A [Not So] Simple Request

[Hulan]

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?

[yukikaze_yanagi]

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

[Rokien]

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

[Hulan]

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."

[Shougun]

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

[Alhanelem]

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

[Hulan]

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

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.

[Eruantien]

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

Especially since parts of the ui might well change during beta

[Shougun]

Especially since parts of the ui might well change during beta

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.

[Hulan]

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.