Comments In Posts Are Disabled

Hooray for Spambots!

I don't have time to plug all the holes that are letting these Spambots get in, so I've simply disabled commenting here on the main blog page. I'll look into this issue after the dust settles on MonkeyMods v3. I'd much rather work on the mods than sort through more spam issues.

But of course the forums are still open and a great place for discussion. The login registration is quick and easy, no emails or even funky image quizzes.

Forums Are Back Up

The forums are back up. Visit the forums for all your MonkeyMod discussing needs.

Be sure to check out the Official MonkeyMods v3.0 Plans thread while you're there.

Forums/Server Hacked

I can't confirm it, but it looks like the phpBB2 I used for the forums let some spammers into the server and they've been serving up spam the past few days. I'm trying my best to lock it down but I must admit that this is not my strong point. If I fail to lock it down I'll have to take the site offline for a day or two.

MonkeySpeed 3.0

Server Outage!

Ouch, seems every time toctastic.net gets a forum, the server goes down... Here's hoping it doesn't happen again.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

New Forums Are Up

When you start getting over 20 comments in your stories, it's time to get some forums.

Check out the forums and feel free to discuss all things MonkeyMods. I'm especially looking for MonkeyMods 3.0 suggestions so stop on by.

WoW 2.0 and Burning Crusade

All MonkeyMods in the download page should work with the new WoW 2.0 and the Burning Crusade Beta. There should be no show stopper bugs, only minor issues. Here's a list of the top issues facing MonkeyMods on WoW 2.0:

• MonkeySpeed reports bad speed. Almost all zones need to be recalibrated. Use /mscalibrate while running at 100% in each new zone.


• MonkeyBuddy tabs are missing text. You'll have to play a guessing game and just click them till you find the one you want :)

And that's about it for issues. I won't be fixing minor issues any time soon, I'll be busy working on the new MonkeyMods 3.0 branch. I'm not ready to release details on any new features just yet, but I will say that the code is being almost completely re-written. Because of the massive code changes I'll have to wait until all the MonkeyMods 3.0 are finished before release.

Maybe just one detail... I'm getting rid of all slash commands.

South Park Plays World of Warcraft

I ran across this today. Looks like the premier of the new South Park season is all about World of Warcraft. If you pause when Kenny's on the computer you might notice that he's drinking "Big Balls."

Click here to see the preview on You Tube

Looks very exciting. I wonder if they use MonkeyQuest :)

WoW South Park

MonkeyMods German

MonkeyQuestTaiwan

Pic of the Taiwan version of MonkeyQuest

MkQL Alpha 2 Screen

MonkeyQuestLog Alpha

MonkeyQuestLog Thumb

Question Mark

?

World of Warcraft v1.11

I haven't had a chance to download the new WoW patch yet, but I haven't seen any related bug reports so I'll assume that all the MonkeyMods should work if you select "Load out of date" in the addons menu.

Anyone have v1.11 issues?

The Next Alliance Race

This is about 2 days old but there's a great article over at Something Awful about the candidates for the new Alliance race. The author really breaks it down and provides convincing arguments for each possible new race.

Of course, the article is a little pointless since we all know it'll be the Draenai. A good read none the less.

Charcoal Beta v1.1c Is Out

Crash has released Charcoal Beta v1.1c which can be found at it's new home www.inabsentia.net. Also you can find Crash hanging out in the Discord Forums.

Widget

Widget Screenshot

Announcing the Official .toctastic! Mac OSX Widget

Macer has created a Mac OSX Dashboard widget for .toctastic! which will display the RSS Feed directly from this site.

What are you waiting for? Go download it today!

p.s. MonkeyQuest 2.3 should be ready later today with the beta BhaldieInfoBar support.

World of Warcraft v1.10 is Out

WoW v1.10 is out, but I still haven't been able to get on and do a quick test of MonkeyQuest. I don't expect any problems besides the the .toc interface number saying MonkeyQuest is "out of date". If you don't know by now, just checking "Load out of date AddOns" will fix that problem.

I'll just wait until the next version of MonkeyQuest is ready before uploading an "up to date" version. Looks like development on MonkeyQuest will speed up now that my whole interface setup is screwed up and that makes playing a little difficult :)

Feel free to report any v1.10 issues here in the comments.

New Look

There's a new look for .toctastic! now. If it looks funny, shift-click the reload button to get the latest style sheet loaded. It's nothing fancy, but it looks clean and lightweight. And it's better than the wordpress default :)

There's a few issues with Internet Explorer, which you really shouldn't be using anyways. The .toctastic! page is best viewed with Firefox, so if you don't have it, support the site and...

Get Firefox (on the sidebar, if you don't already have it)

Update: The Get Firefox button doesn't even show up in IE. So I removed it. Blah, just go here, or throw me a bone and click the big "Get Firefox" button on the sidebar. Note: Firefox users won't see the sidebar one.

Crash And Charcoal Are Gone

Crash removed all traces of his mod, including the Charcoal area of the forums, sometime last week without telling me. I still don't know why.

Later he came back to post in the General forum, where I finally found out that he wasn't just preparing for the next Charcoal release, he was leaving. After reading his post and the thread it was in, I decided to shut down the forums before the whole thing got out of hand.

I wish him luck wherever he's gone, and I'll post a link when he resurfaces.

The .toctastic! RSS Feed

One feature on the site you may or may not have noticed is the RSS and Atom feeds for the latest posts. So if you'd like to stay up to the minute on .toctastic! news and new releases, why not try our RSS feed and save yourself the hassel of refreshing your browser :)

Check out the feed options here.

RSS Feeds

Here are the links to the live feed so you can get the latest and greatest .toctastic! news, without spamming refresh in your browser.

RSS Feed
Atom Feed

Don't have an RSS reader? Check out this list of RSS readers. There's also the live bookmarks feature in Firefox, and finally some email clients like Thunderbird support RSS feeds.

Mac OSX
Get the official .toctastic! Mac OSX widget created by Macer!

World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things

Over at Gamasutra they have an article about the lessons WoW is teaching players. The writter compares WoW to the lessons learned in Street Fighter. His main complaint is that players who spend more time have better loot and thus are better than someone who doesn't, regardless of skill.

Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien.

Personnally I think if you want a game where actual skill matters, you should play Guild Wars. Most MMORPG's are designed to waste your time, and that's why we play :)

Server Bandwidth Issues

Seems like we bit off more bandwidth than we can chew. We went through over 24GB's this month so far. Just a little more than we expected. I've lowered the graphical quality on the site to 75% jpegs from lossless pngs so that should lower the bandwidth by about 90%.

Lesson learned.

This is the first popular website I've ever been a part of (over half a million hits so far this month) and it wouldn't be possible without Crash's hard work. I pretty much just provide some content and suggestions along with debugging help. Big thanks to Crash without whom I'd still be on my old wow.visualization.ca site. Actually, I wouldn't even have that. I'd probably have some Frontpage site :)

World of Warcraft is A Feeling

Oldie but a goodie, this video is about 2 people going on a date in WoW. Cheezy and funny, just the way I like it.

The video comes from the fine folks over at Pure Pwnage. Be sure to check out the episodes of thier pro gamer mockumentary. It's good quality stuff, I like it. It's a bit of an aquired taste though. Kinda like the way Jeff K. is.

MonkeyMods v2.2 Is Out

There's 2 new features this time around.

First up, MonkeySpeed now has Battlegrounds support and should report less garbage values after zoning, which means less opening and closing the map to fix it. And MonkeyQuest will now try to figure out what quest that quest item in your pack belongs too.

Just a note about the way the MonkeyMods version numbers work:

v(major number).(new feature).(bug fixes)

I change all the version numbers for each MonkeyMod everytime I release, even if they didn't get any changes. This makes it easier to keep track of, even if it's different than the way most mod authors do things.

Enjoy!

EU Login Issues And More

GamesIndustry.biz has an interview with a couple Blizzard employees about the EU login issues plaguing servers.

It's just that suddenly a lot of people showed up - sort of like when you're at a party and suddenly 15 people walk through the door and they all want a drink. It's like, "Well, I'll get that to you, but it's going to take a bit of time," and that's what we've found.


There's also talk about The Burning Crusade, the five million subscriber mark, and even some Guild Wars.

Blizzard Hiring For Diablo III?

I just saw over on Blizzard's site that they are hiring quite a few positions for "The team behind Diablo I and II." Sounds like it could be for Diablo III development.

It's just pure speculation at this point. On a side note, Diablo II almost gave me carpal tunnel syndrome.

Check out the Employment Opportunities at Blizzard for more details.

That Quest Item Belongs Too...

MonkeyClock

Overview

Yet another hack of Telo's Clock, the MonkeyClock addOn for World of Warcraft displays the current time in a nice dragable frame. Based off Telo's Clock, minus the tooltip and plus per character per realm saved config settings. This clock is very light wieght and doesn't use many resources.

Pick up MonkeyBuddy for a nice gui config window to change settings.

NOTE: some new settings are only configurable with MonkeyBuddy.

Links

Download

Features

• 12 or 24 Hour display.


• Server time offsetting.


• Alarm with 5min snooze option.


• No tooltip info.

MonkeySpeed

Overview

The MonkeySpeed addOn for World of Warcraft displays your player's current speed as a percentage of run speed. Because the configuration variables are saved per character per realm, you can hide MonkeySpeed for your characters that don't need it. This mod is great for hunters who might need a little reminder to turn on aspect of the cheetah :)

Because the way map coordinates scale, MonkeySpeed may display a speed that is off by 1 or 2 percent, especially the faster you go. For the most part it's accurate.

Pick up MonkeyBuddy for a nice gui config window to change settings.

NOTE: some new settings are only configurable with MonkeyBuddy.

Links

Download

MonkeyBuddy

Overview

The MonkeyBuddy mod for World of Warcraft allows you to easily configure your MonkeyMods with a nice config window instead of nasty slash commands. Just click on the little Monkey in the bottom right corner of the mini-map.

You can hide the MonkeyBuddy icon with /mbdismiss and show it again with /mbcall

Download

MonkeyQuest

Overview

The MonkeyQuest AddOn for World of Warcraft displays quests and their objectives in a nice dragable frame. There are alot more features than
just that, so be sure to read the very long feature list. Or you know, just download it.








Pick up MonkeyBuddy for a nice gui config window to change settings.
NOTE: some new settings are only configurable with MonkeyBuddy.


Links

Download


Features

• Mousing over quests shows the overview in a tooltip.


• Option to display the quest overview if there's no objectives.


• Clicking on quests brings up the real quest log with that quest selected.


• Displays the quest level in the quest title.


• Elite quests display a '+' in the level of the quest.


• Completed quests show a '(Completed)' in the quest title.


• Quest area headers are displayed.


• Clicking on a quest area header collapses or expands it.


• Check boxes next to quests allow hidding/showing of that quest.


• Check box to toggle displaying hidden items.


• Close and minimize buttons.


• Quest objective colouring.


• Quest objective colouring for special "friendly/hostile" type objectives.


• Special quest objective colouring for "find an area" type objectives.


• Nice font for increased readability.


• No additional buttons or options are displayed in the real quest log.


• Option to always hide quest area headers.


• New slash command for hidding the border.


• Key bindings for toggle hidden, minimize, and close.


• Slash command to change the expand direction, up or down (thanks Diungo)


• Shift-left clicking on quests to add the quest name to the chat edit box if it's open.


• Shift-right clicking on quests to add your current quest objective data to the chat edit box if it's open.


• Option to display quest titles coloured by difficulty. (thanks Pkp)


• Option to hide completed quests.


• Does anybody read this? Well, I guess you are.


• Option to hide completed objectives.


• Ctrl-Left clicking on quests to share that quest with party members.


• Ctrl-Right clicking on quests to abandon that quest, after a confirmation dialog box.


• Integration with MonkeyBuddy for configuration.


• Font size setting.


• Option to turn off right-click to open MonkeyBuddy.


• Option to hide the title buttons.


• Quest Items now show up in tooltips. Mousing over targets you need for quests will show "Quest Item XX/YY" in the tooltip. Same for items you need for quests. (** Currently doesn't update if MonkeyQuest is closed **)


• Dungeon quests display a 'd' in the level of the quest.


• Raid quests display an 'r' in the level of the quest.


• Party members show up in the quest overview tooltip. If they have that quest they'll be displayed in the 100% objective colour.


• If the current sub-zone name appears in the quest overview, the quest will highlight.


• Optional displaying of the quest's level.


• And more!

MonkeyMods

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Overview

MonkeyMods for World of WarCraft were made to be small and independant of other mods. So far there are 4 mods. MonkeyBuddy is a config window for the other MonkeyMods. MonkeyQuest is a feature packed Quest Frame. MonkeyClock is your standard Telo's Clock hack, minus the tool tip info. MonkeySpeed is a simple speedometer. All the MonkeyMods except MonkeyBuddy save variables on a per character per realm basis.

As of v1.7 all the MonkeyMods require the MonkeyLibrary to be present, so don't delete it.

Download