A [Not So] Simple Request

Good afternoon (adjust for proper timezone and time of viewing) fellow forum-goes. It is not often that I find myself compelled to create a topic de novo, but I have been increasingly contemplative on a particular topic. What with all of the requests, petitions and outright demands flying around the forums of late, there is one thing that I have yet to see.

This is, for lack of a better word, a petition, but for something I think we can all agree would be incredibly important to many of us in the months to come in the barren wasteland between 1.x and ARR.

I speak, of course, of the Scaleform API for user generated Add-ons. I humbly request that this be provided to us sooner rather than later.

With two (or more) months to contemplate on possible add-ons and unit-frames, FFXIV:ARR could release with a library of user created content. As someone who works on user-interfaces quite often, I cannot wait to tackle this challenge, and it is only in your benefit to allow me and my ilk to do so.

So I will close with this thought, be you for or against User created content, it is coming. Would it not benefit everyone to have the tools available to work with for as long as possible - especially given the downtime between versions - so that we can produce the highest quality of add-ons possible for release?

idon't remember well, but they said addons will be in flash and LUA script ?

Only if you make a ffxi ui~ I'll be down for that.

It will be in Scaleform (a Actionscript/Flash framework). What I am requesting is the actual function prototypes we will have access to to hook into. Without them, it's extremely hard to plan for add-ons. We can only say "Boy I'd love to do this, but who knows if we'll even have access to the distance calculations."

I want a hello kitty UI - I will be waiting in my cotton candy cottage.


+1'd It would be a great boon for our addon developers to have this, please +1 OP

It's pretty much certainly not going to be before we get the client.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

It's pretty much certainly not going to be before we get the client.

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While that was my original assumption. There really is no reason for this to be true. While large changes will no doubt be made over the process of the alpha and beta, the interface by which we interact with Scaleform will mostly stay stay static (since hopefully they decided months ago what functionality we would have access to). Alternatively, it's not like not having the client will be a problem, you can just write the add-on in your Flash environment of choice and throw in dummy function in place of the Scaleform hooks.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

It's pretty much certainly not going to be before we get the client.

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Especially since parts of the ui might well change during beta

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Originally Posted by Eruantien

Especially since parts of the ui might well change during beta

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This is actually a greater reason for addon developers to get it earlier - they can work with the dev team to make an appropriate API before disappointment onsets.

What I am asking isn't even that unusual, in fact, it's an industry standard. Sony releases the specs for their next gen system to developers years before it comes out so that they can start working on games in time for the system release.

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Originally Posted by Rokien

Only if you make a ffxi ui~ I'll be down for that.

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I'll put this at third on my list (with the caveat that it will get pushed down by anything else interesting that comes up). Right now it's:

1.) One button view all (full screen) chat window [al la FFXI]
2.) Second Monitor full screen map [if possible].
2.5) custom party unit-frame [3.5 because it depends on motivation/time allowing]
3.) Full on FFXI mod.

I wouldn't blame SE if they wanted to focus on making their own standard UI the best it can be before player's start shifting their attention to making addons for it.

I mean it would be a little disheartening if that, during beta, where SE needs lots of feedback for adjustments and improvements, players instead just start making addons to compensate for shortcomings. One thing at a time, yeah?

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Originally Posted by Inaaca

I mean it would be a little disheartening if that, during beta, where SE needs lots of feedback for adjustments and improvements, players instead just start making addons to compensate for shortcomings. One thing at a time, yeah?

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It's not really an either/or kind of thing. If they've done it "right" - which under Yoshi-P's leadership I have no reason to believe they haven't - the API should already be well established since it is part of the fundamental building blocks of the GUI (even for them).

Releasing API docs would take almost none of their time, and would give them a new pool of player input to draw from. Not to mention, if they really wanted 5 stars, they could open up a add-on submission form and steal our ideas for the main UI in beta. I don't mind, seriously SE, take any and all of my ideas (for FFXIV).

For the map on 2nd monitor, worst case scenario I guess an addon could export player position and current location to a XML file every 1 to 5 sec, or maybe directly send info to an external software that would display map + current position.

What the UI is written in and utilizes will be completely different than what we'll have available to us. Example: RIFT uses Scaleform, but the entire Addon API is Lua.

If they're doing it right, we won't be touching Scaleform at all and will be locked in a sandbox playground that they establish after they've flushed out the feature set of the base UI. I'll be very, very surprised if it isn't Lua that will power the Addon API. Do they have an idea of what they want to give us access to? Sure, but I honestly don't expect anything solid until well after release.

Maybe, maybe, we'll see some of it during beta, but I doubt it'll be available at launch. If it is, I expect it to be very basic.

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Originally Posted by Hulan

Releasing API docs would take almost none of their time, and would give them a new pool of player input to draw from.

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Yes and no. Exposing API to users/3rd parties means you have to account for any securities/vulnerabilities in it. There's more work that needs to be done there besides just opening it up and documenting it. But

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Not to mention, if they really wanted 5 stars, they could open up a add-on submission form and steal our ideas for the main UI in beta. I don't mind, seriously SE, take any and all of my ideas (for FFXIV).

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I've said it before and I'll say it now. Opening up the API does the vast majority of the work for SE. Design, collecting feature requests, testing, refinement, etc is all crowd sourced -- done by the community. All they have to do is take the popular/useful addons and implement them as is into the default UI once in a while, and they'd be able to keep an up-to-date, competitive UI with much less effort.

Not to get into a debate, but yes, of course we won't be touching Scaleform itself (just the functions it exposes). But I disagree point for point on the "right" way being segregating the player API and developer API. Uniform development environments offer innumerable advantages. Similarly, if they don't want us (Add-on developers that is) to have access to a set of functionality, it means that that is functionality they do not intend players to have. Meaning their UI won't need access to that data either. Special cases only lead to headaches.

Either way, be it Lua or Actionscript, the point still stands. Giving developers more time, even with a beta interface, would do them and us a world of good.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Exposing API to users/3rd parties means you have to account for any securities/vulnerabilities in it. There's more work that needs to be done there besides just opening it up and documenting it.

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While true, these are steps they should have already taken/considered when first developing the UI API much earlier in the development cycle. Though I will admit... This being Square Enix's first real step into open source, I do expect a few... hiccups... early on. All the more reason to let us at it in the beta so we can do our damage and they can respond and learn.

They SHOULD be doing some open API betas, yes. But since I'm totally skeptical about SE's abilities, I don't want them to just flip that switch on or have it on during the ARR beta, since problems introduced by insecure API can totally f**k up more conventional testing and debugging.

I really hope SE don't use scalaform...

I have bad experience with it on MMOs...

Hmmm, I would agree with that, actually. While I obviously want to know what the API looks like, so I can get to work, I do not think we should be able to actually publish to the game until after the beta. On the other hand, I do think that SE should open a submission form during the beta for Mods, not to implement, per say, but as a rough toolbox to work out of.

I always thought coding an add-on for XIV would be too far out there for my knowledge, but if I know AS3 then it means I can do it without problems?

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Originally Posted by Majidah

I always thought coding an add-on for XIV would be too far out there for my knowledge, but if I know AS3 then it means I can do it without problems?

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Pretty much, assuming it is indeed Flash based. You may want to brush up on your Vector based graphics though. A rudimentary understanding of SVG should be plenty.