BigWigs
This page describes fan-made scripting using the World of Warcraft API which has had notable impact on the game's development/history.
Big Wigs is a boss encounter add-on. It consists of many individual encounter scripts, or boss modules; mini add-ons that are designed to trigger alert messages, timer bars, sounds, and so forth, for one specific raid encounter. These encounter scripts are activated when you target or mouse over a raid boss, or if any other Big Wigs user in your raid does. In most cases only one module will be running at any given time.
If you're looking for boss encounter scripts for 5-man dungeons, these are not in Big Wigs proper, but live in their own add-on; Little Wigs.
Help us out
Feedback
Please remember that we are always interested in hearing directly from you. About anything you want to share or ask. You may file tickets from our project page about anything, and you may also contact us on IRC; see the bottom here for details.
The comments on curse.com are rarely, if ever, read or replied to by any of the Big Wigs authors.
Open
Note that the Big Wigs project - like 99% of all add-ons hosted on wowace.com - is open for free access to anyone who cares to join. The source code is open and free, and we welcome you to participate in the future development of Big Wigs.
Transcripts and combat logs
If you want to help us out with a new boss encounter that was recently introduced to the game, you can get our Transcriptor add-on that helps you record raw, relevant data for each encounter. Your help is appreciated, and also needed! Compressed output from Transcriptor may be uploaded alongside a ticket, or dumped on sites such as dump.no and linked from a ticket. Or you can even e-mail it to one of the authors.
But if you don't care for Transcriptor, a simple /combatlog will also help. Don't forget to tell us what raid size, difficulty, and encounter the log is for.
Features
Plug-ins
- Messages: Can be moved, coloured, locked, outputted to all kinds of different text areas.
- Bars: Can be moved, skinned to different textures (SharedMedia compatible), resized & also have an 'emphasis' feature to flash and move to a different anchor when they are about to expire.
- Raid icons: Target painting (put an icon over a player that has been singled out by the boss).
- Boss Block: Suppress "spam" sent by other player's boss encounter scripts and whathaveyou.
- Sound: Plays various sounds on different events (SharedMedia compatible).
- LibDataBroker/Minimap: Button for easy access to the configuration menu, resetting running modules, and seeing what modules are active.
Extras
- Proximity: For displaying players within a certain range on certain boss encounters.
- Test: Test and preview your bars and warnings configuration, and move them around.
- CustomBar: For 'pizza timers', create your own custom bars.
- Flash-n-Shake: Shake and/or Flash the screen blue when something important happens that directly affects you, such as a debuff.
- Clickable bars: Lets you define left/middle/right click actions for your timer bars.
- Super Emphasise: Any encounter ability you want to be extra vigilant of, you can enable Super Emphasise to get a voiced countdown and more.
- Tip of the Raid: Seasoned raiders from Ensidia and Premonition provide helpful tips and tricks to guide you through the raid.
Ancient project history
Tekkub, the original BigWigs1 for Ace1 author - back in the MC days, was inspired to write BW1 after his very first raid. He was horrified by the massive amount of spam his raid leader was creating with his boss mod. Getting messages all over the place for things he didn't care about (Hunters can't dispel a curse or interrupt a heal - well, they couldn't back then). He also found that the "60 seconds until painful doom" timer messages were such a waste. Why not use a simple timer bar to show this?
Our goals
Big Wigs aims to be as efficient as possible (creating a lower memory per second footprint and using a lower amount of CPU than any other boss mod). When modules are written, every aspect of the encounter is inspected. Is add-on synchronisation required? Is target scanning required? What events are really needed? We also aim to have the latest encounter scripts released ASAP; not long after the first few attempts of a brand new boss, we usually have a working encounter script for it.
Credits
Thanks to all the wonderful people in #wowace on irc.freenode.net for help with transcripts, translations, libraries, etc. Visit the About screen in the Big Wigs interface options for a complete list of all authors who helped directly with source changes.
If you want to contact us on IRC, remember that all the main Big Wigs authors live in Europe, and the nature of IRC means you might not get a response for as long as 10 - yes, TEN - hours. Just stick around and eventually, I guarantee we will answer. If you have the patience of a goldfish, however, you might as well just stay away.