How to use the recorder
In this guide, I’ll go over how to use the WoW-Pro Recorder to help you write leveling guides.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Downloading the Recorder
- Creating a New Guide
- Recording
- Editing an Existing Guide
- Saving Your Work
- Working With the File
- Submitting Your Work
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Comments
DOWNLOADING THE RECORDER
To get started, you’ll need to download the guide recorder but I’ve got a handy link here that includes:
• The In-Dev (most up to date) version of the WoW-Pro Addon
• The most current guides
• WoW-Pro Recorder
Unzip the file into your beta addons folder. You should have eight separate folders:
• WoWPro
• WoWPro_Achievements
• WoWPro_Dailies
• WoWPro_Leveling
• WoWPro_Profession
• WoWPro_Recorder (disabled by default)
• WoWPro_Utilities (not an addon)
• WoWPro_WorldEvents
Everything should be ready to go – fire up the client and log in! By default WoWPro_Recorder is disabled, so you need to enable it in your addons list for each character you will use it on.
Once you are loaded into game, you should see the recorder in its basic form
CREATING A NEW GUIDE
To create a new guide, simply click on the « new » button which is the third icon show in the above picture, it looks like a piece of blank paper. This will bring up a dialog box asking what type of guide you’d like to create. For now, we only have one type, and that’s Levelling!
Select it from the dropdown box
This will bring up a new window.
Fill in the guide name box with whatever your guide name will be
- Note that the stuff you put in these fields isn’t really that important, and can always be edited later. For the purposes of this guide we will name our guide 'Example Guide'
We cannot stress how important it is to make sure you press the 'Okay' button after choosing your guide name!
Once all of the fields are filled out, just hit « Register Guide ». If you did it correctly, your guide window will change to show that the guide name you have chosen in the previous step is now loaded and recording. If it doesn’t change, it means you didn’t hit enter for every field – try going through them all again.
Now that you have a new guide, you can start recording!
RECORDING
First of all – the recorder is set to « REC » or record, by default. You can use the record (circle) and stop (square) buttons to toggle between recording and not recording. This can be useful in several situations. Say for example you take a break to do an instance – you can stop recording during the instance so instance quests aren’t tracked. Similarly, if you for example need to abandon and re-accept a quest, you can stop the recorder so the second accept step isn’t tracked. Once you have the guide you want loaded and the recorder is set to « REC », you really don’t have to do anything – just play the game! It can be useful, however, to keep in mind the things that the guide recorder records.
• Accept steps:
• Quest Name
• Quest ID
• Location (including zone if it’s different from the title zone)
• Quest giver name (if you have them targeted)
• Complete steps:
• Quest Name
• Quest ID
• Location of the LAST place you completed a quest objective
• Use items for the quest
• Turn-In steps:
• Quest Name
• Quest ID
• Location (including zone if it’s different from the title zone)
• Quest giver name (if you have them targeted)
• Get Flight Path Steps:
• Location as the title
• Quest ID of the last quest you accepted
• Location (including zone if it’s different from the title zone)
• Flight master name (if you have them targeted)
• Set Hearth Steps:
• Location as the title
• Quest ID of the last quest you accepted
• Location (including zone if it’s different from the title zone)
• Innkeeper name (if you have them targeted)
• Level Up Steps:
• Your level as the title
• Quest ID of the last quest you accepted
I recommend recording while in scroll mode. This will allow you to see what you are recording. You’ll note that the bottom step will be highlighted – this is the active recorder step. New steps will be placed AFTER this step. This is also the step that will be edited when using the edit or delete buttons.
Now that you know how to record, you need to know what to do with the data you are gathering.
EDITING AN EXISTING GUIDE
If you want to add to one of the guides that’s already included in the addon, OR if you have saved a guide using the recorder and would like to edit it, this section will explain how to do that. All you need to do is open up the guide you want from the guide list, just as you would if you wanted to play it! Don’t worry if it’s already completed – if the recorder is enabled, the addon doesn’t automatically ask if you want to go to the next guide. Note: Guides saved with the recorder currently aren’t displayed on the guide list. Instead, you can access them by clicking the « Open Guide » button (it looks like a folder). This will open a dialog where you can select the guide you want to edit. This list will contain ALL guides, both those in the WoWPro_Leveling folder, and those you’ve saved using the Recorder.
SAVING YOUR WORK
Though the recorder does save your work automatically when a new step is added, it’s still wise to save it manually, and often! That’s because when WoW closes unexpectedly, it doesn’t always save it’s saved variables, and your data may be lost! You can save your work at any time by clicking on the save button. It’s on the far right of the Recorder’s bar, and it looks like a little disk. Clicking this button does two things. FIRST: It will save your data in the WTF file. When you quit and log back in, your guide will be loaded and you can select it at the bottom of the guide list. Note that the guide is also automatically saved every time a new step is added. SECOND: It will open a dialog box which contains the code for your guide. This is how you will submit your guide, and also the best way to manually save to make sure you don’t lose your work – just copy/paste the stuff in the box into a text file and save it. You can also use this to work with your guide to fill it out, change the order, and more – we’ll cover that later in the Working With the File section. For now, just know that you can safely close this box without doing anything to it if you want to. Just hit that save button often and you’ll be okay, I’ll try to get an auto-save feature enabled soon!
WORKING WITH THE FILE
If you would like to do a bit more advanced work with the guide file, please read this section. No coding knowledge of any sort is needed – the guide files are written in pseudo-code and they are very easy to understand once you have a key. First of all, open up your favourite simple text editor. I prefer Notepad++, it’s a WONDERFUL editor with lots of very nice features. Open up a new text file. Now, hit the save button on the recorder to bring up the code for your guide. Select all (Ctrl+A for PC users) and copy (Ctrl+C for PC users). Paste your code into your new file.
You should see something that looks similar to this:
A Clear the High Road|QID|24504|M|31.42,13.32|N|From Nura Pathfinder.|
f Hunter's Hill|QID|24504|M|39.75,20.18|N|At Unega.|
h Hunter's Hill|QID|24504|M|39.30,20.05|N|At Innkeeper Hurnahet.|
C Clear the High Road|QID|24504|M|35.93,15.58|
L Level 30|QID|24504|N|You should be around level 30 by this point|
T Clear the High Road|QID|24504|M|37.36,16.70|N|To Tunawa Stillwind.|
First, I’ll explain how to read this stuff and what it means. Then, I’ll tell you how you can improve your guide file’s code to make it even better!
Anatomy of a guide step: Each step is only ONE LINE of code. A new line means a new step to the addon.
Step Type:
• The first letter that you see all by it self at the beginning of the line is the step type. Every step has a step type. The types of steps that the addon can process are found Here They include but are not limited to:
• A = “Accept”
• C = “Complete”
• T = “Turn in”
• K = “Kill”
• R = “Run to”
• H = “Hearth to”
• h = “Set hearth to”
• F = “Fly to”
• f = “Get flight path for”
• N = “Note:”
• B = “Buy”
• b = “Boat or Zeppelin”
• U = “Use”
• L = “Level”
• r = “Repair/Restock”
• The Recorder only automatically creates A, C, T, h, f, and L type steps. If you want the guide to have other types of steps, you’ll need to add them in yourself.
Step Name: • The step name is the word or set of words that follows the step type. This is often a quest name, but is sometimes a location or other short descriptor for the step. The addon knows when the step name ends based on the | symbol.
Tags: • The rest of the step is defined by tags. Tags basically either flag the step for a special function, or feed a piece of information to the addon. The most common tags are map tags, note tags, and quest ID tags. There are a LOT more tags, too, but I won’t cover them all here.
• |QID|24504| = Tags the step as being tied to quest #24504. EVERY step must have a quest ID!
• |M|37.36,16.70| = Tells TomTom where to map it’s arrow to.
• |N|To Tunawa Stillwind.| = Displays “To Tunawa Stillwind” as a note for this step. These should be limited to one or two sentences – we want to minimize reading as much as possible! The recorder will automatically put what ever the quest step was, PLEASE edit this, with something a bit more descriptive if needed. i.e. instead of |N|10 bear hides collected, put |N|Kill bears until you get the needed hides. (sometimes what it says doesn't need editing - but usually it does.)
In the syntax guide you can see other modifiers you can use to help understand a step at a glance such as:
• |CHAT| changes the steps' icon to a chat bubble, symbolizing you need to talk to someone.
• |NC| changes the steps' icon to a gear, symbolizing it is done out of combat or doesn't require fighting.
• |V| changes the steps' icon to a vehicle arrow, symbolizing you click to mount up.
This covers the basics of the pseudo-code. It would be really awesome if people wanted to improve their guide file code before submitting it, since it’s pretty bare-bones otherwise. However, some guide code is MUCH better than no guide code, so if you don’t feel comfortable doing this, don’t worry about it!
If you’d like to learn more about the pseudo-code and how to use it, check out the addon’s documentation page here
SUBMITTING YOUR WORK
So now you’ve got some stuff recorded – maybe you even edited the code to make it a bit nicer. What do you do with it?
First, you should add it to your own game install and play thru it with a different character, just to be sure you didn't miss anything really obvious. Instructions for adding your own guides to your own game install can be found here
Next, you need to make a github account and submit a pull request. I’ll look it over, and if it seems sound, I’ll put it into the addon! Alternatively, you can ask one of the nice "authors" on discord to do that step for you.
**FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS **
Register Guide doesn’t seem to do anything – I don’t see my guide being recorded! Is the addon broken?
- No – you probably didn’t hit enter for every single field. Go through them and try hitting enter for each.
My guide won’t save, what’s going on? I’m getting LUA errors when I try to save!
- In all likelihood, you didn’t actually make a new guide and instead tried to record on the « Nil Guide » – the « No guide is currently loaded » guide. This will indeed produce errors. Make sure you click that « New Guide » button before starting!
I was testing a guide, and when I got to the end, it started repeating! What happened?
- You probably accidentally had REC on while you were testing! Don’t worry – the Recorder can’t actually modify any of the files included with the levelling addon, so the double steps won’t be saved over the real guide. However you WILL need to delete your WTF file for the Recorder before you can access the original guide. Make sure to back up your work first!