Communities
As I've talked about before, I'm a sucker for passion. Recently through my efforts in trying to make WoW modding and specifically map making/world building more accessible, I've seen a lot of that. It's reaffirmed my beliefs of so many talented people being out there that simply haven't messed with it due to its lack of accessibility or it being so stuck in the past. It has also reinvigorated my spirit when it comes to the WoW modding community, as my previous experiences with it haven't been as positive as the ones I've been having recently.
The modern WoW modding Discord has been popping off a bit and is at almost 800 members, but with that it has also been bringing up some of my history with communities. This post with will largely be a rant about said history/sentiments with some minor plans/updates around WoW modding at the end and how I think it can be different compared to what came before it. Feel free to skip to the last 2 paragraphs for those plans/updates!
Party Tortollans
I'm very privileged to have found several online communities that I've been a part of for many years now, some of which I've gotten lifelong friends out of. I try not mix them up as they're very incompatible and different types of people, but I appreciate them all the same. There was a point where I was building up my own community, whether I was intending to or not, around wow.tools and WoW datamining in general that ended up being the Party Tortollans Discord server.
Over the years of the wow.tools project and by extension the Discord server it became clear that I was not a good person to lead a community, let alone moderate it with increasing tensions around the world as well as inside of the community. Datamining has a somewhat entitled, news/first-oriented, take-but-not-give kind of vibe around it as well as the inherent spoiler culture, so that attracts a certain kind of person.
I've grown to dislike that sentiment, and as time went by I tried to not promote that too much by being as open with tools and data as I could be (and still try to be to a lesser extent), but that only lead to different issues around widely available spoilers and by extension attention that I didn't want or need. I decide to stick a fork in the server and the project for various reasons, but that was definitely a major part of it.
Changes since
Was there passion in that community? For sure. My biggest worry of stopping that project and Discord server was that I would ruin that community and passion that had grown there, but I'm glad that it still lives on through the server the community made as a replacement (that I have no part in running or moderating). Many of the sentiments/ideals are still relatively unchanged from a few years ago, but at least the spoiler culture part of it has died down a lot, which I'm happy about.
I kept a much lower profile after the Party Tortollans/wow.tools shutdown. I still did the same stuff I did before, just more in private and less on the forefront where the public could easily follow along with any discoveries. I'm at a point now where I'm happy with that, where the people who need the tools wow.tools provided still have access to them in some ways, but the discoveries that can be made through it being far less accessible/advertised to the general public (helped by me not immediately tweeting them). I do slip up from time to time (sorry Rootlands), but I've largely kept my mouth shut when it comes to discoveries about past/current/future content.
Modern WoW modding
But then I had my radar set on something I had messed with in the past but never really got into; WoW modding. I had learned a lot working with WoW stuff over the years and I knew that there were very talent artists in the WoW community through my work on WoW Export Tools and then wow.export.
Friends were messing around with modding, but everything was pretty clunky and the most basic tasks required several different tools to get done, especially if you wanted to work with modern clients. With my accrued basic knowledge on how WoW and its formats work, combined with a passion for art, world building and making games in general, I decided to see if I could at least try and improve that situation.
Now, a few months later and largely thanks to the effort of multiple people, we've got a pretty good pipeline going for modern WoW map making. There's still a lot left to be done, but the basics for map making are there now and people have made some pretty cool zones already with the early tools we've put out there.
While I am still hesitant to once again be involved in building a community, this one so far is far more about giving/sharing rather than taking. Artists are actively creating new things to look at out of what seems like thin air, instead of digging out things from the ever-scraped barrel that is the WoW client.
The Discord server for the project is far more resource/help oriented and building a community around that is likely a far better story for success than it is to build one around datamining. And while it is a topic that Blizzard will agree with even less than datamining, I have far more hope that, if they see it at all, they will see it in a more positive light full of opportunity compared to, well, a datamining project.
Time will tell if I'm right, if it'll tell anything at all, but I am hopeful for the future of this project and the community I'm involved in for the first time in a long time. If you're interested, check out the video that Implave made and maybe join the Discord.
Next up
I'm already planning several improvements for the modding tooling/pipeline and I'm slowly learning C++ to hopefully work more on Noggit (the map editor) and maybe even try to get it working with new client data directly instead of being forced to port modern stuff down to WotLK and then back up. A lot of this is long-term stuff, but we'll still be improving the current tooling as we go.
Speaking of improvements, we added support for placing modern point lights today (with optional animations/raytraced shadows). They're pretty cool. People can add their own colors as well as tweak the animations to their liking. Spot lights and textured lights (if those work at all) up next!