Ammunition Company

It was quiet here for a long time, and before the silence continues, i’d like to give you a tiny update. PetEmote 1.6.3 for World of Warcraft 3.2 is out now with a fantastic set of Death Knight’s Ghoul emotes. Special thanks to Makklor, who wrote all this great brain-eating action. It contains also a TOC-update for WoW 3.2.

I also updated the long-time out-of-date Custom Emotes Tutorial, to make it useful again. However, I recommend using the PetEmote Editor, which is located in the addon directory, but once in a while a player is interested in going the conventional way through all the LUA code. But the tutorial is also interesting if you prefer the Editor.

Finally I have to take a time-out from developing PetEmote now, because I do not nearly have enough time to go on. There are many new (and partially maybe ingenious) ideas on my list, what our critters may get into mischief next. But until the next Children’s Week I can sometimes update the TOC at best. Sorry for leaving you out in the rain…

At this point I’d like to thank you for your interest in PetEmote and your overwhelming feedback. Enjoy your furry, horned and putrescent companions furthermore!

Today I updated PetEmote for World of Warcraft 3.1 — even though it is no big deal. The previous version still works fine. But you may want to download PetEmote 1.6.2 for the following changes:

• Some corrections have been made to cat emotes, especially in using the right gender and wagging swishing the tail (many thanks to Jessamyn from Zuluhed)
• Combat emotes have been slightly reduced
• TOC Update for 3.1

PetEmote 1.6.1 is out now and brings about a whole bunch of random Spirit Beast emotes. Expectedly it took longer than I announced. Maybe I will learn not to mention any release dates, as long as I don’t know if I can keep my promise. However, here is the list of changes:

• Emotes for Spirit Beasts have been added. Actually these are just a copy of cat emotes, but I threw some of them out. So spirit beasts are cats which are not so… cute.
• PetEmote now also works with the Death Knight’s Ghouls, even though there are no random emotes for ghouls at the moment. Please keep in mind, that ghouls are not real pets as long as you don’t push their futile life with the talent Master of Ghouls. Otherwise, PetEmote will not detect your ghoul. (Maybe I will find a way to get that running.)
• The random emote frequency has been slightly reduced.
• The combat emote frequency has been considerably increased.
• A bug has been fixed which triggered random emotes directly after dismounting or summoning the pet.
• The Editor’s menu has been changed perspicuously. I hope it will be much easier to understand and give a clearer view over a huge amount of configurations.
• Using the Editor, you can now create configurations for ghouls and spirit beasts.

I recognized, that I write so precious few articles here, because it takes me hours to translate them to English. For that reason, I resolved to write more — but only in German, sorry. Otherwise I could just as well close that blog due to inactivity.

Of course, news about PetEmote will be translated hereafter. For an always up-to-date list of translated articles go to the English category. Thank you for your understanding.

Update (March 28, 2009): After I updated WordPress and the famous qTranslate plugin, I recognized that it is not necessary anymore to have an English category. All articles, which are only available in German, are now hidden automatically. Nice feature! Therefore, the English category is now closed.

Finally, Jorna hit level 80. It took only a month, though I did it at my leisure. And I only combed through 4 of 8 areas of Northrend and just flew over the others.

And it was fun! (And will be fun furthermore, I hope.) I bombarded ships from a zeppelin, rode on a harpoon, learned much about falconry, blew up mammoths, fought wild air battles against my old arch-enemy, the Venture Company, saved unlucky fellows with my gryphon, drove a steam tank, rode dragons around the top most mountain of the world and dropped barbarian girls off it. And I’m on my way to become a moped rider.

Well, this expansion is really cool. Some might say it is not, but who cares. I did not often have so much fun with a game like I had with Wrath of the Lich King until now. There are so many little things every now and then where I have to laugh about or roll on the floor. And there are enough quests until level 90, but I’m also glad about the bonus money to buy the chopper soon.

I was a bit quiet in the past weeks and enjoyed this wonderful Expansion. But along the way I finished PetEmote 1.6. I hope I will remember all the changes, which partly are some months old.

• It is now possible to write Combat- and Feeding-Emotes. Luckily for you, I have not added any localized emotes — some of you will remember my bad English grammar. You can use the Editor (which is still located in the PetEmote directory), provided that you are using Windows and have the Microsoft.NET Framework 3.5 installed, to write your own Combat- and Feeding-Emotes for your favorite pets. I will be pleased to find your custom-emotes.xml file in my mailbox, to add your emotes to the next version.
• There are two new conditions for writing emotes, which make it possible to decide if the pet liked or disliked a food.
• Emotes on feeding will only be displayed, if the pet accepts the food. To get an emote, when the pet dislikes a food (for example if you feed him a mana potion), you have to pull the item out of your bag and drop it on the pet or its icon. There is no better way at the moment, sorry.
• The occurence of combat and common random emotes will be better adjusted in later versions. At the moment, it is not optimal.
• There are three new conditions to decide, if a text may be used as the first, second or third part of the whole emote. Using the first condition, it is possible to create emotes, which will not be concated with other texts for sure.
• Creating keywords for emotes has been optimized in the Editor. Most of the time you can leave the Editor creating keywords automatically.
• The new pet families from WotLK have been added and can be selected from the menu to create new configurations.
• At least I have added Devilsaur emotes! (Most of them are modified Raptor emotes.)
• The ominous “bored” emotes have been removed, as they caused problems sometimes. Now you can spam as much as you want!:P

By the way, it is possible to write emotes for the Death Knight’s Ghoul, as long as the character has chosen the (whatever it is called) better-ghoul-talent from the third talent tree. Just give your configuration the name Ghoul. And don’t forget to post your Ghoul emotes here.

As always, I’m glad to read your comments (and emotes of course), though I will not be able to answer everything in the next few weeks. The next minor update is planned for end of December.

Things have come to a pretty pass. My first message in the past two weeks is one where I talk about being bored while downloading patch 3.0.2 again. Well, who could have imagined that Blizzard would deliver such an antiquated Software. But it’s my own fault — I knew since yesterday, that I would need the patch and could have downloaded it all over the day using the big dedicated line. Who cares. I’ll get online until 11 pm, waiting for people crying in the forums that their servers are down.

While reading comments and feedback on PetEmote, I lately had an idea which I like to implement in one of the next versions. In that I can’t estimate if this small but nice modification would arrive safely at all you PetEmote freaks out there, I decided to start a poll and find out, what you think about it.

As most of you might know, PetEmote uses normal emotes, like the ones you can write by typing /me, to send its messages to other players. Because all emotes have to start with the name of the player who is sending them and a following space, it creates sentences like the following one and sends them to all players:

Jorna ’s Gorilla Chuck stomps on the ground.

With all players, who have PetEmote installed, the arriving message will be cut from the beginning unto the pet’s name. This way, it looks like the emote is coming from the pet.

Well, it is not the best way at all, but it works. What I don’t like in it is the space before the apostrophe. That seems to be not a big deal, but maybe you know that there must not be an apostrope in German (against the rule, I put it there for that the single “s” doesn’t look so forlornly). The pet family, which is only used for a better sentence structure, also blows the emotes up, makes them monotonous and therefore is asked to turn off by many players.

So my idea is to yield to these terms and change the output like this:

Jorna » Chuck stomps on the ground.

This might look a bit uncommon in the first place, but I think it is an improvement. The double arrow symbolizes the relationship between the pet and its master in a way – it looks like Chuck, Jorna’s companion, has to tell the world something about himself. At the same time, it creates a border between the necessary means and the beginning of the emote in fact. Alternatively I could imagine a dash instead of the arrow, but I think it’s the second choice:

Jorna — Chuck stomps on the ground.

The picture above is showing all three options using the game grafics. I like to underline, that this output will only be visible to players, who have PetEmote not installed. Friends of the addon will of course carry on seeing all emotes starting with the pet’s name.

I’d be pleased, if the poll on the right side would end with a useful result. I’m also very thankful about any idea in the form of comments to this article.

PetEmote will no longer be updated on Curse.com!

However, there will be updates in the future. You can download PetEmote anytime and only from this page, the Ammunition Company Blog (add to favorites now *grin*).

Announcements about new versions and changes will be also found in the official Blizzard Roleplaying Forum. But the best source for news all around the addon is here.

Why do I take this step?

I can’t spend my time any longer in updating a slow and extremely defective web page like Curse. It takes me hours and hours to upload a new version, entering the patch notes and making some changes. Even signing in to get access to the development area can result in an adventure. It is hard work to find anything in the navigation, which is showing in countless variations all over the pages. All in all, I can’t carry it anymore.

I will spend the saved time into developing the addon.

I will save my comments about that. How could I demand, to play and test the new features halfway rationally on one of the oldest and overcrowded realms today?

Instead of that I will point out an apparently undocumented innovation, which will appear when opening the graphics settings: Shadows. Pure, authentic shadows. Just pull the switch one or more units to the right and the age of undefinable black spots under our feet will be gone forever.

Thank you, Blizzard!