Welcome to another World of Warcraft add-on spotlight! In this issue we are covering HaloPro, by Spinalcracker and Chisato.
The Addon
Patch 5.0.4 introduced several new unique talents, many of which brought new mechanics into the game. One of those spells is the priests' level 90 talent Halo. While certainly fun and innovative, it is not easy to maximize its full potential: Halo does the most healing and damage when cast at 25 yards of the target. The farther or closer you are, the less effective it will be. Would you not rather know if you are in the correct spot?
Then we ought you to give HaloPro a try! This add-on adds a new bar to your interface, which shows how close you are to your current target. Using it, you can ensure you accurately time your use of Halo. Never be on the wrong place!
Moreover, HaloPro is highly customizable: you can scale it and move it to your preferred position, and choose between three different themes, each one named after the priest's specializations.
Interview
We also had the opportunity to have a chat with the add-on's programmer, AUTHOR:
How did you come up with the idea for HaloPro?
I have played shadow priest since vanilla, and Chisato has a shadow priest alt she raided with all cataclysm expansion. Both of us are active on the HowToPriest.com forums.
There was an active discussion there in regards to the mechanics of the level 90 talent spell Halo. After learning the optimal distance to max it's healing and damage potential, I was doing some testing on beta and found it fairly difficult to judge distances to the target. I started looking for an addon to handle this, but there were none specific yet to halo, so thought I would jump in with both feet and write one.
Where do you find it to be most useful? PvP or PvE?
As a competitive raider, I would have to say it is most useful in PvE raid environments when damaging or healing a specific target, but PvP priests could probably argue that point. HaloPro is a tool to maximise Halo, so for PvP, things like healing a flag defender in Arathi Basin, or helping kill enemy melee chasing your own flag carrier, it could be very useful.
How was the experience of working with the World of Warcraft UI?
This was my first addon - I am not a programmer by trade - so as a hobbyist the fact I have a useful, functioning addon I think has to say the World of Warcraft UI is fairly forgiving. I had lots to learn, but Blizzard has produced a lot of useful APIs that really help streamline the development process.
Did you come across any problems during development?
I hit a couple snags mostly due to writing an addon during beta development of the Mists of Pandaria expansion. This meant some APIs were changing as I was trying to use them. Some documentation posted online was no longer current or relevant, but for the most part, the wow community being was it is, people had them updated very quickly.
HaloPro also relies on a library called LibRangeCheck-2.0. It too got caught up in some API changes I was mentioning for MoP, but the developer and maintainer, mitch0 was great. I put a ticket in after a new beta build broke the library's returns and he had it patched up within a few days, allowing me to continue HaloPro's development, so a big shout out and thank you to him.
Another major personal obstacle I had was I am not skilled or creative enough to come up with the textures we used for HaloPro. Chisato really saved the day and gave HaloPro a very professional look and feel with her texture designs. We still have a few more theme's to add and she is hard at work on those, so once complete I think there will really be something for everyone's UI.
Any plans for new addons in the future?
Long term, we would both enjoy working on some new projects as in game addon needs change. In the short term, there are many new features we want to add to HaloPro, so stay tuned for that. We are both excited to see HaloPro deepen in its feature set.
Do you have any advice for others who would like to start modding?
If you're new to programming, be sure to take your approach in small baby steps and be patient with yourself and the community. Learning to create an addon takes a lot of research and self teaching, but is very rewarding when it begins to come together and function how you envisioned. It is a lot of fun!
If you're a seasoned programmer, I think you'll find the Wow UI and Lua very easy to work with. You can be very creative in how you approach coding solutions to whatever need your addon fulfills. The addon community in World of Warcraft is great and I think any programmer out there would have a lot of fun contributing to such a succesful community and game.
Thank you to Spinalcracker and Chisato for answering our questions and developing this add-on.
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