WowPlot is a graphical analysis tool for World of Warcraft® combat logs (compatible only with the new combat log format introduced in version 2.4). Its main focus lies in evaluating time-dependant combat performance in a very free-form fashion, which is in contrast to the mainly statistical approach of other tools.
WowPlot requires Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) and is a Universal application.
I thought I’d do a write-up on the addons I use in World of Warcraft, and why I think they’re useful. Some of them communicate with each other, so they become more useful if more people use them.
Although there’s quite a few addons, my interface still looks largely “vanilla”, so I don’t need to relearn the game… 
AuctioneerAdvanced (and Informant)
This addon can scan the auction house (which takes quite a while; about 5 minutes on Bloodscalp) and remembers a database of prices and other statistics that is displays in a nice tooltip if you mouse-over an item. It also tells you the vendor sell price (e.g. useful if you want to pick the quest rewards that sells for the most gold because they’re useless to you). Furthermore, it extends the auction house interface to sort the items by average price (compared to its scanned database), so you can see at a glance whether items can be snapped up cheap or are horribly overpriced. Also, it offers a nice interface for selling items there, which can sell multiple stacks and displays you the other sellers for said item, and price accordingly. Enchantrix is also part of the package and displays what constituents items can be disenchanted into.
The addon is currently only available as a preview version, but that is already very stable.
BigWigs (and LittleWigs)
BigWigs provides raid (and in LittleWigs’ case party) warnings for instance bosses. This included things like player proximity (e.g. Maiden or Curator), debuffs, sacrifies, etc.
If you want to reset its settings (maybe because you accidentally disabled some warnings), delete “World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/[account name]/SavedVariables/BigWigs.lua” and “World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/[account name]/[server name]/[player name]/BigWigs.lua”.
Cartographer (and Cartographer_Fishing/Herbalism/Mining)
Cartographer improves the built-in full-screen map. You can create and share (!) notes on it, create waypoints that show a little arrow with a direction you’re supposed to go in (helpful for disoriented people like me that don’t know where 10 o’clock is ), it shows the position of other guildmates (that are also using Cartographer) in the world without being in a group and plenty of other things.
The Fishing/Herbalism/Mining bits extend Cartographer to automatically remember where you gathered resources nodes, which is very useful if you’re looking for a particular plant / metal / fish, or simply want to farm for materials.
ClosetGnome (and ClosetGnome_Mount)
With ClosetGnome you can create and swap between different sets of gear with a single mouse-click / keyboard button. For example, I have a normal “default” healing set, one with a focus on MP5 for boss fights, and another feral set (which I usually leave in the bank, though). This integrates nicely into FuBar (see later), but can also be used without it.
The ClosetGnome_Mount bit enables your gnome to switch sets based on mounting / unmounting, so you can equip your Riding Crop or Charm of Swift Flight.
FuBar
Now FuBar I really like. It’s not really an addon on its own, but a system which other addons can use (and quite a lot actually already support it without you being aware of it). Essentially, it creates a small panel or bar at the top of bottom of your screen, in which other information or plugins can be displayed. This really cleans up the sometimes overcrowded ring of addon buttons around the minimap… I’m going to list the FuBar bits that I’ve found useful, but there’s quite a few more:
BagFu — Displays the used and free slots for your bags and opens them all on a click
ExperienceFu — Shows you levelling statistics like “how long to level”, or how many more mobs at the current XP, etc.
GroupFu — Shows (and allows to change) the loot systems. Also takes care of rolling (simply click on it) and recording the results.
MailFu — A “You’ve got mail.” sorta thing. Also records your AH sales.
QuestsFu — An alternative quest tracker (which can track more than 5 quests at a time and also tracks how your party mates are progressing (e.g. “Fungi collected 8/15 Naga Scales.”))
TrackerFu — Displays your current tracking mode and allows you to change it.
TrainerFu — Tracks which skills you can learn now (or at the next level ding) and how much gold you oughta be saving up to pay for them. Also includes trade skills.
HealBot
HealBot is a reasonably easy to setup “grid click-to-cast” interface, mainly for healing and decursing. It tells you the current health status of everyone (as well as incoming heals from other people using it, so you know who’s already getting a big heal) in the party / raid, and includes reminders for missing buffs.
As an example, I’ve set it up to cast my Lifebloom macro (which activates the Lower City Prayerbook) on a left-click, Rejuvenation on a right-click, Shift+Mousebutton is my bigger heals, Alt+Mousebutton is decursing (poison and curse). I let it sort party members by max health, which means tanks are usually at the top and easier to find / heal.
It also displays who has aggro (so you can get preventive heals off on that squishy that just grabbed aggro from the tank), and who is / isn’t in range (so you can tell them to get their sorry ass over here).
A few version were quite buggy, an old stable version is 2.3.3.2, but I’ve also found 2.3.3.10 to be fine again, and from the changes done to .11 I suspect that that won’t cause any new problems either.
MobMap
MobMap displays the patrols / position / occurences of ALL (!) mobs in the game, as well as their drops and droprates, so it can answer questions like “What mob drops [this item] and where can I find this mob?” or “Where is the vendor that sells [enchaning recipe X]?”. It can displays the mob positions on the main map (default) or on the minimap as well. The addon also integrates with your Quest log and tries to extract mob and / or drop names from the quest description and thus allows you to look them up with a single click.
This addon consists of two parts (which you need to download separately): The addon itself and the database with all the information. These are updated independently from each other.
Omen
Threat meter. Know it, use it, love it. That said, as a healer on multi-mob encounters it’s a bit useless, but a new version for 2.4 will bring a few nice new modes that help in this regard. Watch this more closely than your dps-chart, please!
RatingBuster
Adds another mouse-over tooltip to gear that enables you to compare them to your currently worn gear more easily and see whether it’s an upgrade / downgrade / sidegrade. Also does nice things like converting Spirit to MP5 (for priests, druids), Int to crit% and many more.
If you use this and Informant (from Auctioneer) there is a bit of overlap in the displayed information. I simply configured them to remove duplicate information so the tooltips don’t grow huge. Fully configurable, but comes with sensible defaults.
SpellReminder
This displays timer bars for HoT, DoT, Buffs, Blessings etc, allowing you to easily determine on which mob / player you need to refresh. It’s a bit verbose out of the box (and by default has two groups of timers, one informative and one for the ones that are about to run out), but it is easily configured to your liking.
In my case, I’m only using it for my HoT-spells (Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Regrowth) and CC abilities (Entangling Roots, Sleep). I’ve given each of these timer bars a different colour (e.g. green for LB, pink for Rejuvenation, red for CC) and can thus see very easily what needs to be refreshed. It also displays the amount of stacks and the mob / player name.
Violation
Modern SWStats / DamageMeters-like addon with FuBar-integration and low overhead. Also communicates with other players using this addon. It also offers a few interesting stats that few other addons do, like aggro duration, for example. All these stats can also be displayed in one (or more) nice little live-updated window with graphs and such. Again, watch Omen more closely than the dps chart!
I haven’t watched much anime in the past few years, but recently there have been a fair number of shows which I’m actively following again; some due the teams behind them (Seirei no Moriboto, Ghost Hound), and some due to their premise (Dennou Coil, Nodame Cantabile).
So far, I can say the Seirei no Moriboto is really good. It’s technically well done, it tells a good story, and is not weighed by the common stereotypes. Instead, it simply tells the story of its characters, all of which behave believably and consistently.
Oh, and Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann is very old-fashioned and modern at the same time, and still typical Gainax. It certainly throws some curve-balls your way and is not quite as juvenile as it may at first seem.
PS: Why is Death Note so popular? I found it mostly annoying (due to the dislikable characters). I don’t get it at all. Still don’t know why I bothered watching it ’till the end…
An amazing movie. Very enjoyable, but slightly fragmented (with many fades to black separating scenes) and very surreal.
I’m a bit sad that many people won’t bother with the film because it seems to make very little sense in the beginning (and not too much more explicit sense in the end); it’s more like a collage of emotions at times.
The art style takes some getting used to, it is similar to Ping Pong from the same mangaka — which also has an excellent live action adaptation which I cannot recommend heartily enough; it evokes many of the same feeling that Tekkon Kinkreet does.
Technically, the 2D animation has a rather low frame-rate at times (and I’m not sure I like the motion-blur post-processing in that context), but the excellent backgrounds and superb 3D animation (which managed to never feel separate) are more than making up for that.
Last but not least, the soundtrack (although sparse) by Plaid fits perfectly.
Truly a high point for animated films this year!
Xbox 360 #5 died yesterday evening with the red ring of death, two days before the launch of Halo 3…
I am not amused! :/
I finished reading Alastair Reynolds’ “The Prefect” yesterday. It’s set in the Revelation Space universe (in the Glitter Band, before the Melding Plague) and comes in fairly short at ~400 pages (which I read in two suitably epic evening sessions).
It’s very much a page-turner, and I feel he is improving from book to book. Two things weren’t handled terribly (the Thalia Ng strand was not quite as exciting and important as the others, and the reveal about what happened 11 years back doesn’t IMO justify the actions taken afterward by the Supreme Prefect as well as the people at the scene).
So, if you hated Reynolds before, you might hate this book a bit less, everyone else will probably like it as much as I did (which is a lot). I feel this is a good stand-alone novel (in the way things start, move forward, and end) but the other books also add a lot of nicely interwoven additional background information; so I find it hard to judge how I would’ve felt about the book had I not read the other books…
Very recommended.
A slightly bigger release, which brings two major changes. Not compatible with older files due to the the reorder-changes. The improvements to bit.c are not terribly well tested. More here, as usual. As an aside, Kompressor is now served in a ZIP-archive, instead of a DMG…
Changelog
I finished this the day before yesterday (on PS3). It is quite hard-hitting in a few places, and I did very much enjoy the story-telling (great voice acting!) and vibe of the game.
Definitely not perfect but excellent while it lasts…
While compressing a multi-channel file with a target bitrate and no specific target MSEs the resulting bit distribution between the channels seemed rather odd, and comparing the results to an older version revealed that it was indeed totally bogus!
So I changed the target MSE computation in main.c to be more inline with what happens in Kompressor.app, which revealed a another bug where tiny negative (i.e. relative) target MSEs passed to wv_query_scheduler() / wv_encode() were converted to 0 (instead of the smallest negative fixed point number representable) and thus interpreted as absolute target MSEs.
Both of these are fixed in 3.3.4 (and Kompressor.app has also been recompiled with the relevant fix).
Other than those two fixes (both of which only relate to target MSE evaluation when compressing), the code is identical to (and thus fully compatible with) version 3.3.3.
Most played game: God of War II.
Hardware - Heavy, although it doesn’t seem much bigger than my 360 when horizontal. Although upright it seems much more massive. I won’t be lugging this back to my parents’ for the weekend. The form itself is odd, and always makes me look twice because out of the corner of my eye it looks skewed and perspectively incorrect. The finish looks very nice (glossy black - Klavierlack) and attracts dust and fingerprints even more so then the PSP, but then you don’t have to touch it as often as the handheld. After it’s been on for about 10mins, the fan goes to its high settings (same as when turning the machine on), which is about the same volume as the fans on my 360 (not the jet-engine derived DVD drive), but a much nicer tone (not as much droning). So far, I don’t own a disc-based game, maybe the spinning drive will provide additional ventilation. It expels plenty of warm air out the back and the right (top) side.
HDMI output at 1080p looks really good; I’m using an HDMI to DVI cable and a mechanical DVI switch (so I can still use my Mac Pro with DVI as well).
Controller - Still don’t like the sticks (large dead-zone, little resistance, positioning). Seems to charge quickly, though. Haven’t seen a single game where the SIXAXIS was useful. The Motorstorm demo had an option for control using it, but I was missing feedback of how far I was turning and how much further I could turn. The triggers have a similar feel of “not knowing where you are”. Rumble is missed. It’s very light. D-pad is decent.
Interface - I really like the XMB in principle (especially on a high-def output device), but it seems a bit cumbersome once you get into sub-menus (e.g. in the audio-output menu, you had to go right to get the screen to save your changes; elsewhere you don’t have to do that and right will change the category). The built-in “swirl” and the music visualiser look very nice (the swirl probably only in HD), although I don’t see what they have in common with the music (but this has been my problem with visualisers for the past 5 years or so).
The text-entry system is a disgrace. Give me a proper on-screen keyboard, getting the USB-keyboard out of the closet gets old fast. The whole set-up process of the console was seemingly focused on being user-unfriendly: Plug in your wireless controller, then you have to use the PS2 display connector first to get a picture to enable HDMI, optical out disabled by default, the on-screen keyboard, …
As for the user-friendliness, something I wanted to mention that contrary to one’s expectation (but not their marketing materials) the PS3 is much more a PC than the 360 coming from Microsoft. The PS3’s got activity LEDs for the HDD, it needs to be properly shut down, it installs stuff after downloading, etc.
But I have to add, most things are fine after the initial set-up. Nevertheless, most companies would do well to rent an Apple employee for improving the unpacking and set-up experience of new shiny equipment…
Online / Store - I’m not quite sure how the accounts will work for different regions will work, so far I’ve not used my planned main-account name, as I’ll probably reserve that for a European account. I also haven’t bought anything (again because I’m not sure how transferable the bought items are).
The friends system I haven’t tried much, although I registered a few peeps.
The (US) online-store is essentially a web-page (which is slightly sluggish when moving quickly between items). You use the analogue stick to controller the mouse pointer or flick between controls with the D-pad (unfortunately it also scrolls through long description texts). The sections are nice and clear, I like the “what’s new” and “top downloads” side bars.
The downloads themselves are nice and fast (maxing out my 6000 kbit/s connection most of the time, the rest of the time I was torrenting 
), but they better be because you (currently) cannot do anything else while download. Except cancel the download. Which then tells you that the download has failed if you do. I know, I canceled it!
Good selection of stuff though, I was expecting it to be sparse compared to XBLM, but it’s not at all. I really appreciate the “proper” downloadable at very reasonable prices.
1080p trailers look really, really nice. Recommended are 300 and Black Hawk Down. It’s also nice to have plenty of hard-disk space.
Demos / Downloadable Games
F1 2007 - Quite nice and difficult (played with most of the aids turned off). Looks a bit vaseline-smeared.
GripShift - “Only” looks OK, but seems very fun. Reminds me of Trackmania. Not too keen on the racing, but more on the platforming / collecting side of things. I’ll probably buy this.
GT HD - Only game I recalled running in 1080p. The gameplay doesn’t look much better than you remember GT4, but it’s really sharp and the car models are a lot better (which you would have noticed it they’d simply used the GT4 ones in this). The replay though look really proper good! No force-feedback, even with the Driving Force Pro. Hate!
Motorstorm - Looks and plays nice, but some of the videos I had downloaded looked nicer (with dust particles going in and out of shadow / sunlight and being shadowed correctly). The demo is probably from an older build.
Resistance - Died repeatedly after killing 3-5 of the bad guys with the default weapon.
None of the games I recall as using AA (although F1 used depth of field and motion blur, and so did GT HD in replays), but on the plus side all of them had a very stable frame-rate and no apparent tearing.
(Current) Conclusion
I’ve ordered the US versions of Resistance and Motorstorm, so I’ll see how the full games fare. For me, as a 360 owner there aren’t many more interesting exclusives out at the moment, but the good downloadable games and the stunning picture via HDMI (compared to the lacklustre colours via VGA on the 360) are quite nifty. As is the feeling of untapped potential, but we’ll see about that.
Would I recommended you buy one at the current price? Not really, unless you have enough disposable income or are gagging for a Blu-Ray player. The reason I imported one now was that I sick of Europe getting shafted.
