Evan Sims

Evan is a 25 year old designer, programmer and college student from the cornfields of Illinois. Aside from being a freelance web developer, he is also an aspiring video game designer. Learn more.

Free for Job I am currently available for contract work! I have over a decade of experience in building appealing, standards-based web designs and applications. Check out my resume on LinkedIn, my list of ongoing projects and if you feel like we might be a good fit, drop me a line.

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So the new level sync feature in FFXI definitely makes this game way more playable. Why couldn't they have added this two years ago?

Monday 22:16

Uh oh. Methinks somebody forgot to renew tsavo.com.

Monday 19:30

Majorly productive day so far. Who knew rocking out to Tenacious D was a big work motivator?

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Chris and I are discussing the logistics of creating a tweet tracking app devoted exclusively to the topic of poop. Genius. Pure genius.

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Exploring Tag: lua

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September 25th, 2008
Game Design
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MinChat: A Minimal Chat UI for Warhammer Online

A recent goal of mine has been to learn Lua, an increasingly popular scripting language that is used most commonly as the extension interface for games like World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online. Having been quite the Warhammer addict myself these last few months, I decided now was the perfect time to put what I’d learn into action.

My first project is very simple: a chat interface modification. The chat system in Warhammer is nice, but a bit clunky. The chrome around it (that is, the huge social button, the scrollbars, etc.) take up a lot of screen real estate. Being the minimalist I am, it kind of bugged me. So I took it upon myself to fix it.

MinChat in Action

The fruit of my labor is MinChat. It does one simple thing: hide all the crap you rarely if ever use in the chat interface. No more social button (press O to open that window), no scrollbars, no input text button, nothing. Just text and, when you hover over it for a few seconds, chat channel tabs. The addon also automatically focuses your chat on the most recent line when new text comes in.

You can grab the addon from Curse Gaming’s Warhammer site. Please let me know you’re thoughts!

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