My First WildStar Addon - Kael's Housing Tour

Hard to see, but there is a handsome
warrior with new PvP gear in this picture.

The screen shows it's not much of an addon, but the person I made it for is ecstatic about it.

This post isn't about how to use Kael's Housing Tour. I spent more time writing a readme than it will be cumulatively read by users. It's available on the git repo. After some tweaks I'll put it on Cursed Gaming too.

EDIT: It's on cursed now too.

The look of this addon was made by Kaelish (that's who Kael is). If you are curious why it's her housing tour I suggest the aforementioned readme file. Obviously this will get better over time, for example I'd like to grey out the Guide and Change Guide button if you haven't clicked join a tour.. or not show them.

Development wise, lua is kind of strange. I'm not a huge fan of Houston, the official addon development tool. I only used it for making changes to the graphical form. All the lua editing was done in Notepad++. This was the first time I ever used git in Windows. I was told there was some pretty gui for it, but I found Git Bash and did what I usually do (except no copy and paste, lame).

The API is lacking in official documentation. Most unofficial documentation is just lists of libraries and methods available. Most of my real insight was gained looking at other addons. There are some area's my code is very similar to others. At first I thought that was kind of wrong, but the right click menu code for every addon I saw was virtually identical. I cyclomatic complexity-ed mine up by changing the right click menu option based on if you are a tour guide or not. Also, if you click on yourself the text is different.

The Visitor addon's function for searching random properties was decent, but I had to do some tweaking. The most notable (imo) improvement is I pass the unique properties searched to the form instead of searches done. Searches done will always increment until the user clicks stop. Unique Properties will eventually hit a cap, so the user can see they probably aren't going to find the property they're looking for. Future improvements a visual indicator that the search is still going, and I'd like to add an auto stop after so many searches with no more unique properties found. The are really a ton of things I want to add... some are in that readme.

This addon also marked the next iteration of my 10 minute hack experiment. I wrote a quick blurb in my notes for almost every day. I'm happy to share it, but these are just notes for myself (nothing juicy). They're in markdown, but I only ever view them in a text editor so it might not be perfect markdown.