As hunters, the best and most important addon we can use is…

Well, let’s let you guess! Omen? Nope. Fubar? Not even close. Proximo? Nah.

PetEmote, foshizzle.

So you’ve got PetEmote and it’s nifty. But it’s not You. Your pet says distinctive things, not the same things ever other cat and boar and ravager say. How can you make your pet’s style come through?

We’re gonna hack PetEmote. Yeehaa!

First, find the PetEmote addon on your hard drive and then find the “localization.lua” file inside the PetEmote addon folder.

Open this file with a non-formatting text editor. Apple’s default TextEdit works fine, you PC users gotta figure this part out for yourselves.

Here’s what this file looks like when you open it:

That’s right, it’s German. Dude who wrote it has a German-localization setting. Not to worry, we’re just going to scroll down to the English section, like so:

Now we want to find our favorite pet by scrolling down a little more to the Cat section:

Bingo, cat! The [1] subsection is for Unhappy cats, [2] is for Content cats, [3] is for Happy cats. Keep your pet well-fed and he stays Happy, duh. For our little demonstration, we’re only going to worry about the Happy subsection.

Break out your Creative Hat, slap it on your noggin, and think of the things your pet likes to say while running around Shattrath and in between pulls in raids. Type them over the quotes already in the [3] section, like so:

If you want to add more, go right ahead. Just be sure to follow the formatting EXACTLY.

How spiffy! Now your pet’s emotes are as unique as he is. Save the file, launch WoW, and watch the magic begin.

Let us know what you come up with!

WoW Armory Browser Plugin

Intewesting. Veddy intewesting. We’ll be fascinated to see if there a practical use for this thing that would cause us to discontinue using WoWHead’s plugin.

Oh yeah, the Armory is fixed again. It was miscalculating some stats, specifically DPS, for the past couple of days, but seems to be accurate again.

The first thing you need is the development kit, Xcode. Download it for free here. It’s 932MB so it might take a while.

Xcode can be used to make simple console applications, like we’re going to do, but can also make 64-bit applications that can tax the best systems Apple makes. We’re not going to touch 1/10,000 of the thing’s power.

It will compile C, C++, Objective C, Java, Cocoa, Carbon, and even Applescript. It will import your old CodeWarrior projects. You can make applications, libraries, device drivers or anything else your little heart desires.

We’re going to build a HelloWorld console app.

Download Xcode, use the default install, and you can find the Xcode application itself here:Notice that it’s not in your Applications folder or your Utilities folder. The installation created a Developer folder and buried the Xcode app inside of that. Grab the Xcode icon and drag it to your Dock. Launch it.

File menu, New Project, Command Line Utility, C++ Tool.Give the project the name HelloWorld, don’t change the Project Directory, click Finish. Two windows will open, we care about the main.cpp window:Click the Build and Go icon. It should compile, execute, and display the Run Log that contains our command line output.This little app contains the important line

std::cout << "Hello, World!\n";

This tells you the proper format for generating output to the console. The \n is the carriage-return/new-line syntax. Now we can build a simple Focus-counting app.This calculates how much Focus your pet has after four Claw hits. Nothing spectacular and we probably made a mistake somewhere, but it compiles and runs smoothly.By modifying this program, we could extrapolate the effects of Go For The Throat dumping 50 Focus on our pet when we crit 25.43% at a shot rate of 1.96 seconds per shot. We could increase our Focus regeneration as if we had points in Bestial Discipline. We could test different combinations of each talent spec, send the output to a text file, import that data into Excel, and build graphs showing the Focus vs Time for each spec.

But not today. Soon, perhaps, we’ll see.