Welcome to another World of Warcraft add-on spotlight! In this issue we are covering CloudSerpent, by Lockslap.
The Addon
The cloud serpents were some of the most popular mounts introduced in Mists of Pandaria. Yet, if you want to ride these majestic new beasts, you will have to raise your reputation with the Order of the Cloud Serpent. That involves raising your cloud serpent from baby to maturity, performing daily quests, races, and searching for Onyx Eggs in Windward Isle for extra reputation.
Finding these eggs is not very simple, as they are rare, hard to see and in large demand. Hence, the first step is to know where to search them for.
For these reasons, we ought you to try CloudSerpent! This add-on does one simple thing: whenever you enter Windward Isle, it adds all the egg locations to the TomTom waypoint system. This means that you will be able to see all egg locations on the world map, and have an in-game navigation system for traveling through all the relevant points.
Note you will have to install both TomTom and CloudSerpent for the feature to work.
Interview
We also had the opportunity to have a chat with the add-on's author, Lockslap:
Why did you decide to create Cloud Serpent?
When I was trying to complete the Order of the Cloud Serpent reputation grind, I used the coordinates listed on Wowhead’s page for the Onyx Egg to manually imputing them into the TomTom’s waypoint system. Yet, around that time I had a guildmate say rather offhandedly he wished there was an addon to help with the Onyx Egg grind.
It became rather clear to me that there had to be an easier way to do it instead of having to create macros. Then I remember my Lorewalkers addon, which does a similar thing for the lore objects spread around Pandaria. So that’s when I decided to write Cloud Serpent and release it on Curse so that others could get some use out of it.
Approximately how long did it take to finish the first working version?
I'd say it was about 3 or 4 hours from the time I had started writing the code to the time I was pushing the first release version to it's Curseforge page. Most of the time was spent fine-tuning the coordinates and then adding them into a Lua table that could be easily accessed by the addon.
I did my best to make sure the coordinates were as accurate as possible. After that it was pretty much just getting the addon into a working state, and releasing, then I can add features and fix bugs as I go.
How is the experience of working with the World of Warcraft UI?
I have written my fair share of mods/addons/plugins for various games over the years, but I can say without a doubt that WoW's UI is by far the best and most customizable of all them. Blizzard has really provided addon developers with fantastic tools to be able to tweak and change things so that they are just right. Couple that with the fantastic support provided by Curse to the developers, and it really is a match made in heaven.
Could you tell us about any other mods you are working on, or have planned for the future?
My main addons that get my attention mostly lately are...
Lorewalkers - A simple addon that loads the lore objects of your current zone into TomTom's waypoint arrow.
ElvUI_ChatTweaks - A Prat/Chatter replacement specifically designed for the UI-replacement ElvUI. This is the one that sucks up a majority of my development time, due to the vast amount of features it has. Its also the one I'm the most proud of.
Dark Intentions - A simple Warlock addon to announce when you cast our raid utilities (healthstones, summoning portal, soulstone, etc.)
Dark Soil - This is another of the prototype started with Lorewalkers and continued with Cloud Serpent, except that the coordinates are for the Dark Soil that are known throughout Pandaria to help with farming the Tillers NPC reputations.
I usually try to push an addon as far as I can as far as functionality without going overboard and letting it become bloated - that's why I haven't really added any funtionality to Cloud Serpent as of late.
As far as future projects goes I can't really say simply because I usually just happen into an idea for a new addon. Either I'll need an addon to accomplish something or add functionality that I feel is missing and so then I decided to write it. All of my addons start out of my own need of something and then they just have blossomed from there. The bulk of my addons I have released on Curse are just simple improvements to ElvUI.
Thank you to Lockslap for answering our questions and developing this add-on.
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