Reflection (the sequel)

This is an import of the Reflection (2023) post I made on Google Docs for archival purposes.

1 year ago in December 2022, after collecting input on Twitter I posted this to reflect on changes I had gone through up to that year around datamining as well as to some of the reasoning why I made the changes I did. It was very therapeutic to write at the time so why not write a sequel? A lot of this is as a continuation of what I wrote last year, so you might want to read through that to get an idea of where I was at the time.

Ironically, I am once again recovering from being sick while writing this (but COVID round two now, not the flu like last time) and my sleep schedule is in the drain, so instead of having insomnia while coughing up my lungs I decided to grab a laptop instead (this does not however fix either the insomnia or coughing, but at least I'll feel useful).

Updates on the various projects

I ended the post last time around with an update on/looking forward to the various projects I still (expected to) work on so I thought it was fitting to start off with that and how that has gone. I still don't want anyone (particularly artists/devs, which includes me) to suffer by no alternatives being available for some of the things wow.tools did and making sure that doesn't happen is still the primary, and somewhat selfish, end goal.

WoWDBDefs, DBCD and the listfile still largely fall on me maintenance wise. QartemisT (who also runs wago.tools which has slowly been providing alternatives to some things WoW.tools used to do) has taken up the triggering of automatic WoWDBDefs updates after a new build which I am very grateful for but other than that nobody new has gotten tangibly involved in these projects

wow.export is a different story, while both Kruithne and I still expected to actively work on it going forward at the end of last year (and as late as April this year), that has since changed. Kruithne made an excellent post that goes more into it, but the TL;DR is that wow.export is now in maintenance mode, no new features are being worked on by either Kruithe or myself and only when Blender, Blizzard or we break wow.export (e.g. Blizz did in 10.1.7) should you expect an update. If someone wants to come in and continue working on new features, that is very much welcomed and we'll of course do our best to support that as well.

wow.tools the site has been read-only since early this year with many features having been disabled and/or locked in time. The server is still running and as promised last year (and it did indeed take some time) there is an archive available of most of the data that wow.tools stores while the server is still running (please grab it). More on that last bit later.

wow.tools.local, the hacked together local version of the wow.tools site, has seen a lot of updates/additions since the version from December last year. Sadly, this is largely due to the lack of alternatives for many of wow.tools' features to this day and the fact I still need to have access to many of these for work or other projects I'm working on. Many thanks to the other contributors as well for keeping that going.

Personal update

I also wrote a bit about my personal/mental health last year, not a lot of news there but might as well continue that tradition.

I've been having more success in dealing with/predicting some of the physical health issues I talked about last year. I still have a long way to go to be healthy and/or fit, but the amount of situations where it got really bad is far lower than it was last year, so progress is progress. Mental health is still an ongoing thing as it is for many people and various things that happened this year haven't been very beneficial in that department, but I'd still say I'm in a better place now than I was this time last year. My fixations are still a problem, although I also think I booked some progress in that department.

I'm a bit more comfortable in my sexuality compared to this time last year, at least I'm pretty sure "anything goes" now. Gender identity/self image and all that is still an ongoing thing, but that's bound to be a very slow process of discovery, especially if you don't (and I still haven't) spent a lot of time on it.

The jury is still out on new creative outlets. I've messed around with Blender, WoW content creation/map making and various other things, all of which have left some ideas/projects racking around in my brain that I hope to get back to at some point to explore further. More on that in the looking forward section later.

Probably not a money problem?

I had a header called "not a money problem" last year which has now developed in the above. My 3 day/week job at Magic Find is now my only job and while I make enough to make ends meet, anything outside of the usual expenses and such cut directly into savings now. I still have more than enough savings to last me a long while, so there's no immediate issue, but stuff like the read-only wow.tools site/archive might go down permanently whenever a hardware problem or anything like that that requires additional money to fix arises. I also had to invest into a new PC as my old one that served me almost a decade was definitely on its last legs, only proven by the fact I am barely able to boot it after moving the GPU/disks out, so that processor and/or motherboard is definitely almost toast. Either way, no big immediate issues money wise, but am limiting subscriptions/large expenses a bit more (Bye Netflix!) and am considering using that new PC to put some time into things that could make me money (again, more later).

Datamining/spoilers

My opinion on spoilers from last year hasn't really changed, but with wow.tools.local being far less accessible than the website has already made what I think is a visible impact in how many things that could have been spoiled – didn't, and I'm pretty happy about that. I'm also actively still reporting issues around encryption and such to someone at Blizzard so hopefully even with tools/alternatives like wow.tools.local around, spoilers, at least those coming from datamining, will become less and less frequent. Blizzard announcing the next 3 expansions and their respective synopsis hopefully also help a bit in that department.

Looking forward, again

I still want to further explore myself, improve my physical/mental health and all the other stuff people want to self-improve on every year. Other than that? I don't know. Long-term planning is still not something I'm good at, let alone keeping myself to those plans. For example, earlier this year I had planned to release a Hearthstone tavern related machinima before the end of this year, but that required some tool development that I haven't found the time for, so that's been shelved until I find said time. That might be one of the things I want to work on. There's some other ideas racking around in my brain that I want to explore as well, but I'll keep the list limited to WoW-related stuff here to make sure this list doesn't become too big (I have a physical bulleted list on my desk which is probably a few pages at this point).

So here's some of the WoW stuff I might want to work on in 2024, most of it is intertwined with each other, but would also be meaningful on its own. With the new PC I should also be able to stream progress on these projects on Twitch (provided mental health allows) which might offset some of the cost of the PC if I manage to keep it up in the long-term. I technically have 2-4 days/week to work on this with 3 days of the week being for my actual job, so there's plenty of time to spend on these in theory.

Hearthstone Tavern machinima

As people who know me/follow me on Twitter probably are very aware of, a few years ago, Blizzard added an in-game version of the Hearthstone Tavern to WoW. I've been somewhat obsessed with this place for various reasons and have wanted to do something with it for a while. I wrote a script for a machinima last year and had done some initial prototyping as well. I expanded on that prototyping this year and got the basics of a system to make in-game cinematics with Blizzard's scene script technology working, but quickly came to the conclusion I needed some more visual tools to make a proper workflow out of it. Depending on whether or not I'll do that (see next project) I might pick this project back up or maybe modify it into something that won't rely on said in-game cinematic tech as much. Another part of this project was to make an exterior for the Hearthstone Tavern in Blender, some progress on that was made as well this year, but that turned out to be much harder than I thought, especially getting it back into WoW properly.

Tools for improved modding/machinima

With my history in machinima, working with WoW maps and making tools to export 3D data, and later other data from WoW, I've been aching to make some better tools that encompass all of that as well as WoW modding, even if just for myself initially. There's some cool stuff being worked on in various parts of the WoW modding community, but nothing that truly fits the stuff I have been looking for (I like to be more on the bleeding/modern WoW edge). Whether this turns out to be a revival and expansion on the original WoW Export Tool I made years ago or if this is an entirely new thing is still up in the air, I've started prototyping both options.

My own places in WoW

Thanks in part to Implave spurring me on, I've messed around with making my own WoW places and had such a blast that I want to continue doing that, related to the above projects or not. There's some concepts of places I want to make/work on and if one of the above projects ends up happening this will definitely happen as well, but if they don't I might still do this but on a smaller scale.

Exploring/reverse engineering WoW features

Something I still enjoy doing more than other things is the exploration of how WoW is made and how it works under the hood. I've had a lot of fun figuring out the scene script system so far and more recently have explored the dragonriding (aka dynamic flying) system which has taught me a lot about WoWs internals, its infrastructure and has advanced my programming knowledge in general as well. This has been done largely in private (unless you've seen my updates in Discord/on my private Twitter) and I want to continue doing stuff like this going forward. I don't know what the next thing that I want to look at after dynamic flight is, but Blizzard surely has something brewing that'll pique my interest.

Deep dives

Based on the stuff I figure out, I might also make a blog post or something about it if I deem it interesting enough to talk about, I know there's a select few in the WoW community that really like to know how things work and Blizzard doesn't do enough behind the scenes stuff in my opinion, especially with 0 BlizzCon panels about it this year. So why not do it to the best of my ability instead? This might also turn into maybe videos seeing I can actually record things on this new PC now.

Sandbox

So I ran a Twitter poll a while back about people's opinion on sandboxes and I might take a peek at making and/or updating one and implementing some systems in it purely for exploration. Obviously no quests, campaign stuff and all that as that goes too far into private server territory and one wouldn't want to compete with retail in any way, especially as a sandbox is just for exploring archived builds.

Patreon

If one of the above projects takes up steam, I'm considering opening up the Patreon again. I want a good spot to make blog posts to and Patreon was pretty good at that. A bit of extra cash could go back into these projects/offset the PC costs and some of them are probably of interest to some people. As the above projects are still largely for myself (but this doesn't mean they won't be public), I will need to figure out how to be careful not to repeat previous mistakes and create a situation where I feel guilty about running a Patreon, but I'll cross that bridge if I get there. If this is something you'd be okay with seeing or not or have advice about, please let me know.