Raid Data Exchange v6 - Update

As I mentioned before, I joined the RDX website in order to get at and help test the earliest releases of this add on. For better or worse, I took the plunge today without really reading anything on the RDX website about how to get started.

For those of you considering becoming charter members this means when you open up RDX for the first time it looks like this:



Rather than be discouraged (or look for documentation!) I spent the next two hours or so creating Filter, Sort, MouseBinding, UnitFrame, and Window Objects, organizing them into Packages until eventually my Object Browser looked like this:



The end product of all this tinkering you may be wondering? Nothing spectacular really, in fact it ended up being something I'd done in about twenty minutes using RDX5. Of course AFTER I had created windows in order to display Tanks, Druids, Healers, DPS..



I went and looked at the RDX website in an attempt to find an answer to one of the many questions which had arisen in my mind (which I did find by the way), I found this quote from Veni regarding the user friendliness of RDX6 as well..

I do sympathize with the user friendliness issues, a lot of people find the new RDX intimidating.

I will be working to address those issues as we move on through the alpha.

One thing I will be doing is adding "Wizards" like a Window Wizard that will let you set up a window in a few easy steps. The wizard will generate all of the sets/sorts/features for you so that you don't have to mess with them.

I didn't find this terribly surprising. You may notice the listing in the above screenshots under Packages which says Builtin, I fully expect this to be well populated by the time a release version rolls around.

Usability concerns aside, the flexibility of Veni's approach is what really amazed me. I'm no stranger to Object Oriented Programming, in fact its what they pay me for, but Object Orientation like this in a language which, to my knowledge, is not particularly designed for an Object Oriented approach is pretty amazing.

In the end I could have saved myself a lot of time by reading the documentation provided and downloading the pre-constructed objects, but I'm really glad I didn't. Not having Builtin objects forced me to understand the relationships between the objects and allowed me to appreciate the power of Veni's approach.

My biggest concern for RDX6 at this point is how much of a resource hog is it going to be. It may have been because of the refresh events I chose in the Window configuration, but I was getting some client side lag which I will attribute pretty completely to my addition of RDX6 and I wasn't even in a raid environment.

In response to resource consumption concerns Veni says,

Well, we're still in alpha, I'm always looking for ways to make things more efficient, and I'll keep reducing consumption when I can. That Kb/s figure in battle sounds a little high and I'll look into reducing it.

However, my focus with RDX is not to make a minimalistic addon, but rather a fully featured one. You can expect RDX to take up a good chunk of memory.

I personally completely understand his interest in developing a fully featured raiding utility. However, I think it will certainly be necessary to balance utility and performance. An addon developed to be used in what is generally the laggiest of environments certainly needs to keep a somewhat smaller footprint.

So far this mod gets a thumbs up from me.