Regular raiders are always on the look-out for ways to improve their raiding performance and will commonly take advantage of the output of tools such as WoW Web Stats (aka: ‘WWS’) or World of Logs (aka: ‘WoL’) to provide them with detailed reports on how much damage or healing was done and by whom, what abilities were used, who died and how and much, much more.

Typically, there will be one or two people in a given raiding team who have been given (or have assumed) responsibility for producing these raid reports and the steps they typically have to go through are generally as follows:

- Create an account with the reporting system. (WWS, WoL et-al.)
- Enable the logging of all combat data to the WoW Combat Log file at raid start.
- Upload data about the raid from the WoW Combat Log file to the report website.
- Stop logging of all combat data at raid end.

In general it’s not a terribly hard task but there are a few caveats that can catch people out from time to time, the most common ones being:

- Forgetting to enable the logging of combat data.
- Not managing the size of the WoW Combat Log file.
- Being unable to upload combat data due to the size of the WoW Combat Log file.

As a result of these potential caveats, being the one responsible for combat logging can sometimes be a more stressful and annoying job that it needs to be. Therefore, we’d like to offer a few useful nuggets of advice to those burdened with such a task.

Automatic Logging:

To get woW to record all combat data to the combat log file, one simply needs to enter the following command into the WoW chat window:

/combatlog

This should trigger an acknowledgement message to be displayed in the chat window indicating that logging has been enabled. To stop WoW recording the combat data to the log, simply type the same command again and once more, you should see an acknowledgement message indicating this.

Naturally, it’s quite tedious to have to be responsible for manually starting and stopping the logging of combat data and if you find yourself forgetting to start or stop the logging from time to time you wouldn’t be the first. Step forward therefore magically-useful addon “LoggerHead”.

Loggerhead is a small addon that detects when you switch zones and the first time it detects a new zone it does not know about it pops-up a small window asking if you’d like combat data logged whilst in this zone. It then remembers your answer so it doesn’t need to ask again the next time you enter the same zone and eventually, you’ll move freely around the world and if you enter a raid (for example) it will automatically trigger the logging of combat data to the wow combat log file on and off as appropriate, assuming that you answered ‘yes’ for logging in that zone!

You can download LoggerHead from here.

Log File Overload:

It’s great to be able to have LoggerHead manage the switching on and off of logging automatically on our behalf and commonly means that the task becomes one we never think of again. There is however a potential problem with this that we have not mentioned yet.

Whenever you enable logging, WoW simply appends the current combat log data to the WoW Combat Log file, growing the file over time. As a result of this, without proper management, the log file can grow to uncomfortable extremes. Here at ‘BW-Central’ we’ve recently taken on the mantle of managing our raid’s ‘WoL’ report creation and had never spared a thought historically to looking after the WoW Combat Log file. The result? The file grew to about 4.5gb in size before we noticed which is rather a lot of data and wholly unnecessary.

The quick and dirty solution to this problem is to simply wait until you’ve closed WoW down, finished uploading any data you care to upload to either WWS, WoL or wherever and then simply delete the existing WoW Combat Log file. The next time you enable combat logging WoW will detect the file does not exist and will create a fresh new log file accordingly.

We’re huge fans of ‘automation’ though so we’d much rather not have to even remember to do this job on the occasional basis. Far better for us to find a way for it to be taken care of on a repeating and regular basis without any interaction from us. Step forward ‘Chomp’, ’7-Zip’ and a simple Dos batch-file.

First of all, get hold of the following two utility programs and install them onto your computer:

- Chomp – Enables the splitting of logs files into smaller individual pieces.
- 7-Zip – A free archiving tool in the same vein as Winzip and Rar et-al.

With these tools downloaded, the next step is to copy the following batch-file code into a new text file on your PC and save it somewhere safe that makes sense to you. Although you could save it into the default ‘log’ directory (typically ‘…\World of Warcraft\logs”) we’d recommend against that simply because there might come a time when you need to reinstall the game and if you’ve saved it there, you might then delete it in the process of reinstalling. A user-profile directory or similar would do just fine. Save the file with the filename “WoWCombatLogRotator.bat” in the location you chose.


@echo off
REM WoWCombatLogRotation.bat
REM Rotates the WoW combat log file.
REM Notes:

REM Delete unzipped log-file extracts.
ECHO Deleting uncompressed log files matching "WoWCombatLog-*.txt"...
Del WoWCombatLog-*.txt


(NB: See comment #5 and comment #6 below.)

Note that there are several lines in the batch file code that you need to customise to point to the locations on your system of Chomp, 7-Zip and the WoW logs directory. Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to jump on to the next stage of the proceedings.

We now have a program to split the log file (chomp), a program to add the bit we chop-off to an archive and compress it down to save space (7-Zip) and a batch-file to marshall the whole process. Let’s give a quick explanation of what this batch file does.

We could run this batch-file now to test it and by all means, if you’d like to do so, please do. We’ve set it to empty the combat log file completely so if you run it a second time before you play WoW again, it won’t have anything to do.

What we’d really want though is to set this program to be run automatically everyday on an automatic basis. Under Windows we have something called “Scheduled Tasks” which you can find in your control panel.

Open the Scheduled Tasks window and create a new scheduled task. Configure it to run once per day at a time you would generally be sure not to be playing WoW (5am seemed like a good option here at the ‘BW-Daycentre!’) and save the task with a useful name and description such as “WoW Combat Log Rotation” etc.

With the task setup to run everyday at 5am, the first new session of WoW on any given day after 5am will have a fresh and empty combat log. Should you for any reason need a previous day’s combat log, you will be able to find it archived inside the Zip format archive in the WoW logs directory under the name “WoWCombatLogs.zip” with each day’s log data referenced in the name by day and date.

Microsoft recently released what they call the “Release Candidate” of their latest desktop operating system, Windows 7, via their website. It’s a free download and can be used until the summer of 2010 completely free of charge. We won’t explain here all the many new features of Windows 7 because there are plenty of reviews already published to great effect on that subject but we will give some thoughts on why it might be a good choice for the WoW player to consider.

Here at ‘BW HQ’ we’ve been using the “Release Candidate” or ‘RC’ on our main machines for about one month now and thus far it has behaved itself impeccably. It’s definitely an improvement over its Windows Vista predecessor although when we say that, it is worth adding the qualification that our experiences with Windows Vista over the past two years have been quite excellent. Despite the many voices that jumped onto the “we hate Vista” train with claims of preference for the earlier Windows XP, we’ve preferred Vista as our desktop OS of choice at all times. We get plenty of exposure to XP in our corporate offices and with our business clients but when it comes to what we rock with on our own kit at home, it’s been Vista every time. If you understood the few basic changes between XP and Vista and could cope with that, it was no problem.

In fact, the only problem we ever truly had with Vista came towards the end of our time with it (we’re confirmed Windows 7 converts now for reasons that will become immediately clear) after we replaced the main workstation in the office with a bigger more powerful machine. As part of the upgrade, we kitted it out with a fancy 30″ screen with a 2560×1600 resolution display and it was here that some problems were encountered. Essentially, during day-to-day operation the machine worked flawlessly however it would quite regularly trip-over when running WoW (the only game we have installed onto the machine bar those that come supplied with Vista) and cause us to have to either restart the game or restart the machine. It didn’t happen often but it happened enough for us to recognise that it only happened during game-play and thus, it was never a welcome occurrance.

Since switching to Windows 7, this problem has simply disappeared. It’s not possible to tell if it’s the new OS, the ATI driver for the graphics card under Windows 7, the fact we’ve gone from running 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7 or some other factor that is to thank for the improvement but any improvement shall be considered a good thing, whatever its cause. Unsurprisingly therefore, we’re firmly attached to Windows 7 now and with our experiences from Vista in hand, there are some very useful tips to be passed on to anyone considering trying the new Windows OS.

Installing WoW on Windows 7:

The first important decision to make after installing Windows 7 on your PC and before installing WoW on top of that is where you are going to install WoW. On a traditional Windows XP machine, all standard program installations went into the “C:\Program Files\” directory which thus meant that WoW generally ended up in “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\” if you simply followed normal convention. There was no problem with this under Windows XP but come Windows Vista, this way of doing things could have a subtle but significant effect.

Windows Vista introduced some new and more stringent security settings and one of these was the increased protection of what it termed ‘Important System Folders’ and of course, the “C:\Program Files\” directory was one of these. Thus, if you first installed WoW into the normal “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\” location and then attempted to make changes to WoW folders that used to be stored inside there such as your “Interface\Addons” folder or your “Screenshots” or “WTF” folders you’d find they no were longer located inside there. Instead, to preserve the protection for the ‘important system folders’, Vista had moved the folders you might need to change to a location inside your personal profile, typically under…

C:\Users\<name>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\World of Warcraft\

…where <name> is your Windows Vista username. Handy huh? And easy to find… we think not!

Thus, our personal solution to this ‘problem’ was to install WoW to a different location where this separation would not occur so that we could more easily keep all of WoW’s data in one place. On our machines, we would create a single directory called…

C:\Program Files Public\

…into which we installed WoW. This ensured that all WoW’s folders stayed in the same place and kept things tidily organised. Remember that a good Windows Nerd seeks to minimise the number of directories directly under “C:\” so things don’t get cluttered.

Moving to Windows 7, we have exactly the same matter to address so we were all ready to create our “Program Files Public” folder under “C:\” when we noticed something new to consider. We’d chosen the 64-bit version of Windows 7 given that we have a modern PC and almost all the modern Intel chips in desktop PCs these days are essentially 64-bit chips. They’ll still run quite happily if you only install the 32-bit version of Windows but there are limitations on things like how much memory you can access with a 32-bit operating system thus we’d elected to go 64-bit this time around.

In the same way that your PC with a 64-bit chip can run both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, so too can your 64-bit Windows run both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows applications, no doubt to ensure compatibility for business users and the like. What this generally means though is that if you install a 64-bit application on 64-bit Windows (XP/Vista or 7) then it will default to the normal “C:\Program Files\” location. However, if you install an older 32-bit application on 64-bit Windows, it will instead default to the alternate “C:\Program Files (x86)\” location in order to help it (and us!) identify the 32-bit apps from the 64-bit ones.

Thus, with Windows 7 we created our new directory as…

C:\Program Files Public (x86)\

…before installing WoW since we knew, after doing a bit of research via Google, that WoW’s client is only available in a 32-bit version. We then installed WoW to this location giving us an install-location of…

C:\Program Files Public (x86)\World of Warcraft\

…and once again were forever more blessed with being able to find all our ‘Interface\Addons’, ‘Screenshots’ and ‘WTF’ files under the same basic location. Everyday geeks have a word for such things as this… bliss!

Thus, if you choose a 32-bit version of Windows 7 then we’d recommend installing WoW into the normal ‘Public’ folder whilst under a 64-bit version of Windows 7 we’d recommend installing WoW into the ‘Public (x86)’ folder instead. Either way, it’ll make your life simpler in the long run.

Running WoW on Windows 7:

In general, the experience of running WoW on Windows 7 should not differ from the experience you’d have received when running it on Windows XP or Vista before it. Former users of Windows XP will probably find the performance of WoW under Windows 7 to be about the same whilst former Vista users should see a minor performance improvement due to the refinements that have been made to the core Windows systems between Vista and 7.

We’ve noticed a few other areas where WoW seems to perform better under Windows 7 than under Vista although again, it’s not clear for us whether the performance improvements are coming from being under the new version of Windows or from our step-up to a 64-bit version of the OS from the former 32-bit version we used before. However, running Fraps alongside WoW under Windows 7 is notably smoother than it was under Vista previously. Fraps, for those that don’t know, is a small utility program that allows you to record the game-graphics as you play for the purposes of making game-related movies afterwards.

We’re running WoW in a 1920×1080 window to mirror the default resolution of modern ‘High Definition’ or ‘HD’ television sets and Fraps will comfortably grab the game graphics at 30 or 60 FPS as we prefer without causing the game to become in any way laggy, choppy or notably affected. At approximately just under 4GB per minute of footage captured in the raw ‘avi’ format that Fraps saves, handling the large files produced is a problem/joy of its own when we later attempt to stitch our movies together. However, this should clearly bode well for those wanting to capture their own gameplay via Fraps-like tools. Again, we’re guessing, whatever performance you managed under XP will likely be the level you’ll get with Windows 7 and Vista users should find performance slightly better than before.

In Conclusion:

Windows 7 is a truly excellent continuation of the Windows desktop operating system line. It has proven itself to be both rock-solid stable and a pleasure to use over the past month and furthermore, WoW runs very nicely on Windows 7 offering perhaps the most enjoyable WoW experience due to the combination of all the modern Windows finery with no notable performance penalties over the more basic XP versions of Windows.

We’d certainly recommend all Vista users to strongly consider it a good option to explore since it is basically “more of the same but just plain better.” To XP users we’d also recommend it highly however we’ll happily pull our punches with the recommendation here because we know many XP users have tried and disliked Vista in the past and really don’t want to move forwards beyond XP. That’s cool – WoW certainly works just as well on XP as it does on Windows 7 and if you’re not itching to try the newest version of Windows then why make needless ‘upgrade’ work for yourselves. However, we will say that one day you’ll probably be in a position of having to make the step forwards to a new version of Windows and if that version happens to be Windows 7, we think you’ll be really quite okay.

As for us here at the BW-HQ, we’re all for Windows 7 now and won’t be going back to Vista or XP where we have the choice. Windows 7 and WoW is a very satisfying combination.

-B-