Patches


Karazhan


Site Changes

Recently, Apple released their Safari browser for Windows. I installed it, just to see how it worked with this site. Turns out, it didn't play well with my gzipped JavaScript files (which helps the site load MUCH faster). So, in lite of that, I made some Safari-specific files, and now the site seems to function completely fine (tooltips, effects, etc).

Also, for the time being, those of you still using IE6 will have to live with the ugly PNG transparency bug. I got tired of the somewhat crappy-looking .gif images of the UI portions of the site, so now they're in PNG (smoother edges, shadowing, just all-around better looking). At some point, I might try to incorporate a fix for IE6. Other then that, it looks like my site is now compatible with IE(7), Firefox, Opera, and now Safari.

For a small WoW note, patch 2.1.2 was released the other day.

I've still been playing my hunter, Barcana, a lot. I just dinged 52 on her last night. Playing a hunter is pretty fun... being Beast Mastery specced, it's pretty easy to take on multiple mobs, take on higher level mobs, and do group quests by myself. I tamed Rawr at about level 15. Device and I ran over to the Draenei starting area so I could tame him, since this is the only place to get a Ravager pet before going to Outland.

Ok, Azerothianites. My old domain was on the verge of expiration, and I decided to switch registrars. In doing so, I decided to register a new domain, www.unbarc.com. A little more fitting, don't you think? Once I get my old domain straightened out, I'll try and forward all that traffic to the new domain.

On the professions front, I made it up to 374, and have had the past 4 items I've made not get me over that last little skill. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow I'll have tailoring maxed, and the ability to make 20 slot bags, and finish my Spellfire set.

Speaking of which, since I last posted (yeah, I need to get back into posting more often), I made myself a [Spellfire Belt] and [Spellfire Gloves], and fitted each one with a [Potent Noble Topaz] and a [Glowing Nightseye]. Vera nice. All that's left is to make a robe, then try and start saving up the mats/money for the Spellstrike set.

Patch 2.1.0 came out recently, with a ton of changes. One of the best changes: gold spam reduction. Before the patch, I was getting between 10-15 gold-spam whispers per login, now I've gotten a total of 3 since patch day.

After almost 2.5 years of playing WoW, I finally had my first world-drop epic drop when I was farming in Netherstorm. After a few days of sitting on it, I put it up in the AH for 500 starting, 700 buyout, and it ended up selling for 671. Needless to say, that money was spent the next day on mats to try and max out the tailoring.

Tomorrow night, my wife and I are going to be taking a real look at a house. In the past, we've just been looking online, but now we're actually starting to go out and see what the houses look like in person. We found one we really like, so hopefully it'll turn out that way for real.

It's been 2 months, so I figured I should post some sort of update. I haven't really been playing Unbarc a whole lot lately. For a little while I was working on leveling my alt hunter, Barcana. The past week or so, though, I decided to drop my previous profession of Jewelcrafting (keeping Mining for some cash), and I took up Tailoring. Surprisingly, it didn't take too long to get up to 335 tailoring... Jewelcrafting took FOREVER. Right now I'm in a slump because of a lack of [Netherweave Cloth]. It's going to take me a while, but here's the reason(s) I switched:
[Spellfire Belt]
[Spellfire Gloves]
[Spellfire Robe]

As for the site, I've done some new things. There's a new Tutorials section. There isn't much there yet, but it's something I can add to over time. Right now I've written a couple of short tutorials about WoWMapView and how to convert WoWModelView models to Lightwave (you can see some examples here).

Pretty soon, the 2.1.0 will be going live. This is the biggest changelog yet... my version is 1322 lines of text long (my version being HTML-formatted), and the previous longest one was 1.11.0 with only 823 lines.

On the loots side, I haven't gotten much. I think the only thing of late would be these from a quest:
[Shattrath Wraps]

On the other side of the computer screen, my wife and I are starting the process of finding a house, which I'll probably start playing even less because of this. We're so tired of living in an apartment, and we're really looking forward to having someplace we can crank up the surround-sound without the people on the other side of the wall complaining, or doing the same thing.

Been a little while since my last post, so I figured now would be a good time as any to do so. First off, there were a couple of new patches released, 2.0.7 and 2.0.8. Now before the Burning Crusade came out, the most number of patches between major updates (1.#.0) was 5. This time around, there has been 7 updates, and no major patch. They even skipped 2.0.2 for some reason.

I'll be going back through the current changelogs and adding an Undocumented Changes section, via WoWWiki.com. These changes are observed by the players, are not part of the official Blizzard release notes, and may not be agreed upon by everybody, but I like the addition of it.

On the side of my Site Upgrades, there's been some you may have noticed. Firstly, I finally updated the in-game rendition of me in the header and on the profile page.

Second, I re-added an Image Gallery back. I used to have the popular Gallery integrated in the site, but I ended up not liking how the end-result looked. So this past week I decided to just code my own. It's very basic, and has some nice effects, but isn't overloaded with stuff I don't really need.

Lastly, I started playing around with WoW Model Viewer and Lightwave again, only this time I am able to get the texture along with the model. If you have a look in my renders gallery, you'll see some quick renders of stuff.

So with the days being shorter, and the workdays seeming to be longer, lately I've been pretty bored here at work. What could come from this, but a new site feature: Unbarc's WoW Site RSS Feed. It's not the best coding job, but over time I'll hopefully have it fine-tuned. If you use Firefox or IE7, you should see the icon for the feed, but if not, here it is. For right now, it only shows the latest news posts (which is currently limited to the past 15, depending on how I feel), but in the future I may add one that shows a site changelog, the WoW changelogs, etc.

Because work has been extremely boring lately, I decided to go through the old patch notes and make them a little better by adding Item Links into them. Have a look at the 1.10.1 Patch Notes linked in my previous posting to see.

I spruced up the Itemstats tooltip (Especially in FireFox) a bit. I went from the default style, to one more true to the game. Here's a sample: [Choker of the Fire Lord]

I've also decided to make this site my blog, instead of what I already have set up. I've invested so much time into making this site, I barely even look at the blog any more.