Evan Sims

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.

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!

A Look at Warhammer’s Preview Weekend

Last weekend Mythic Entertainment opened it’s doors to everyone who preordered the forthcoming Warhammer Online, an MMORPG based on — what else? — the long standing Warhammer franchise. I’d been playing WAR in closed beta for a few weeks prior to this, so I figured knew what to expect more or less. What I didn’t expect was just how much the influx of people would change the game’s world, and my perspective of it.

Much of WAR revolves around Realm vs Realm combat; that is, PvP campaigns that pit armies of good nd evil against one another for the glory and honor of their homelands. These campaigns take place in either instance scenarios or, my personal favorite, in open world battlefields. Each battlefield has a different landscape, and different objectives, but the rules remain the same: kill enemies, capture objectives, defend your captured objectives, siege keeps, lock a region for your realm. I had played RvR before Preview Weekend, of course, but the new flood of people took the battles from fun to truly epic.

So, besides RvR, what else went really well? I was impressed with the overall server and client performance. The servers have never been hit with near this many people, and they managed to stay up and responsive the vast majority of the time. The client, likewise, ran very well, even in the intense battles that took place in RvR. I’ve been super impressed with the amount of polish the game receives each patch.

What went wrong? Not a lot, but a few big problems arose. Pathfinding was borked, which was unfortunate. They had fixed the pathfinding issue in a previous patch, but the issue was regressed into the Preview Weekend patch somehow. Well, that’s Mythic’s story anyway. I got stuck on sharp edges and weird objects a whole lot more than I previous had as well… my guess is Mythic disabled some CPU intensive checking on character collision detection to ensure the servers performed well. Nothing wrong with that… in fact I’d applaud them for having the foresight to do it… but whatever the cause, this needs to be fixed before launch.

There were also quite a few crash to desktops (CTDs), far more than I remember there being in previous builds. Those issues aside, I couldn’t have been happier with the way WAR handled the Preview Weekend masses, and I have to applaud Mythic for doing such a fantastic job in preparing for it.

I’ll be giving Warhammer Online a full, overall review after Open Beta closes. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a great group of buys to play with, give my guild a look. We’ve love to have you.