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Keepin' it real..

After the first release of AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft in last December (and a subsequent minor release in January), ideas were immediately flying around how to improve the overall experience of seasoned AddOn developers and those who were just starting to get their feet wet with customizing their World of Warcraft interface. Add to that the feedback that was posted to the Codeplex site and the forum threads that were praising AddOn Studio while pointing out some of its shortcomings and the plan for a v2 was born that Dan Fernandez - the man behind the idea of AddOn Studio - just posted about today.

One of the main areas where AddOn Studio could definitely improve was the FrameXML designer experience. V1 allowed addon developers to put together simple user interfaces by simply dragging an dropping buttons, fontstrings and other visual elements onto the design surface and then writing some Lua code to implement their behavior, FrameXML ninjas were understandably missing features like true support for the built-in virtual frames that you can inherit from, BLP texture support, font support and an overall WYSIWYG experience that didn't require them to fire up WoW or type /script ReloadUI() every time they made some small change and hoped the FrameXML was still valid and showed up.

With its upcoming release, AddOn Studio v2 will have a much better support for FrameXML files that was designed with the single goal of trying to resemble World of Warcraft as possible from the ground up.

The FrameXML support will have the following features (all subject to change):

• Support for MPQ archives, BLP and TGA textures and fonts
• Loading of resources from the MPQ files as well as the filesystem
• Loading and saving of FrameXML files (optionally with validation)
• Full inheritance support (virtual="true", inherits="...") for any FrameXML, including the built-in ones (GameFontNormal, DialogBoxFrame, UIPanelCloseButton, etc.)
• Complete FrameXML layout engine (Anchors, relativeto, explicit and implicit sizes, AbsDimension, RelDimension)
• WoW naming support for $parent (including inherited controls named using $parent)
• Design-time rendering of WoW visual elements, including Texture, FontString as well as high-level elements such as Button, CheckButton, Frame Backdrop), adhering to correct order (Framestrata, Framelevel and layer ordering)
• Toolbox items for all elements and property grid support for all attributes
• ... :)

Our team at EPAM is now working on finishing up the design-time experience to be as smooth as possible. While we're working on this, I'll be posting some technical details on how the FrameXML support was implemented. While our primary goal was to support the best FrameXML designer experience with it, it could certainly be used for working with FrameXML outside AddOn Studio. Stay tuned!

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