WoWDev Team

[Balkron]

This post is adressed to people who care about the future of WoW Modding, especially to those people who are programmers, scripters, designers. The list of people who can help out can actually be expanded. If you are somehow related to some content creation for our favorite game WoW, this post is for you.

I'm Balkron, a 3D modeler and graphic designer. I am sick of working with crappy software.

The community on Model-Changing, Modcraft, Ownedcore and other related boards is quite big and seem to even grow bigger. There are many old members as well as newcomers. I can see that many of you dislike the lack of decent development tools as well as the poor quality of the existing ones.

I want to gather a team of people that will work on promoting WoW modding and increasing its quality. Everyone of us can make WoW modding better.

There are developers among us that have already created tools for the community before.There are enough people who constantly contribute to the development of the community by giving their ideas and suggestions. There are many newcomers as well that want to learn how to do things. So, what do I want?

The programmers make different software, editors, fix bugs and reply to feedback, as well as making tools that are interesting for the community. This is an amazing contrbution. However, this is too little.

This is what I particularly want:

• create a solid team of developers from MC-Net and other boards
• fix bus of the existing software
• discuss missing software and develop the concepts
• perform the development in organized manner by our united efforts

The most crucial problems for the community are:

• outdated software
• inconvenient software (there are a lot of toolchains utilizing 010 edtior or commandline tools)
• lack of software (both in terms of functionality and different WoW version support)
• too many software with limited capabilities (e.g. OBJtoM2 instead of a full featured M2 editor)
• abandoned software projects (obviously Neo)
• absence of knowledge or time for the development

There are many talented people as well as real professionals involved, but almost everybody is working separately. If we gather our knowledge together, we can become a truly effecient team for the creation of all necessary tools, that will have good quality and a wide range of features.


Let's stop tolerating outdated software and dirty hacks. It is time to stop using commandline to convert some file or fix something. We should think ration and improve our workflow.

You can pretty much find a programmer in any programming language that we might need in our community. There are also many people who do ingame scripting, level design, modelling and other things. People usually want to express their ideas and add some new features to their tools and to automate exhausting repetitve working pipelines.

Thanks to WoWDev Team most of this can be brought to life. Yes, there is already a sever called WoWDev on Discord, but there are actually just the people who are interested in WoW modding and just want to stay in touch with tool releases. In our team we can bring togehter people who want to contribute directly to the tool development. There won't be any passive activity in the chat with muted notfications, your participation is important.

It is clear that my proposal mostly refers to programmers. A large portion of work can only be done by them. Their work cannot be underestimated, and should not be, especially if we talk about high quality work being done.

I also want to specifically address people who do toy-projects. We also need you. Even if your work does not seem to you as something important, a large portion of tools in this community were started as someone's toy project. Even if you don't release your work to the public, your knowledge and experience still can be greatly appreciated by the community.

I also want to address the people who do small applications or scripts for converting, viewing or fixing files. We need you too. With our efforts united we may help you improve your software or help create new one, which is more comfortable in its use.


We also need people who draw, does 3D modelling, maps. Your experience in creating graphic content for the game can help us improving our software through testing and feedback. Each of your has probably faced the difficulties during the work. Your suggestions and concepts undoubtedly will become the entry point for a new tool or app.

hope that many people from the modding scene will answer this call and we come together as a team dedicated to creation of powerful and multifunctional tools.

You might have a question now: "How are you going to develop this or that tool?"

At first, I want to take some time spreding this announcement.

After we have enough people who are interested, we bring together all the issues that we have to solve and document it in our TODO list. There we will have all our planned changes and future improvements. As a team of interested people we can describe all the issues that we currently have and find their potential solutions.

After that we will divide the responsibilities within the team. Of course, the work should account IRL things and the experience of the team members. That is why I want to see people specialized in different areas working within the team that want to dedicate a part of their free time to this work.

People in the team should be able to establish convenient communication and receive feedback from the rest of the team members. For example, programmers may seek help with the code issue from the other developers, if they lack some knowledge. Or the level designer can test a version of your tool and describe its disadvantages and bugs. If a 3D modeller complains about the lack of software for Legion, they might get a "qualified" answer on their question.

The work of people who release their software for free is greatly appreciated. However, I think that efforts and time put into the development should be rewarded. Soon I will create an account for donations from the community, as a reward for people who create tools for you. Of course, we will make it in some way that will look safe for both people who donate the money as well as people who get it.

Nothing really stops us now to gather our efforts and direct them the right way. With that being done, our community can develop as never before.

Discord

I decided to make Discord our main communication platform. It is convenient for discussing our ideas, doing voice calls, sharing screens and keeping chat logs organized. Skype is horrible, IRC is way too old.

If you are interested, let me know in PM or join the Discord server directly.

Balkron#1435

Thanks for your attention and reading this large piece of text.