Greetings,
Was cool to see you frequent ESOUI.com and keep track of things, and even help out on the dev forums.
I had a request for a project I wanted to develop that would require some adjustments on your side to facilitate. Specifically, I want to hook into the display of health bars/nameplates in order to create custom "marks" on targets. Anyone who ever played WoW knows immediately what I mean.
In order to do this a couple things would be needed:
- A method of sharing information between clients through the addon API. This could be as simple as numerical or text string blocks and possibly even piggyback on the chat interface through an invisible channel. Either way, the only method of information sharing now is map pings which is unreliable beyond 5 digits and also thrown off by actual pings.
- Some globally accessible method of hooking the name plates by unique reference ID. Currently the unique reference ID of individual mobs is obfuscated and inaccessible beyond certain combat events when they are one of the named units ('player', 'reticleover', etc.) and even then maybe not accurate.
With regard to the first, I realize ZOS has a "no DPS meters" policy, however there is nothing currently stopping trials guilds from requiring people to download personal DPS addons like FTC and posting their dps to chat, so the point is really moot.
With such a data sharing interface, people would still have to choose to download an addon or not, and in the case of any I made, would have to manually enable such a function with all appropriate warnings. I do not see the detriment and a simple data sharing interface would open up a TON of creative possibilities.
As for the 2nd, this would also provide a more robust means of tracking "invisible" procs like Beast Trap on targets when mousing off and back that wasn't dependent on name text string matching like my extremely basic solution in Srendarr.
So, what do you think? Any chance of such things making it into our arsenal of API tools?