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Show HN: Ajour – A GUI application in Rust to manage World of Warcraft addons

mlindner 6y ago
Why is there a Makefile? Can that not be done in the build.rs?
nikivi 6y ago
Last I played WOW was burning crusade and that was 2007-08. Amazing times for sure. Curious how the game evolved over time.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  You should check out modern WoW for a day just to see the mechanics they've been able to add. Before the WoW Classic release last year, I was in your shoes and decided to try modern WoW for a few days as a goblin. It had some pretty crazy quests/events/locations compared to just spawning in Goldshire and getting some "Kill N of X" quests.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Yeah, quest variety has increased a ton. Lots of other kind of stuff than just fetch/kill. I don't think there's really any "Collect 30 bear asses and also only 3% of bears have asses" quests left either. Maybe in like the Burning Crusade zones?
    - shoemakersteve 6y ago
      Oh don't worry, there are still plenty. It's better now though, most bears have asses.
      - Hamuko 6y ago
        I think they've changed the quest drop mechanics that if you don't get a bear ass from a bear, it starts incrementing the drop rate of bear asses for future kills. Previously you were just rolling for that 3% chance all over again.
    - LinuxBender 6y ago
      The more recently added and revamped quests have higher drop rates. There are still a handful of quests that have a low drop-rate, but I find the ratio of these quests to be bearable.
- carlhjerpe 6y ago
  They added a LOT of convenience features and made it possible to buy ingame time with gold.
  - LunaSea 6y ago
    Convenience is what killed the original game's atmosphere in the first place.
    - blibble 6y ago
      it's a completely different game to even how it was in Cataclysm/Pandaria it's now a single player game for nearly everyone (unless you're a higher level raider) the vast majority of players will push a button, the game then automatically forms a group, teleports you to the dungeon/raid, which is then completed without anyone saying a word (and it is almost impossible to lose) the other players might as well be bots loot is now dished out individually and automatically by the game: no interaction with other players is needed higher level raiders experience the same content, just at a higher difficulty (which does require an organised group) Blizzard has optimised out the massively multiplayer part of the MMO, and with new "features" like PvP/mob scaling they've obsoleted the RPG elements too (leveled up? your character is now weaker!) sadly: what's left is a skinner box collection game with many infinite grinds to force you to play by exploiting the fear of falling behind your peers
      - slightwinder 6y ago
        > the vast majority of players will push a button, the game then automatically forms a group, teleports you to the dungeon/raid, which is then completed without anyone saying a word (and it is almost impossible to lose) To be fair, this is not really new. It already was this way 10+ years ago at the end of WotLK when I started playing it for a bit. > Blizzard has optimised out the massively multiplayer part of the MMO, and with new "features" like PvP/mob scaling they've obsoleted the RPG elements too (leveled up? your character is now weaker!) Argh, that is ugly. Does this mean I can't farm old Dungeons/Raids and Low-Lvl-Areas on my own anymore? This was quite nice to chill from time to time.
- als0 6y ago
  There's been a surge of activity in the last year or so due to the re-release of WoW Classic, also known as Vanilla. There are rumours that Burning Crusade will also be re-released soon. I suspect the potential revenue is too good for Blizzard to resist.
  - apacheCamel 6y ago
    I actually have a question here, why would they re-release BC? Isn't the point of Classic to keep it in a certain period of time? When many people started the game and thought it was at its "peak"? On a side-note: would it be interesting to have a second branch of the game, maybe not called Classic, that would follow the main-line of the game, but would be a large chunk of expansions behind? That way people could relive those old expansions as if they were the latest one released. Personally, I think I would be much more on board with that since the game would actually change over time.
    - als0 6y ago
      Because there are a lot of fans that think BC was peak. And they’re willing to pay for it again.
- fareesh 6y ago
  I played until the end of WOTLK. I heard Cataclysm had the best / hardest endgame.
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  It has changed a lot and is about to change again. There is a level squish coming soon to prepare for changes that will make it much easier for new and returning players to level up and enjoy the game. The current system is a little overwhelming to some. The new changes should be live within a month or so. The release date slipped a little.
- bovermyer 6y ago
  Try it again one week from now (Oct 13). That's when they're doing the prepatch for the new expansion. One of the things they're doing is making it so you can level from 1 to 50 in a single expansion's content. Also, they're squishing levels back to the original 1-60 from the current 1-120.
- Bayart 6y ago
  Although the game remained good afterwards, you pretty much quit at the peek. The last decade has been nothing but Activision-Blizzard abusing a captive audience.
yoshuaw 6y ago
Didn't GitHub spin off from Tekkub's hub back in the Burning Crusade days? Fun to see GitHub still being used to enable writing WoW addons a decade later.
- Macha 6y ago
  As far as I can tell tekkub was an early hire and had a cgit instance for wow mods around the same time, but nothing suggesting they were a founder or GitHub was a spin-off of that site
avinassh 6y ago
How was your experience with Rust for GUI and also using iced?
- weinzierl 6y ago
  After looking it up and finding iced I'm curious too. There are so many GUI frameworks for Rust but I never have heard about iced before - looks promising though.
  - rapsey 6y ago
    Only relevant rust gui frameworks are Iced, Druid and orbtk.
    - Crespyl 6y ago
      If you don't mind bindings, there's also qmetaobject-rs, which I had a great time with in a small project.
- rob74 6y ago
  Ah, it's using iced, good to know! Would make sense to mention that in the project's README...
- culinary-robot 6y ago
  I like it a lot. But by saying that, don't get confused by the overall state Rust GUI applications are in: immature[0]. I have a background in native iOS and macOS development and this is another game. However I have not regretted choosing Rust for this project. I wanted to natively support both Windows, Linux and macOS and at the same time learn the language. This was my first proper Rust application and I've learned so much. The limitation Iced has have actually done something good for the simplicity of Ajour. People are liking this simple look because the application is just a tool. There is no need for fancy animations. [0] - https://www.areweguiyet.com/ https://www.areweguiyet.com/
fareesh 6y ago
I remember writing LUA scripts to alert people of certain encounter mechanics between boss attempts when my guild was among the US top 20 or so. The "boss mod" addons eventually caught up, but when you were among the first to get there, you could do a lot of additions/modifications yourself to make them better. Great game, good times. Not anymore though from what I hear
- jabroni_salad 6y ago
  The boss mod addons are still king, but over the past couple expansions a tool called WeakAuras has been getting really popular. It lets you make little displays that pop up or disappear based on in-game conditions. There is a whole ecosystem of these, you can share them via in-game chat, and they are pretty fun to put together between wipes.
- bladegash 6y ago
  Yeah, when I was in one of the top guilds during vanilla, there was an addon that top guilds had that allowed for adding timers/modifications via LUA. I can't remember the name anymore, but it wasn't publicly available, just circulated amongst upper echelon guilds. We would wipe dozens, if not hundreds of times, just to get all the timings down and scripted. It also helped that four of the people in our guild worked in QA for Blizzard (not so well-kept secret of many top guilds back then). Like someone else mentioned, now WeakAuras more of less does that in a much more user friendly way. Still the same process of wiping hundreds of times to build the WeakAuras though.
- bpicolo 6y ago
  > Not anymore though from what I hear Still a ton of fun. I consider it better than the original - more content to enjoy.
  - jefft255 6y ago
    I think so too, and I played a lot in Vanilla. Shadowlands looks to be interesting.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pcf 6y ago
For a non-nerd, the implications of someone making "a GUI application in Rust to manage World of Warcraft addons" makes it a really sad sentence. :)
- silly-silly 6y ago
  Try to hold it together.
eandre 6y ago
Awesome! I have lots of fond memories from the days of writing World of Warcraft addons (CTMod, CT_RaidAssist, ...). Great to see the community is still going.
ajmarsh 6y ago
Nice, any chance you would expand it to manage Elder Scrolls Online addons as well? Great work.
- culinary-robot 6y ago
  Thank you! I don't plan to support other games than World of Warcraft for now. But the code base is split into a core and gui part so it should be easy to fork and modify to your needs!
Thaxll 6y ago
Is that a common thing in GUI to have a single function over 900 LoC? https://github.com/casperstorm/ajour/blob/master/src/gui/update.rs#L21 https://github.com/casperstorm/ajour/blob/master/src/gui/upd... https://github.com/casperstorm/ajour/blob/master/src/gui/element.rs#L27 https://github.com/casperstorm/ajour/blob/master/src/gui/ele...
- culinary-robot 6y ago
  I am very proud of the code base, but there's many places to optimize. I welcome contributions if you want to help out!
- ziml77 6y ago
  Ehh it doesn't seem to be a problem. Understanding the function doesn't require thinking about those 900 lines at once since the code for handling each message type doesn't interact with any other code in the function.
- stefan_ 6y ago
  It's a WndProc, feel free to split each message into a separate function but that's not actually helping anyones understanding.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
minimaxir 6y ago
Some metacontext for those who don't know: Curse was the de facto WoW addon manager. Then Twitch acquired Curse and absorbed the addon manager functionality into their client. Now Twitch sold off the Curse/addon functionality to a party with a much less-polished addon system. Thus, there is now a new market for addon managers, since there is a new major expansion coming out, and playing modern WoW without mods is not great.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  Why did Twitch buy Curse in the first place? Why are they selling it now? Why did Curse agree to acquisition in the first place? I mean, surely it must make sense from the business perspective, but from the user side of things, it doesn't quite do.
  - apacheCamel 6y ago
    My personal opinion, as soon as they forced the merge into the Twitch client, the quality went down greatly. The old Curse client was much simpler, easier to understand, and didn't have all of Twitch crammed into it all. It really didn't make sense to have an "all-in-one" application since both parts seemed very different in terms of audience.
    - Joker_vD 6y ago
      Absolutely, it's as if Netflix acquired Uber (or the other way around) and made a single unified app. Totally reasonable, right?
  - Macha 6y ago
    Seemed like typical business ideas, the curse launcher had an audience, they'd get that audience and synergise it into somehow making people use Twitch more as it's in the twitch launcher. It didn't work, people used the curse launcher to load mods, not to socialise or work live streams. But some of these acquisitions can be that clueless. Curse likely agreed because money.

Why is there a Makefile? Can that not be done in the build.rs?

Last I played WOW was burning crusade and that was 2007-08. Amazing times for sure. Curious how the game evolved over time.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
You should check out modern WoW for a day just to see the mechanics they've been able to add. Before the WoW Classic release last year, I was in your shoes and decided to try modern WoW for a few days as a goblin. It had some pretty crazy quests/events/locations compared to just spawning in Goldshire and getting some "Kill N of X" quests.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Yeah, quest variety has increased a ton. Lots of other kind of stuff than just fetch/kill. I don't think there's really any "Collect 30 bear asses and also only 3% of bears have asses" quests left either. Maybe in like the Burning Crusade zones?
  - shoemakersteve 6y ago
    Oh don't worry, there are still plenty. It's better now though, most bears have asses.
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      I think they've changed the quest drop mechanics that if you don't get a bear ass from a bear, it starts incrementing the drop rate of bear asses for future kills. Previously you were just rolling for that 3% chance all over again.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    The more recently added and revamped quests have higher drop rates. There are still a handful of quests that have a low drop-rate, but I find the ratio of these quests to be bearable.
carlhjerpe 6y ago
They added a LOT of convenience features and made it possible to buy ingame time with gold.
- LunaSea 6y ago
  Convenience is what killed the original game's atmosphere in the first place.
  - blibble 6y ago
    it's a completely different game to even how it was in Cataclysm/Pandaria it's now a single player game for nearly everyone (unless you're a higher level raider) the vast majority of players will push a button, the game then automatically forms a group, teleports you to the dungeon/raid, which is then completed without anyone saying a word (and it is almost impossible to lose) the other players might as well be bots loot is now dished out individually and automatically by the game: no interaction with other players is needed higher level raiders experience the same content, just at a higher difficulty (which does require an organised group) Blizzard has optimised out the massively multiplayer part of the MMO, and with new "features" like PvP/mob scaling they've obsoleted the RPG elements too (leveled up? your character is now weaker!) sadly: what's left is a skinner box collection game with many infinite grinds to force you to play by exploiting the fear of falling behind your peers
    - slightwinder 6y ago
      > the vast majority of players will push a button, the game then automatically forms a group, teleports you to the dungeon/raid, which is then completed without anyone saying a word (and it is almost impossible to lose) To be fair, this is not really new. It already was this way 10+ years ago at the end of WotLK when I started playing it for a bit. > Blizzard has optimised out the massively multiplayer part of the MMO, and with new "features" like PvP/mob scaling they've obsoleted the RPG elements too (leveled up? your character is now weaker!) Argh, that is ugly. Does this mean I can't farm old Dungeons/Raids and Low-Lvl-Areas on my own anymore? This was quite nice to chill from time to time.
als0 6y ago
There's been a surge of activity in the last year or so due to the re-release of WoW Classic, also known as Vanilla. There are rumours that Burning Crusade will also be re-released soon. I suspect the potential revenue is too good for Blizzard to resist.
- apacheCamel 6y ago
  I actually have a question here, why would they re-release BC? Isn't the point of Classic to keep it in a certain period of time? When many people started the game and thought it was at its "peak"? On a side-note: would it be interesting to have a second branch of the game, maybe not called Classic, that would follow the main-line of the game, but would be a large chunk of expansions behind? That way people could relive those old expansions as if they were the latest one released. Personally, I think I would be much more on board with that since the game would actually change over time.
  - als0 6y ago
    Because there are a lot of fans that think BC was peak. And they’re willing to pay for it again.
fareesh 6y ago
I played until the end of WOTLK. I heard Cataclysm had the best / hardest endgame.
LinuxBender 6y ago
It has changed a lot and is about to change again. There is a level squish coming soon to prepare for changes that will make it much easier for new and returning players to level up and enjoy the game. The current system is a little overwhelming to some. The new changes should be live within a month or so. The release date slipped a little.
bovermyer 6y ago
Try it again one week from now (Oct 13). That's when they're doing the prepatch for the new expansion. One of the things they're doing is making it so you can level from 1 to 50 in a single expansion's content. Also, they're squishing levels back to the original 1-60 from the current 1-120.
Bayart 6y ago
Although the game remained good afterwards, you pretty much quit at the peek. The last decade has been nothing but Activision-Blizzard abusing a captive audience.

yoshuaw 6y ago

Didn't GitHub spin off from Tekkub's hub back in the Burning Crusade days? Fun to see GitHub still being used to enable writing WoW addons a decade later.

Macha 6y ago
As far as I can tell tekkub was an early hire and had a cgit instance for wow mods around the same time, but nothing suggesting they were a founder or GitHub was a spin-off of that site

avinassh 6y ago

How was your experience with Rust for GUI and also using iced?

weinzierl 6y ago
After looking it up and finding iced I'm curious too. There are so many GUI frameworks for Rust but I never have heard about iced before - looks promising though.
- rapsey 6y ago
  Only relevant rust gui frameworks are Iced, Druid and orbtk.
  - Crespyl 6y ago
    If you don't mind bindings, there's also qmetaobject-rs, which I had a great time with in a small project.
rob74 6y ago
Ah, it's using iced, good to know! Would make sense to mention that in the project's README...
culinary-robot 6y ago
I like it a lot. But by saying that, don't get confused by the overall state Rust GUI applications are in: immature[0]. I have a background in native iOS and macOS development and this is another game. However I have not regretted choosing Rust for this project. I wanted to natively support both Windows, Linux and macOS and at the same time learn the language. This was my first proper Rust application and I've learned so much. The limitation Iced has have actually done something good for the simplicity of Ajour. People are liking this simple look because the application is just a tool. There is no need for fancy animations. [0] - https://www.areweguiyet.com/ https://www.areweguiyet.com/

fareesh 6y ago

I remember writing LUA scripts to alert people of certain encounter mechanics between boss attempts when my guild was among the US top 20 or so. The "boss mod" addons eventually caught up, but when you were among the first to get there, you could do a lot of additions/modifications yourself to make them better. Great game, good times. Not anymore though from what I hear

jabroni_salad 6y ago
The boss mod addons are still king, but over the past couple expansions a tool called WeakAuras has been getting really popular. It lets you make little displays that pop up or disappear based on in-game conditions. There is a whole ecosystem of these, you can share them via in-game chat, and they are pretty fun to put together between wipes.
bladegash 6y ago
Yeah, when I was in one of the top guilds during vanilla, there was an addon that top guilds had that allowed for adding timers/modifications via LUA. I can't remember the name anymore, but it wasn't publicly available, just circulated amongst upper echelon guilds. We would wipe dozens, if not hundreds of times, just to get all the timings down and scripted. It also helped that four of the people in our guild worked in QA for Blizzard (not so well-kept secret of many top guilds back then). Like someone else mentioned, now WeakAuras more of less does that in a much more user friendly way. Still the same process of wiping hundreds of times to build the WeakAuras though.
bpicolo 6y ago
> Not anymore though from what I hear Still a ton of fun. I consider it better than the original - more content to enjoy.
- jefft255 6y ago
  I think so too, and I played a lot in Vanilla. Shadowlands looks to be interesting.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pcf 6y ago

For a non-nerd, the implications of someone making "a GUI application in Rust to manage World of Warcraft addons" makes it a really sad sentence. :)

silly-silly 6y ago
Try to hold it together.

eandre 6y ago

Awesome! I have lots of fond memories from the days of writing World of Warcraft addons (CTMod, CT_RaidAssist, ...). Great to see the community is still going.

ajmarsh 6y ago

Nice, any chance you would expand it to manage Elder Scrolls Online addons as well? Great work.

culinary-robot 6y ago
Thank you! I don't plan to support other games than World of Warcraft for now. But the code base is split into a core and gui part so it should be easy to fork and modify to your needs!

Thaxll 6y ago

Is that a common thing in GUI to have a single function over 900 LoC? https://github.com/casperstorm/ajour/blob/master/src/gui/update.rs#L21 https://github.com/casperstorm/ajour/blob/master/src/gui/upd... https://github.com/casperstorm/ajour/blob/master/src/gui/element.rs#L27 https://github.com/casperstorm/ajour/blob/master/src/gui/ele...

culinary-robot 6y ago
I am very proud of the code base, but there's many places to optimize. I welcome contributions if you want to help out!
ziml77 6y ago
Ehh it doesn't seem to be a problem. Understanding the function doesn't require thinking about those 900 lines at once since the code for handling each message type doesn't interact with any other code in the function.
stefan_ 6y ago
It's a WndProc, feel free to split each message into a separate function but that's not actually helping anyones understanding.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

minimaxir 6y ago

Some metacontext for those who don't know: Curse was the de facto WoW addon manager. Then Twitch acquired Curse and absorbed the addon manager functionality into their client. Now Twitch sold off the Curse/addon functionality to a party with a much less-polished addon system. Thus, there is now a new market for addon managers, since there is a new major expansion coming out, and playing modern WoW without mods is not great.

Joker_vD 6y ago
Why did Twitch buy Curse in the first place? Why are they selling it now? Why did Curse agree to acquisition in the first place? I mean, surely it must make sense from the business perspective, but from the user side of things, it doesn't quite do.
- apacheCamel 6y ago
  My personal opinion, as soon as they forced the merge into the Twitch client, the quality went down greatly. The old Curse client was much simpler, easier to understand, and didn't have all of Twitch crammed into it all. It really didn't make sense to have an "all-in-one" application since both parts seemed very different in terms of audience.
  - Joker_vD 6y ago
    Absolutely, it's as if Netflix acquired Uber (or the other way around) and made a single unified app. Totally reasonable, right?
- Macha 6y ago
  Seemed like typical business ideas, the curse launcher had an audience, they'd get that audience and synergise it into somehow making people use Twitch more as it's in the twitch launcher. It didn't work, people used the curse launcher to load mods, not to socialise or work live streams. But some of these acquisitions can be that clueless. Curse likely agreed because money.