having some queue problems. In particular, whenever I log out and back in, I get a couple stray entries in the queue, stuff I made previously. Coupled with the (very annoying) fact that there is currently no way (that I can find) to remove an item from the queue, this is a serious bug. It means I can't queue up several things to make and have a bank alt mail the mats—which means the queue is only barely useful at all. Hopefully you can fix the bug, but we need a way to remove things from the queue either way.

I imagine you know this, but while the UI is a good start, it needs some usability work. Every day, i'm discovering new features by accidentally right-clicking somewhere, or holding down alt/ctrl/shift while i click. Maybe this will change over time, but I think too much of the functionality is currently hidden under modifiers—even if they were documented.

Personally, I think Apple's UI guidelines are correct here (and they're backed by quite a few usability studies): modifier keys and right clicks should be convenient shortcuts for things that are visible in the UI as buttons, options in a preferences pane, or menu items. Modifier keys and right clicks shouldn't be the only way to access key functionality, that approach makes software less intuitive.

Also:

• I'm having a bug where sometimes the icon to expand the queue items doesn't work.

• I don't like the use of color-coding only to differentiate different levels of craftability. Around 5% of the population is colorblind (higher in males), so color vision should only ever be an accent or a reinforcement, not an essential indication. My objection is that if I can't craft any with inventory, but I can by mailing from alts or going to the bank, you shouldn't collapse out the 0 for craftable from inventory.

• We need a summary shopping list, maybe at the bottom of the queue window. As it is, it tends to have a lot of empty space at the bottom. I want to quickly see what items I don't have on me without browsing the leaves of a big tree.

• The queue closes when I open the map. I've been leveling by a blacksmith by running from the AH/mailbox/bank to the forge/trainer and back in the Exodar. I know the way, but I tend to open the map on the run anyway out of habit. Then I have to reopen GW, get the queue up, then close the list window to just see the queue, which is all I want. Maybe you can't easily make it survive the map being open, but I do see other AddOns that create a window that survives the map opening and closing. I don't need the whole window to stay up, just the queue.

• A way to directly open the queue would be great. Maybe a slash command and (even better) a broker button. Also auto-opening when I visit the AH, mailbox or bank would be nice.

This is a post full of criticism, but hopefully it's all constructive. You're doing awesome work and I'm excited to see it progress.

Thanks again for all your great work,
—Sarah

Hi Sparky, I really like this new addon. Here's some comments on possible improvements. ;)

1) I miss the "create all" button from Skillet, so I can create all of a given item based on the amount of bits I have in my inventory.

2) It looks like LSW, if installed, runs after something is finished being crafted. I.e., I cooked up 20 pieces of food, and after ever one was done, there was a slight pause as the LSW line for loading cached data flew by at the top.

3) After using it one time to use cooking, I could no longer select among any of my other recipes for my other skills, making it impossible for me to do enchants, etc. :/ I tried switching in and out of gnomeworks, and changing which profession I was trying to use. But no luck. I could not get it to stop highlighting anything but the very first recipe for a profession no matter what I did.

Small suggestion here: have the filtering be tied to the profession instead of a global configuration.  For example, I like to show only my best gem recipes; but for smelting it doesn't really help me to hide everything which is already gray.

You may also consider add a filtering exception for any of the components which are in the queue.  At the very least, its a nice visual to items which are required -- perhaps something I'm only noticing since its alpha software and found frustration looking for the items when that was busted.

I know any suggestions I make are development timeline permitting. :) I am also a technology person (but not a dev) so I know how it works.

OK, I'm not sure if there is a better place to put this stuff. Let me know if there is.

On my enchanting window the last recipe on the list is chopped off. It looks like I should be able to scroll down a tiny bit more, but no go. I can still click on it.

I'm also getting the make two and then stop problem with the latest build. I just click again and it works from there.

It would be nice for enchanting to have what kind of scroll it would go on so I know which one to buy. Like Enchant Agiliy gloves goes on Armor Scroll.