Changelog

v0.10.0

The plugin tabs open at their own size, and the window keeps up with your screen. Measured on client 1.60.1.70205. Nothing changes on the sync wire or in saved data, so v0.10.0 syncs with v0.8.x and v0.9.0.

AltStable Companion

The Roster's character portraits come from AltStable Companion, a free Windows app that turns your /alts portrait captures into the transparent cutouts the scene draws (and can enhance them). Without it, the scene has no one to show. Get it from AltStable Companion releases. Its newest version finds the game you play AltStable in by itself. It also says how many enhanced pictures it will make before it sends anything, and saves its diagnostics file to your Downloads folder.

Changed

• Roster, Warband and Professions open at their own size (#150), whichever tab you came from. They used to keep whatever size the previous tab left. Each now glides to its own size, as the sheet's tabs already did. A collapsed sidebar still makes the window narrower by its width; the tab's own area is the same.
  • Warband's Single and Combined views each have their own width; switching between them resizes the window.
  • Professions now has a minimum size, so its toolbar and recipe list always have room.
  • On a smaller screen or at a larger scale, the window still fits the screen as before.
• The window follows a change of WoW's UI scale or resolution, and lays the open tab out again for its new size. Before, it kept the size it had until you switched tabs.

v0.9.0-beta

Getting started without help: the Roster names the app that makes its portraits, /alts status gives a bug report what it needs, and professions are right on every client. Measured on client 1.60.1.70205. Nothing changes on the sync wire or in saved data, so v0.9.0 syncs with v0.8.x.

Updating while the game is running? Type /reload (or restart) afterwards. Until then a window can show bright green where the glass should be: the old code is still asking for textures the update moved.

AltStable Companion

The Roster's character portraits come from AltStable Companion, a free Windows app that turns your /alts portrait captures into the transparent cutouts the scene draws (and can enhance them). Without it, the scene has no one to show. Get it from AltStable Companion releases. Its newest version adds Help → Save diagnostics…, one text file to attach to a bug report.

New

• The Roster names AltStable Companion, and links to it (#176). The hint used to say "the converter on the project page". Click it now for the download link, ready to copy. After your first capture, it also reminds you that the very first portrait needs the game restarted once, because WoW only finds the Companion's new folder at startup.
• /alts status (#175): your version, client build and language, how many characters and portraits you have, and whether the Companion's folder is loaded. It shows one line ready to copy into a bug report, with no character names in it.
• /alts help lists the commands. A word /alts doesn't know now says so, instead of quietly opening the window and asking every other account for a sync.

Fixed

• A character's second profession was lost (#177). Forever lists every profession twice, so both profession slots held the first one, and the spreadsheet export dropped the second. Professions are now read by their ID, so they are also right on French, German and other non-English clients, where none were found before. The export reads each profession on its own, so a character saved by an older version exports correctly straight away.
• The Roster grid said portraits were missing when they weren't (#178). It only counted the cards it could draw. It now counts everyone, and says "+N more not shown" when the window, or the grid's limit of 24, leaves characters out.

Under the hood

• The glass look now comes from LibGlass, a small library shared by the Glass addons and included in the download (#184). Nothing changes on screen.

v0.8.0-beta

Camps in the Roster, like retail's warband camps. Measured on client 1.60.1.70205.

The camps travel with your sync to your own other account. They ride at the end of a sync, where an older AltStable reads past them, so v0.7.x and v0.8.0 still sync characters with each other. Both accounts need v0.8.0 to share camps.

AltStable Companion

The Roster's character portraits come from AltStable Companion, a free Windows app that turns your /alts portrait captures into the transparent cutouts the scene draws (and can enhance them). Without it, the scene has no one to show. Get it from AltStable Companion releases.

New

• Camps in the Roster (#152), like retail's warband camps: the scene now shows a camp, a named group of up to four characters in the order they stand, each with its own backdrop.
  • Your first camp is made for you the first time you open the scene, from your highest-level characters (those with a portrait first).
  • Switch camps with the new < camp name > arrows at the top of the scene; the backdrop arrows now change the shown camp's backdrop.
  • Click the backdrop's name for the backdrop picker, like retail's Campsites: every backdrop as a thumbnail, six to a page. Pick one and Apply it to the camp you're looking at, or tick Apply for all camps.
  • The camp list, beside the scene like retail's: a search box, + for a new camp, each camp with its four seats, then everyone in no camp. Drag a character onto a seat or a camp's name to put it there, onto someone in another camp to swap them, or anywhere else in the list to take it out; drag the characters in no camp up and down to order them, and a camp's name onto another to reorder the camps. Click a camp's name to show it, right-click it to rename or delete it. The CAMPS toggle along the bottom tucks the list away.
  • Right-click a character: Add to a camp, Move to another, Add to a new camp, or Remove from its camp.
  • Favourites no longer pick who stands at the fire; they still sort the grid first.
  • Camps sync between your own accounts (#171): the camps and the order of the characters in no camp go with every sync to your other account found through Battle.net, and the newer one wins. A friend's sync never changes your camps. Which camp you're looking at, and whether the list is tucked away, stay per account.

v0.7.1-beta

A one-fix release on top of v0.7.0-beta. Measured on client 1.60.1.70205. Nothing changes on the sync wire or in saved data.

AltStable Companion

The Roster's character portraits come from AltStable Companion, a free Windows app that turns your /alts portrait captures into the transparent cutouts the scene draws (and can enhance them). Without it, the scene has no one to show. Get it from AltStable Companion releases.

Fixed

• The developer message at login could come back after the next client update. v0.7.0-beta meant to show it only on development copies, but the release counted itself as one. It now recognises a release correctly.

v0.7.0-beta

Sorting that makes sense, a window that moves smoothly, and a bigger, tidier sheet. Measured on client 1.60.1.70205. Nothing changes on the sync wire. The new settings below are this account's own and are not synced.

AltStable Companion

The Roster's character portraits come from AltStable Companion, a free Windows app that turns your /alts portrait captures into the transparent cutouts the scene draws (and can enhance them). Without it, the scene has no one to show. Get it from AltStable Companion releases.

New

• Sorting, reworked (#160):
  • Each tab keeps its own sort. Sort Summary by Gold, switch to Gear, and Gear has its own; come back and Summary is still by Gold.
  • Remembered across logouts, with a new option, Options > "Remember each tab's sort order" (on by default). Turned off, each tab keeps its sort until you log out.
  • The first click goes the natural way: names, guilds, classes and races A to Z; numbers highest first; Last Online most recent first. Click again to reverse.
  • Characters with no value sort last, whichever way you sort: unreadable gold, a faction they haven't met, no guild.
  • Gear slot columns no longer sort.
• Clearer column headers:
  • The column you sort by has a soft accent fill, an accent underline and an arrow for the direction, on every kind of header, icons included.
  • Hovering a header shows a plain grey highlight, so it never looks sorted.
  • Each header's tooltip says the current order and what the next click does.
  • The Class and Race headers have their own icons instead of the letters C and R, and every header icon is the same size.
• Switching tabs animates (#159): the window glides to the new tab's size instead of jumping. Tabs that keep the size don't move. Turning off the open animation in Options turns this off too.
• The Roster's menu icon is the AltStable logo.
• Portrait angle is a setting (#149): Options > Presentation > Portrait angle, -45 to 45 degrees (the same value /alts portrait facing sets). The default is now straight on (it was 20 degrees). An account that already has captures keeps 20, so new captures match the old ones; set 0 there to switch.
• Collapse the menu to icons (#150): the » at the bottom of the left menu shrinks it to its icons (hover one for its name) and gives the room to the tab; « brings the labels back. Remembered per account.
• Maximize (#150): the new button beside close fills the screen, and stays maximized as you switch tabs; click it again to go back to the size and place the window had.
• Collapsing and maximizing animate: the menu slides and the window grows or shrinks into place, in a fifth of a second. Turning off the open animation in Options turns these off too.
• The grid fills a wider window: when the window has more room than the columns need (maximized, or a collapsed menu), the spare width is shared out across the columns instead of leaving empty space beside the table.
• Options reads better (#151): the sync peer, request and hidden-character lists take only the room they use (an empty one says so in a line), so there are no more large blank gaps; and the note about class colours now sits under the Accent row it explains instead of at the bottom of the page.

Fixed

• No more developer message at login. After a client update, AltStable told every player to "re-run /apidump" and edit its source. That note is for whoever tests the addon, and now only shows on a development copy.
• /alts config and right-clicking the minimap button opened Options half way and raised an error. They open it properly now.
• Sorting by Name never showed which column was sorted.
• Rested XP sorted by the stored value rather than the one shown in the cell.
• Race sorted by the game's internal names, so Undead ("Scourge") landed between Orc and Tauren. Class and Race now sort by the names their tooltips show.

v0.6.0-beta

The Warband tab becomes a warband bank, laid out like retail's. Measured on client 1.60.1.70170. Nothing changes on the sync wire, and no saved data changes shape: the new settings are this account's own.

AltStable Companion

The Roster's character portraits come from AltStable Companion, a free Windows app that turns your /alts portrait captures into the transparent cutouts the scene draws (and can enhance them). Without it, the scene has no one to show. Get it from AltStable Companion releases.

New

• The Warband tab is a warband bank (#153), laid out like retail's, read-only:
  • Your own tabs sort items by category (Equipment, Consumables, Trade Goods, Reagents, Recipes, Miscellaneous). Add one with +; right-click a tab, or the gear by its title, to rename it, pick its icon and choose what it shows. An item in no tab appears under Other.
  • Single shows one tab, Combined three side by side.
  • Personal Bank shows the character you're on; Warband shows every character, filtered by ruleset (your current one by default, or All, Normal, PvP, RP, Hardcore). Hidden characters are left out, as from the sheet's totals.
  • Tabs are settings on this account; nothing about them is synced, and no item moves.
  • The window grows to fit the tab when you open it, whichever tab you came from.

v0.5.0-beta

Hunter pets and warlock demons in the Roster's campfire scene. Measured on client 1.60.1.70170. The sync wire is unchanged; the pet travels as three new fields that a v0.4.x peer stores and passes on without reading.

AltStable Companion

The Roster's character portraits come from AltStable Companion, a free Windows app that turns your /alts portrait captures into the transparent cutouts the scene draws (and can enhance them). Without it, the scene has no one to show. Get it from AltStable Companion releases.

New

• Pets in the Roster scene (#75): a hunter's beast or a warlock's demon stands with its owner, as on the retail warband screen. Off by default: Options > Presentation > "Show hunter pets and warlock demons in the Roster scene".
  • Drawn live from the pet's saved look, so it needs no portrait capture, and it keeps its idle animation (its particle effects, like an imp's fel fire, are left out).
  • A character's pet is the last one they had out; summon a different one and the scene follows. An alt's pet arrives with sync like the rest of its record.
  • Pets keep their true size against their owners: a cat comes to a night elf's hip, a voidwalker towers over a gnome.
  • With pets shown, four stand at the fire instead of five, to leave them room. Pets beside the fire turn toward it; the outermost stand at the scene's edges, a little further back.
  • New saved fields, flat and synced: pet_display, pet_npc, pet_name.

Under the hood

• Measured on client 1.60.1.70170: the login warning about a different build is gone on it. The API changes in this build touch nothing AltStable uses.

v0.4.0-beta

Your accounts sync through Battle.net, sync asks before it shares, a Professions tab, and portrait capture in the addon. Measured on client 1.60.1.70124. The sync wire is unchanged, so a peer on v0.3.x still syncs by whisper; syncing through Battle.net needs both accounts on v0.4.0. New saved data is listed below; nothing existing changed shape.

• Your other accounts sync by themselves - any ruleset, any faction. Two of your WoW accounts on the same Battle.net account now find each other through Battle.net and sync with no whitelist and nothing to type, including a Horde account with an Alliance one and across rulesets, which whispers cannot do. "Found your other account: …" says when it happens; Options has an off switch. Once two accounts have met, they keep finding each other even when Battle.net is slow to show who is playing on either. Battle.net friends are never included (#58).

• Sync is sturdier when pieces arrive out of order. A finishing message that overtakes the data no longer loses the sync, a stream completes the moment its last piece arrives, and a character seen with and without its realm is one peer.

• Sync no longer loses pieces to the server's message throttle. The bundled ChatThrottleLib is updated from v24 to v32: on this client the server can refuse an addon message it considers too fast, and v24 treated the refused piece as sent - the other side then reported chunks missing and asked again. v32 waits and retries.

• /alts sync to someone unreachable no longer floods the chat. A character offline, or online on the other faction (addon messages do not cross factions), used to produce one "No player named…" line per piece of the database. Now AltStable asks first, sends nothing more if they cannot be reached, and says so once - "X is Alliance and you are Horde" when it knows. The server's echo of AltStable's own messages is hidden, including the one a login request to an offline peer used to leave.

• Sync asks before it shares, and before it takes. Someone you have not allowed who asks for your characters gets a prompt on your side - Allow, Not now, Never; Escape is Not now - and Options has a Requests and answers list to change any answer later. Characters sent to you are taken only from people you allowed, or asked yourself in the last ten minutes; anything else is dropped with one line. /alts sync <name> counts as your consent for that exchange and refuses anyone set to never. An answer is by name: it covers the character whatever realm suffix they arrive with, on every ruleset you play (#61).

• The Roster can show an enhanced portrait. When the companion app has made one (optional, its own feature), the scene, grid and detail views draw it in place of the plain capture; anything malformed falls back to the plain portrait. The contract for it is in docs/PORTRAIT-CONTRACT.md (AltStableCompanion#17).

• The capture button tells you when a portrait is due. It glows when the character you are playing has no portrait yet, or when the gear a portrait shows changed since the last capture - not rings, trinkets, the neck or the ranged slot, but showing or hiding the helm or cloak does count; its tooltip says which. A capture waiting for the converter does not glow. Never in combat; /alts portrait glow off turns it off. Other addons can ask too: AltStable.GetPortraitStatus() and a PortraitStatusChanged callback (#128).

• A Professions tab: which alt knows which recipe. Open a profession's window on each alt once, and the tab shows every recipe of that profession with who knows it, the skill it needs, and where it comes from (trainer, drop, vendor, quest). Filters for known, missing and nobody, a "not from a trainer" shopping list, and a search that spans every profession. Click an alt's card to see the list through their eyes: their difficulty colours, what they are missing. Alts from your other account arrive with sync. It only claims what it has seen: an alt whose window was never opened says "not scanned", and "nobody knows" becomes "nobody recorded" until every owner has been scanned. "Meets the skill requirement" is exactly that - specialisations and reputation are not checked. Craft cooldowns now show in the grid's profession tooltips. The recipe list comes from Wowhead's Forever database (#14).

• Recipes on item tooltips. Hover a recipe item (at a vendor, in the auction house, in your bags) to see which alts already know it, which meet the skill for it, whose skill is still too low and by how much, and whom it cannot speak for yet. Crafted items say who can make them. Switch it off in the Professions tab. An item is only linked to a recipe when its name matches exactly one recipe of that profession; the few that do not get no line rather than a guess (#14).

• New saved data: AltStableProfessionsDB, created by the new plugin. Nothing existing changed shape.

• Other addons can read your characters. A small read-only API - AltStable.GetCharacters(), AltStable.GetTotals(), AltStable.ToggleSheet() and a CharactersChanged callback - so an info bar can show your total gold and alts without keeping its own copy of them. First user: GlassPanel. The sheet's footer now computes its totals through the same function, so the two always agree. Documented in docs/PUBLIC-API.md (#123).

• Portrait capture ships with the addon. /alts portrait, or the camera button in the sheet's title bar, takes the two-shot capture the Roster's lineup is made from; it used to live in a development tool the download never had. It refuses in combat, in a dungeon, while dead or moving, and gives up cleanly if you enter combat, die or bring your interface back mid-capture. Each of the two shots makes the camera's shutter sound. Afterwards it offers a reload, because the record of whose screenshots these are is only saved on a reload or logout. /alts portrait preview shows the framing first, and /alts portrait facing <degrees> turns the character. Turning captures into portraits happens outside the game, with the free AltStable Companion app for Windows (#89).

• New saved data: AltStablePortraits. It holds the capture records and is only created the first time you capture. Nothing existing changed shape.

• A portrait belongs to the character, not the name. Two characters sharing a name no longer show each other's portrait (#89).

• /alts update-reference is gone. It took one plain screenshot for a pipeline that no longer exists, and nothing read it; it now points you at /alts portrait.

• The Roster's scene says so when nobody has a portrait. It used to show an empty campfire captioned "showing 0 of 12 - highest level first; favourite the ones you want here", which no amount of favouriting could fix. It now says there are none yet and how to capture one; the grid still shows characters without one as cards (#89).

v0.3.1-beta

One tab's colours, and nothing else. Same client build, same data on disk, same sync — a peer on any v0.2.x or v0.3.x stays compatible.

• The Raids tab matches the rest under glass. Its rows, group headers and column header were charcoal values chosen before the material existed, so the one tab with its own grid was the one that still looked like the old theme. They come from the skin now and move with it (#97).

v0.3.0-beta

Still measured against client build 1.60.1.70009. Nothing changed on disk and nothing changed in sync, so a peer on v0.2.x stays compatible with this one.

Mostly about what the window feels like to use: the glass look is now a setting you can find, it stops at the edge of what is ours, and the world behind the window stops answering your cursor.

• The skin is in Options now. Flat, Clear glass and Smoked glass as a row of buttons, with the panel saying when a choice needs a reload and offering one — the material is built when the window is, so a choice takes effect on the next load. /alts skin still works (#108).
• "Theme" is called "Accent", because that is what it is: one highlight colour, Gold or your class colour. It never changed a background, a row or a border. Your setting is unchanged — only the name is (#108).
• Our own tooltips wear the glass, and only ours: the game's tooltips and every other addon's are left exactly as they were (#97).
• The world stops reacting to your cursor through the window. Moving the mouse across the sheet used to keep firing unit tooltips for whatever happened to be standing behind it, which in a city is constant. The window takes the mouse now, so the world responds where the window is not — and nowhere it is (#74).

v0.2.1-beta

A text fix, and only a text fix — no behaviour changed. Everything in v0.2.0-beta below applies.

• The Roster stopped telling you to type a command you do not have. Its grid hint named /asrender, which is registered in a development tool that is not part of this download, so on a packaged install the client answered it with "Type /help for a list of available commands". The hint now names that command only when the tool is installed, and otherwise says where portraits actually come from (#15).
• The v0.2.0-beta notes below described portrait capture as something the addon does. It is a separate workflow in the project's repository, and they now say so.

v0.2.0-beta

Measured against client build 1.60.1.70009, which is also the build that fixed SavedVariables — see below. A peer on v0.1.0-beta can still sync with this one, with one exception noted under Sync.

The Roster — a new tab

• Your characters as characters, not rows. The Roster shows each alt as a card — class colour, name, level — and as a portrait for anyone who has one. Portraits are not something this download can make. They come from a capture tool in the project's repository that takes two shots in game and mattes them outside it, and that tool is not packaged here. Installed from CurseForge, the card is what you get, and the Roster says so rather than naming a command you do not have (#15).
• Scene mode stands them together around a campfire, on fourteen backdrops. The grid stays the default and both views share one selection, so switching never loses your place (#15).
• Click a character for a paper doll: every equipped item, the stats the client actually reports for it, and an enchant audit that names the slots missing an enchant. Back returns you to whichever view you came from (#91).
• Favourites pin characters to the top of the sheet, and choose who stands in the scene (#66).

A new look, and two of them

• Liquid glass. The window, the sidebar, the menus and the toasts are a translucent material with rounded corners and a lit rim, in Clear or Smoked. Choose one with /alts skin clear, /alts skin smoked or /alts skin flat, then /reload — the material is built when the window is, so it changes on the next load rather than under your feet. Flat is still there and is unchanged, so this is a preference and not a migration. There is no Options control for it yet (#97).
• There is no blur available to an addon, so the world behind the window shows through sharp. The table itself stays opaque for that reason — glass is for the frame, the table is somewhere to read.
• The window fits your screen now. It clamps to the display and re-fits when you change the UI scale, instead of growing past the bottom edge (#99).

Living with a lot of alts

• One right-click menu on a character, in the sheet and in the Roster: favourite, hide, unhide, forget. Hovering a name marks the row, and the mark stays put while the menu is open, so there is no doubt which character you are about to act on (#69).
• Hide a character from the sheet. It leaves the grid and the footer totals, which then say how many were left out. The record keeps syncing — nothing is deleted. Restore it under Options → Hidden characters (#21).
• Forget a character that no longer exists. Deleting the record was never the hard part: a peer still holding it re-sends it within seconds. Forgetting now leaves a tombstone, so a deleted character stays gone across sync (#65).
• Faction is captured at scan time rather than derived from the race, because Forever's two Skyborne races report one race key — so every Skyborne was exported as Alliance, silently (#22).

Sync

• The request handler answered anyone. The addon channel prefix ships on CurseForge, so a crafted message could ask this addon for every record it held — names, realms, guilds, levels, item levels, gold, mail, lockouts, reputations — and on a default install it was not limited to one account. The handler now requires authorization before it answers. This is the reason to take this build (#61).
• Surnames are back. Client 1.60.1.70009 moved the surname into UnitName's second return, so characters scanned on it were stored under their first name alone, and a persisted record then rejected its own updates ("name changed: Kaleid Sumner -> Kaleid"). Names are read whole again, and a record missing its surname gains one back on the next sync. Both sides need this build — a peer still on v0.1.0-beta applies the old strict rule and will reject the repaired name (#56).

Fixes

• Data survives a restart. The beta client used to write SavedVariables and never read them back; build 1.60.1.70009 fixed that, so characters, settings, the sync whitelist and the hidden-character list are all still there next launch. Nothing in the addon changed — it had been writing them correctly all along (#23).
• The account number saves when you click away from the box, not only when you press Enter. It was never persisted, which read as "it doesn't persist" (#64).
• A corpse run is not a gear change. Auto-capture stopped announcing three portraits in as many minutes on a character that had picked nothing up, and Skip is a button rather than a command you have five seconds to find (#86).
• One line of chat per pull, gone. The quiet-after-combat wait announced its own cancellation on every single mob (#81).
• The hide confirmation opened behind the sheet (#68), and the capture blackout could not see the window it was standing in front of (#87).
• Realm group headers said "(Account: Default)" for everyone. That value never existed — it was the fallback for a field nothing ever set. They name the accounts their characters actually came from now, and say nothing at all when there is only one.
• Bank storage measured, not estimated: 52 bytes, against a 30 KB guess (#44).

Notes

• Licence. MIT covers this addon's own code. The bundled libraries keep their own licences, which the previous wording implied otherwise (#90).
• The repository also carries development tools — portrait capture, an icon identifier, an API probe — that are not part of this download. Commands like /asrender and /asicon belong to those, and the addon no longer points at them unless they are installed.

v0.1.0-beta

First packaged build for World of Warcraft: Forever (measured on client 1.60.1.69977, interface 16001). Ported from AltTracker (TBC Classic 2.5.5).

Known limitation at the time of this release: the client did not read SavedVariables back after a restart (#23), so nothing persisted between sessions. Fixed by Blizzard in client build 1.60.1.70009, with no change needed here.

The sheet

• Characters, gear, professions, reputations, gold, rested XP and raid lockouts, in one grid, gathered from every character on the account.
• Reputations are the Vanilla set plus Forever's own sixteen factions, keyed by faction ID. A faction appears only once some character has actually met it.
• Gear is coloured by item quality, and item levels read as whole numbers.
• The level cap, the rested-XP rules and the profession caps all come from the client rather than being hard-coded, so they follow content patches.

Plugins (optional, enable them in Options)

• Warband — every item across all your characters' bags and banks in one grid, with a per-character breakdown on hover, and optional counts on every item tooltip in the game.
• Raids — which characters are saved to which raid and when each resets. Progress is shown as a count ("7/10"); named boss kills wait until a real lockout can confirm the encounter order (#17).

Sync

• Characters sync between your own accounts over the addon channel, in deltas, compressed and chunked under the client's 255-byte message cap.
• Whitelisted names only, and a character removed at the source is removed on the other account too.