Current mood:	groggy
Current music:	Planet B.E.N - Orange-u-tangent
Entry tags:	addon, reputation, soap, warcraft, wxwidgets, xml

HotNightElfOrNot.com
Finishing a project feels so good. Of course, any proper project is never really finished.

First, I got the Avida-ED port working on Windows. Avida-ED is an experimental platform to teach principles of evolution. There's much more to it, but that's the rough overview. So now anybody with a PC can try it out. Took me a good half-year almost, but it's done.

Second, and probably far more interesting to all the Warcraft lovers out there, is a new addon I'm developing. How many times have you grouped with somebody, only to find out they're a total twink? Wishing we could brand them with a big scarlet T? Well, I have the solution. Click below for more :).



Imagine an eBay style feedback system for WoW. Somebody up and leave your group in the middle of an instance? Just leave them negative feedback. Find an awesome player to group with? Leave them positive feedback. Before grouping with anybody, pull up their feedback (preferably inside the game.)

So, I set out to create such a system. Blizzard has opened up much of the game to 3rd party developers, allowing them to create AddOns scripted in Lua with the GUI written in an XML language. I found another project somewhat similiar called Karma, but it's missing the core feature, sharing of reputation info. Possibly because Blizzard makes it difficult to move data into and out of the game, to prevent cheating mostly.

Anyways, a week later, and much wrestling with SOAP libraries, window toolkits and Blizzard's wonky XML format, I have the outline of something working. Below are some screenshots. I hope to have an installer available later this week. Everything is done with cross-platform libraries, so Mac support will be possible.

Screenshots:

Negative or Positive rep on a player:


Player list:


Uploader program:


The web page (obviously needs some help from _ninjakitty_):


So yeah.. it needs some UI work, but the code is there. And the voting system may change. Deciding on a fair voting system is an interesting problem in itself.


Oh, and btw, HotNightElfOrNot.com is still available for anyone interested.