Combat information at your fingertips - Scrolling Combat Text

icelava — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 10:20:48 GMT

One of the coolest things about World of Warcraft is the exposure of an API to allow the end-user community to program and customise the UI and other gaming aspects in a highly flexible way. Some of the add-ons make the UI look amazing different, as though the control panel of another game was ported into World of Warcraft.

I use a variety of add-ons to quickly show me real-time information about my character and the surroundings of the world. Chief among them is Scrolling Combat Text (SCT), which overthrows Blizzard's sparse affordance on information during the course of combat. The add-on listens to events and details them into information strings that get scrolled across the screen. It is highly configurable, so one can adjust the amount of events that get displayed, as well as how they are to be animated.

What I found to my disliking was the speed at which the text scrolled and disappeared out of sight - at the slowest setting, they go by so fast that I couldn't register the values displayed fast enough into my brain. Since I am a software developer (albeit only well-versed with .NET Framework), I took it upon myself to see how easy it was to modify the LUA scripts that make up SCT. This is a log of what I had to change to slow down the animation speed.

SCT is dumped as two directories - "sct" for the core engine, and "sct_options" for the optons menu.
Inside the sct_options directory is the file options_setup.lua.
There is an array declaration within by the name of "ANIMATIONSPEED".
The array contains a value of "maxValue=25".
Setting a value of 100 to 120 gives an animation speed that is comfortable enough for me.

UPDATE : Looks like the new version of SCT has slowed down the animation natively. No need to customly hack this code anymore. :-)

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Combat information at your fingertips - Scrolling Combat Text