Changelog

0.1.14

The map pins are round now, and the addon carries its own logo — in the list where addons are switched on and off, and on the minimap button.

The addon's own logo, in the list and on the minimap

Where the addons are switched on and off, this one showed the red question mark — WoW's placeholder for a missing icon. It carries the project's logo now, and so does the minimap button.

WoW reads only .blp and .tga inside an addon, never PNG, so npm run logo <picture.png> makes both: the whole logo at 64 pixels for the list, and a crop at 32 for the minimap button, where the lettering would be a grey smear at twenty pixels. The list icon is pointed at the file only after it has been written — a path to something missing brings back exactly the question mark this removes — and a test holds that.

The crop was picked by looking, after three tries of picking by feel. npm run logo:preview lays candidates side by side and writes a picture: each at true button size, and enlarged without smoothing, because a preview that flatters is the wrong kind of help.

The single most legible one was the lion, and that made it exactly the wrong choice: it is one faction's crest, and the logo deliberately carries both. A button that leaves out half the guild is not a good button, however well you can see it. The crop now spans both shields with the blade between them. It is wider than tall and gets squeezed — the shields sit side by side and the button is square, so either enough height comes along and lettering is in the picture, or it squeezes. Squeezed, the crests stay far enough apart to tell apart, which is the job.

One bug came out of it that only a small picture could show: a crop was averaged over a field twice as far from the left edge as it should have been, so anything cropped came out a soft gradient instead of a picture. With no offset the mistake cancels itself, which is why the whole logo looked right in the addon list while the minimap crest was mush — and why the regression test crops from somewhere that is not zero.

The converter is tested against a picture it builds itself, so no image has to live in the repository for the test to run. The part worth testing is the channel order: TGA stores blue first, PNG stores red first, and getting it wrong does not look like a bug. It looks like a blue logo, and then you go looking everywhere except at the order of three bytes.

Round map pins, as class crests

Each pin is the round class emblem now, over a dark copy of itself two pixels larger. The dark one keeps it off whatever the map is made of — a dark shaman disappears into the sea otherwise — and having the same silhouette rather than a circle behind it means no edge stands out anywhere.

It is also the better pin. A coloured dot states the class through a shade you have to have learned; the crest states it outright.

Twice guessed, twice wrong. First Blizzard's portrait mask over a colour fill, then the same mask used as a picture. Both times the call went through, the protected call reported success, the fallback never fired — and both times the pins were still square. This client accepts mask calls and does nothing with them. It is the most expensive kind of answer: no error, no "no", just a result that isn't true, and a pcall that doesn't throw is no proof that anything happened.

UI-Classes-Circles renders round here — the dashboard portrait has been going through it for a week and has been looked at. So the third attempt uses art that is known to work rather than a third guess.

Without a class to draw, the coloured dot with its square outline stays. It says less, but it says it reliably, and a map with no dots is broken.