MMO-Champion is a World of Warcraft news website. When a new patch is released, we want to show what has changed in the game (Post Example). An english summary of each spell change is hand written, but we want to show the exact tooltip changes.

Generate Tooltips

First, we use the database application to generate the tooltips in HTML form.

Epic
Binds when equipped
Chest
1669 Armor
+341 Intellect
+512 Stamina
Requires Level 85
Item Level 359
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 205.
Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 241.
Epic
Binds when equipped
Chest
1669 Armor
+321 Intellect
+512 Stamina
Requires Level 85
Item Level 359
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 205.
Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 221.

Tokenize

We are not going to do a full HTML diff which is really difficult. Instead, the trick is to parse the HTML and extract only text nodes. We split them by space to generate a token stream.

ChestguardofNature'sFuryBindswhenequippedChest1669Armor+341Intellect+512StaminaRequiresLevel85Equip:Improvescriticalstrikeratingby205.Equip:Increasesyourmasteryratingby241. ChestguardofNature'sFuryBindswhenequippedChest1669Armor+321Intellect+512StaminaRedSocketSocketBonus:+10HasteRatingRequiresLevel85Equip:Improvescriticalstrikeratingby205.Equip:Increasesyourmasteryratingby221.

Diff

Paul Butler SimpleDiff algorithm is used on the two token streams to label each token with old, new or both.

ChestguardofNature'sFuryBindswhenequippedChest1669Armor+341Intellect+512StaminaRequiresLevel85Equip:Improvescriticalstrikeratingby205.Equip:Increasesyourmasteryratingby241. ChestguardofNature'sFuryBindswhenequippedChest1669Armor+321Intellect+512StaminaRedSocketSocketBonus:+10HasteRatingRequiresLevel85Equip:Improvescriticalstrikeratingby205.Equip:Increasesyourmasteryratingby221.

Combine

We parse the HTML again. This time we pretty-print the HTML while traversing it. As we parse text nodes, we add <ins> tags where we need to. We just make sure to group contiguous insertions.

Epic
Binds when equipped
Chest
1669 Armor
+341 Intellect
+512 Stamina
Requires Level 85
Item Level 359
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 205.
Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 241.
Epic
Binds when equipped
Chest
1669 Armor
+321 Intellect
+512 Stamina
Requires Level 85
Item Level 359
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 205.
Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 221.

Text Diff

We would also like to get a text-based diff we can insert in a Patch Note. We combine both token streams into one.

Chestguard of Nature's Fury
Binds when equipped
Chest
1669 Armor
+341+321 Intellect
+512 Stamina
Red Socket
Socket Bonus: +10 Haste Rating
Requires Level 85
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 205.
Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 241.221.

Chestguard of Nature's Fury Binds when equipped Chest 1669 Armor +341+321 Intellect +512 Stamina Red Socket Socket Bonus: +10 Haste Rating Requires Level 85 Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 205. Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 241.221.

However, the result isn't that readable. There is too much noise. We want to show only the information that has changed! In order to do that, we are going to keep only the lines that contain changes.

+341+321 Intellect
Red Socket
Socket Bonus: +10 Haste Rating
Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 241.221.

+341+321 Intellect Red Socket Socket Bonus: +10 Haste Rating Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 241.221.

And it works a lot better 🙂

Conclusion

This approach is working really well with the World of Warcraft tooltips. After many patches and hundreds of changes, I haven't seen any weird behavior. They were common before using this technique. The only downside: non textual changes such as icons or colors will be completly ignored.

If you liked this article, you might be interested in my Twitter feed as well.
 
 

Related Posts

  • August 23, 2011 Javascript – Hook Technique (5)
    Let's go back 5 years ago during the World of Warcraft beta. I was working on Cosmos UI, a projects that aimed to improve the World of Warcraft interface. As interface modification was not officially supported by Blizzard, we went ahead and directly modify the game files written in […]
  • September 17, 2011 WoW Interface Anchor Positioning (6)
    I've always found CSS positioning with both float and position: absolute/relative hard to work with. I want to introduce to you an alternative way borrowed from the World of Warcraft Interface: Anchors. Anchor The concept is extremely simple. You can tell where you want the element […]
  • November 10, 2011 Diablofans Theme Improvement (0)
    Diablofans.com needed a bit of love. It is really gratifying to be able to visually improve a website by an order of magnitude just by changing some colors and fixing broken layout :) Here are some of the changes I made: Post Poll Blizzquote
  • September 22, 2011 URLON: URL Object Notation (43)
    #json, #urlon, #rison { width: 100%; font-size: 12px; padding: 5px; height: 18px; color: #560061; } I am in the process of rewriting MMO-Champion Tables and I want a generic way to manage the hash part of the URL (#table__search_results_item=4%3A-slot). I no longer […]
  • December 7, 2011 Automatic Links with Trie (0)
    On MMO-Champion, we often paste World of Warcraft patch notes taken from Blizzard. The main problem is that it's plain text. We want to be able to add links to all the spells, quests, zones ... This way people can mouseover and see the description. It helps figuring out what […]