Bongos3

Yeah, I've not posted in a good while. Here's the status on my stuff:

Bongos

I'm working on Bongos3 now. Most of you should know this due to the betas being out. The goal with Bongos3 is to do two things: Fix anything broken in Bongos2 that could not be done without redoing profiles, and to implement variable length bars.

To do the first, I've done the following:

• Stances are now done via [bonusbar:x] conditions. Druids lose the ability to have their bars change in say, travel form, but stances should all finally work out of the box, no matter what forms you know or do not know. It also fixes Shadowform on priests to not switch your bar if you're in Spirit of Redemption. I didn't actually intend on doing this, but it just happened that Blizzard added enough to the API to make it possible.

• Bindings for action buttons are now done via binding overrides. Basically, this means your action bar bindings now sit on top of your other bindings, and as a plus, are attached to profiles. This fixes a very common problem with Bongos2: "My bindings don't work when I switch to cat/stealth/berserker!"

• The possess bar is implemented. For people who have been using Bongos for a long time, the possess bar is a feature Blizzard added in 2.3 that switches your main bar when you well, possess something. You can see it in action if you do the kara chess, cast eyes of the beast, or in certain raid encounters.

• Bars are now created using a new painting system. Enter configuration mode, and alt drag on an empty space to start creating a bar. The biggest problem with this system is that you're still limited to 120 buttons overall, but I really do not think the API is quite ready for me to implement infinite action buttons.

The following two things were derived from me implementing variable length bars

• User defined show states. Its now possible to make a bar show only when a macro condition is true, like [combat]. The only thing I'm really using this for is to hide bars when possessing something, but I'm sure others users will come up with something for it.

• The action sets mechanism for configuring stances. In Bongos2, you'd say, "This bar should show the buttons on bar3 when in cat form, and bar2 when in bear form" Lets call this bar mirroring. Bongos2 could get away with bar mirroring, since every bar has the same effective size. Bongos3, however, does not have that limitation. So telling Bongos3 that you would want bar 1 to show the buttons on bar 2, when bar 2 is 1 button, and bar1 is 30, would not make very much sense. So instead, you tell Bongos3, "This bar should have this many sets of buttons. When I'm in cat form, use set 2, when I'm in bear form, use set 3, otherwise use set 1"

Issues

It sounds nice...but I'm not yet satisfied with the design. I need to add in more feedback to the bar creation/destruction and stance configuring stuff in Bongos3. It really does make sense, once you understand it, but getting to the point of understanding it is going to be too difficult for the average user.

The second issue I've been having is the binding system. The first implementation I wrote for Bongos3 did not work properly for non US locales. I released a new implementation yesterday, and if that does not work, then I'm probably headed toward writing a Bongos 2.5. The rest of Bongos3 cannot really work at this time unless the binding system works.

There are, of course, other minor issues, but I'm not thinking about them until I solve the major ones :)

Other Addons

Bagnon For now, Bagnon is in bugfix only mode. If someone wants to fork it to add in more features, then by all means do it.

Combuctor Combuctor's priority is lower than Bongos3. Odds are, it'll be released more or less as is, or I'll completely revamp it. Not sure which :P

Sage Sage is lower than Combuctor in priority. Again, its going to be a "minor changes" or "total revamp." I'm leaning towards the middle, somehow :P

OmniCC Bugfix mode, like Bagnon. There's really nothing else I want to implement that's not there.

SellFish & Ludwig Same :P