CTMod: making the World (of Warcraft) a better place

One of the most satisfying things a World of Warcraft player can ever feel is seeing the last hit on a raid boss before it goes down, and the entire party cheering and patting each other on the back for a job well done. A lot of successful raiders owe their success to the numerous mods that all help make their lives a little easier when taking down a boss.

One of the most popular mods circulating among World of Warcraft players is the CTMod add-on pack designed by Cide and TS. Tucker Smedes (TS) talks about this mod and its development into one of the most well-used add-ons in Blizzard‘s world renowned MMORPG.

Smedes tells about how his background in EverQuest prompted him to create the vertically oriented buff display and menus of CTMod. With Cide doing the bulk of the coding, he proposed a more user friendly UI with most of it built from scratch.

When asked what advantages their mod have over other open-source mods, he had this to say:

There are small advantages, in that if a mod has several components, all would be coded the same way, and the look and feel of all mods should stay consistent. However, over time I’ve changed my opinion on this a bit.

The major disadvantage comes into play if someone is busy, loses interest for a time, or just has too much to do. Cide hasn’t wanted to code much since last year, which really makes it impossible to make any changes or updates. I can’t code myself, so I end up relying on him to want to fix a bug or make a change. When a project has multiple coders working on it, if one isn’t going to fix a bug, another can, and I see that as a huge advantage with keeping things up to date. It has crippled our projects over the past several months.

With the CT_Raid as their most popular mod in the add-on pack, most of the development team took considerable pains to constantly upgrade it to meet up with the number of suggestions and updates to make it more efficient for players to use.

One of the most satisfying things a World of Warcraft player can ever feel is seeing the last hit on a raid boss before it goes down, and the entire party cheering and patting each other on the back for a job well done. A lot of successful raiders owe their success to the numerous mods that all help make their lives a little easier when taking down a boss.

One of the most popular mods circulating among World of Warcraft players is the CTMod add-on pack designed by Cide and TS. Tucker Smedes (TS) talks about this mod and its development into one of the most well-used add-ons in Blizzard‘s world renowned MMORPG.

Smedes tells about how his background in EverQuest prompted him to create the vertically oriented buff display and menus of CTMod. With Cide doing the bulk of the coding, he proposed a more user friendly UI with most of it built from scratch.

When asked what advantages their mod have over other open-source mods, he had this to say:

There are small advantages, in that if a mod has several components, all would be coded the same way, and the look and feel of all mods should stay consistent. However, over time I’ve changed my opinion on this a bit.

The major disadvantage comes into play if someone is busy, loses interest for a time, or just has too much to do. Cide hasn’t wanted to code much since last year, which really makes it impossible to make any changes or updates. I can’t code myself, so I end up relying on him to want to fix a bug or make a change. When a project has multiple coders working on it, if one isn’t going to fix a bug, another can, and I see that as a huge advantage with keeping things up to date. It has crippled our projects over the past several months.

With the CT_Raid as their most popular mod in the add-on pack, most of the development team took considerable pains to constantly upgrade it to meet up with the number of suggestions and updates to make it more efficient for players to use.