Battleground General

BGG is now in AV

Battleground General is a small panel that appears in Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin and now in Alterac Valley (see below for specific AV instructions). It shows you where all your team-mates are, and allows you to give specific orders to multiple people at once, along with other useful and fun features.

Getting started:

Once you have downloaded Battleground General and put it into your AddOns folder, you can open up WoW and set some keybindings. The most useful bindings are Show, Hide, Order by Class and Order by Position. I use Ctrl-S, Ctrl-H, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-P for these commands. Once you enter Warsong Gulch or Arathi Basin the panel will appear and you can place it where it suits you. If the BGG panel doesn’t appear (which occasionally happens), using the "Show" keybinding or typing /bgg show will show it. It will show you where all your team-mates are and a red dot will indicate if they’re in combat. Ordering by class is self-explanatory. Ordering by position sorts players by where they are, with Alliance areas at the top and Horde areas down the bottom.

Giving commands

You can select players by shift clicking on them. This is different to targeting them as you can select multiple players. To order them around, use the Battleground Whisper command. For example you may select three players you want to defend the flag in WSG. Then you type:
/bgw stay on defence
The message "stay on defence" will be individually whispered to each selected player.

As of Version 1.3.1, whispers will automatically be preceded by a header: "[Multi-Player Whisper]"

When you start, this won’t actually work, as BGG is by default in Sandbox Mode. Once you are confident to send real whispers, type /bgg sandbox off

You can also right-click on the five red buttons near the top for pre-made, hopefully grammatical, commands. I like the Battleground Whisper concept a lot more, so am deprecating using the buttons.

Do Not Whisper List

Not everyone will respond positively to being whispered to. As a responsible Warcraft citizen, you can maintain a list of players to whom whispering is not productive. Target the offending (offended?) player, or select them in the BGG window and type /bgg dnw on to avoid sending them more whispers. Type /bgg dnw help for more information about maintaining the list. This list will be valid for the whole account.

Organizing Groups

You may wish to issue commands certain groups of players. Use the the Store Group # and Recall Group # bindings (I use Shift-Ctrl-1 to store and Ctrl-1 to recall) to save and bring back your groups. Alternatively you may want the groups to follow raid groups (players in the same party can share auras and make use of Vampiric Touch for example). Type /bgg group on to be able to recall raid groups (ie. BGG groups will follow raid groups).

Advanced Stuff

Creating this custom macro in Clique will allow you to toggle BGG selections by clicking on unit frames:
/bgg click select
For more details, see the change notes for version 2.1

If you’re not American you may prefer the area above the Flag Room floor in WSG to be called "1st floor" instead of "2nd floor". To change this, open up the file BGGConfig.lua and change the first line to ABGUseAmericanNames = false.

The Toggle Enemy List keybinding shows or hides a panel showing which enemy players have been seen where in Arathi Basin. It is useful for knowing whether a node can be defended or whether it will probably by overrun. Note that this information is imperfect, and that there may be enemy players as yet unseen. The panel automatically hides if you enter combat.

You’ve grabbed the enemy flag in WSG and got all the way back to your base. Someone on your team returns your flag, but you don’t notice until too late in the desperate struggle to keep yourself alive. Battleground General can help! Type /bgg warn on to get BGG to warn you that you can now capture the flag with a sound you can’t miss.

Lastly, for fun, type /bgg cheer on to get your character to perform a suitable positive or negative emote when you or the opposition capture the flag in WSG. You raise your fist in anger at Dumbflagcarrier.

Alterac Valley

Out of necessity the interface is different in AV.

Instead of individual players, the frames now represent areas. Mousing over the frames will show you which players on your team are in that area, and which enemies have been sighted there. If you have selected any players it will list them by their area.

You can left- and right-click on the frame do select and deselect players:
Left-Click: Select one player
Right-Click: Deselect one player
Shift-Left-Click: Select all players in that area
Shift-Right-Click: Deselect all players in that area

Left-Clicking three times will select three players from a particular area. They will be the three closest players to each other so that they can group up easily (BGG selects the player with the shortest total distance to every other player in the area- processor intensive but it only happens when you mouseover, so it’s unlikely to cause problems in combat).

The eight buttons at the top are for selecting and deselecting raid groups. For example with button 1:
Left-Click: Select Group 1
Shift-Left-Click: Add members of Group 1 to selection
Alt-Left-Click: Remove members of Group 1 from selection
Right-Click: Clear selection

Mousing over the buttons with the Alt key down will remind you of these options.

All communications are done with the /bgw command. Players on your Do Not Whisper list will never be selected. There is a shortcut for selecting groups:
/bgg select 34

...will select members of Groups 3 and 4. So the following macro:
/bgg select 57
/bgw protect bal

...will instruct members of Groups 5 & 7 to help Balinda.

• 

  Author

  tsadok

  (Project Manager)

  Downloads

  • Battleground General
  • Queen's English (enGB)
  • HaxX0r

2.2
Hopla! Battleground General is now functional on German clients. Also most of the look-and-feel is also in German. Many thanks to Nerozud for his help. There may be an issue with emotes performed when a player captures the flag on the German client. Feedback is welcome!

In Warsong Gulch, the enemy flag is visible on the world map 45 seconds after it is taken. At this point, enemy flag tracking will change to following the enemy flag icon. This should allow superior tracking of the enemy flag.

Battleground General is now compatible with Addon Loader by Ammo. If Addon Loader is present, BGG will not load unless you enter a battleground.

It also interfaces with Grid. To configure with Grid, open Grid's configuration menu. The status is called 'Battleground Position'. You probably want to set the text2 indicator to this. If you have Grid, but don't want to use it for battleground positions, type:

/bgg grid off

...to save a little memory and CPU. If you don't have Grid, performance won't be affected.

Finally, in AV, BGG looks for the death of Balinda or Galvangar and reports it to the /bg channel. Only one client with BGG will report their deaths. It will use the message "Bal is down" or "Galv is down".

2.1
Battleground General can now interface with Clique by Cladhaire:
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info5108-Clique.html
To use it, open Clique and press 'Custom'. Select 'Create Custom Macro', and for the macro, type:

/bgg click select

Now, clicking on their unit frame (with for example shift-left click) will toggle their selection in Battleground General. To make the macro always select or deselect, use:

/bgg click select on|off

You may have noticed that you can only send ten whispers at a time before WoW says it’s too many. If players in your team also have Battleground General, it will send them their message via an Addon Channel rather than as a normal whisper, which will let you whisper more people at once. For sender and receiver it should be indistinguishable from an ordinary whisper. (This took a lot of debugging, which is why this version took so long- please let me know if there are any more problems).

BGG should now behave better going straight from AB to AV for example. Sorry, the /bgg select 134 command is still buggy, or not worky. Next version!

A LOT has been done behind the scenes, only of interest if you like... ok, not of interest to anyone but me :-) Reducing BGG’s global footprint and the like.

2.02
Added support for Death Knights. Their presence on a battleground may have been causing errors.

2.01
Updated (and tested) for WotLK. The event scheduling algorithm is now more efficient.

The Battleground General pane will now hide during combat. Specifically, it will hide when an enemy player (not a pet) causes you normal or spell damage. So it won’t hide if you’re riding through AV and are attacked by NPCs such as harpies, frostwolves, archers etc. To enable or disable this feature, type:
/bgg hidecombat on|off

2.0
Battleground General has come to Alterac Valley! It works the same as before in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. Out of necessity the interface is different in AV.

Instead of individual players, the frames now represent areas. Mousing over the frames will show you which players on your team are in that area, and which enemies have been sighted there. If you have selected any players it will list them by their area.

You can left- and right-click on the frame do select and deselect players:
Left-Click: Select one player
Right-Click: Deselect one player
Shift-Left-Click: Select all players in that area
Shift-Right-Click: Deselect all players in that area

Left-Clicking three times will select three players from a particular area. They will be the three closest players to each other so that they can group up easily (BGG selects the player with the shortest total distance to every other player in the area- processor intensive but it only happens when you mouseover, so it’s unlikely to cause problems in combat).

The eight buttons at the top are for selecting and deselecting raid groups. For example with button 1:
Left-Click: Select Group 1
Shift-Left-Click: Add members of Group 1 to selection
Alt-Left-Click: Remove members of Group 1 from selection
Right-Click: Clear selection

Mousing over the buttons with the Alt key down will remind you of these options.

All communications are done with the /bgw command. Players on your Do Not Whisper list will never be selected. There is a shortcut for selecting groups:
/bgg select 34

...will select members of Groups 3 and 4. So the following macro:
/bgg select 57
/bgw protect bal

...will instruct members of Groups 5 & 7 to help Balinda.