Introduction
I don't know about you, but I like having access to a wikipedia of information directly inside games.
It's much more convenient. And the goal of this addon is to introduce all the information about anything related with item chances.
This includes:
- Monsters and NPCs
- Chests and Containers
- Profession Sources
It also gathers information whenever you loot a target.
This is currently just used to display some very basic statistics on the tooltip.
Utility
The controls and information will be available using chat commands. Type /lootz help to get started.
The tooltip of entities which has a valid loot entry will display their id number. This id number can be used to open the loot window remotely if you want to.
Disclaimer
Data shown may be inaccurate if there is a difference between the version of your client and the version I gathered the database from.
But for the majority of items, this should still work fine reguardless of which version you play on.
I personally doubt that the majority of drop rates has been modified that extensively over the years before Cataclysm.
How it was made
I got access to a repacked version of the WotLK server files.
This includes access to item data which is not normally available through the game's addon API, like drop rates.
I entered the database configuration (Using HeidiSQL) so that I could access it and export all the tables I needed data from.
With the exported SQL files, I read/parsed and optimized the data for this addon (Using Unity Game Engine)
I generated LUA files which contained the relevant data inside variables. Making sure to split the data along several tables to prevent size issues.
At this point, the database was ready for use for the addon.
But sadly, some of the information is still challenging to validate based on game events.
Particularly, there is no single good way of getting the "loot index" of a "game object" (like Treasure Chest).
So this is fetched, by grabbing the text of the tooltip whenever it's showing information which is not from an Unit/Item/Spell.
Then comparing all positions of instances of that object from the database to determine the nearest ones.
This may therefore rarely show the entirely wrong entry.