OpenRDX - Raid Data Exchange
 

There has been relatively little mention of the OpenRDX (Raid Data Exchange) project here on the EJ forums, and I personally think that's somewhat of a shame. For a brief bit of background on what the package is, it was previously a subscription based usage all-in-one raid package with near limitless potential. After a while, however, the original author saw fit to give up the project and turn the code over to the open source modding community.

I would like for this thread to serve as a place to discuss and share the various desktops, bossmods, unit frames, and so forth that the community has come up with and to bolster interest in this powerful mod package.

As a start, here are the official links regarding the project as it currently stands:

• OpenRDX - Homepage
• OpenRDX Forums
• OpenRDX Sourceforge project page
• Main Page - The OpenRDX Project Wiki

Pre-Made Setups (Posted by Xenios)

• Brethren_RaidFrames
• AF_Raid

I'm impressed, you already have more documentation available then Veni ever did. ;)
I kind of miss my RDX healing grid, the Ace Grid just doesn't have the same effect.

I've looked through the wiki and the forums. I've heard a lot about RDX in the past, but I still haven't yet gotten a handle on exactly what it offers that other mods don't, besides (a) insane and frankly impenetrable on-the-fly customization and (b) raid castbars. Could someone familiar with the system give a short paragraph or two about what the concrete benefits of RDX are for those of us a little loath to spend a few weeks familiarizing ourselves with an arcane system of mods?

For what it's worth, I still use RDX 6.3.1 on my characters (the last Veni-published version). It still works, and I have everything the way I like it after using it for so long, so there's no real reason to switch away from RDX. Probably what I would use now if I were healing.

I haven't looked into OpenRDX much, because it appeared while I was away from the game. I imagine if it's turning out well (and it sounds like it is), I'll just start using their updates.

Probably won't contribute much, as my involvement with WoW is a bit more relaxed these days, but I can least make sure all of my bossmods still work.

Other than the absolutely crazy level of customization available (if you can dream it, you can build it), the biggest benefit was that people who knew what they were doing could fix other users UIs for them. Or design it all for them. It helped a lot of guilds overcome what they saw as weaknesses in standard UIs or as incompatibilities between their raider personalities and those UIs.

For example if you were forming a brand new guild with people who had never played WoW before and wanted those guys to dive right into raiding, you could build a totally custom UI for your healers, and send it to them in-game.

Or for a guild that desired standardization across the board, RDX can be used to eliminate stupid errors like people not having abilities keybound, things like that. Some guilds desired that every healer use the same raid healing setup, etc.

It seems like the people handling the OpenRDX project's main goal is to keep Veni's work up to date and working as Blizz changes their UI and scripting rules. While features are being added, the community has to make a strong case for them before the maintenance crew will actually implement them.

Truthfully, that's probably a good thing.

The biggest downfall of frameworks is feature bloat - once you reach the point where the userbase is using less than say 80% of the framework, you have to ask "why not use individual mods and save 20% bloats". The best way to avoid feature creep is to simply be unwilling to add features that are non-universal. If it's really a good idea, then getting the rest of the community on board won't be too hard. If it's just a neat idea, instead of a needful one, then it probably belongs outside the framework.

To answer the question regarding "what does RDX do":

RDX is a very good alternative (perhaps the only real alternative) to the Ace/Ace2/Rock family of frameworks. The benefit of RDX is that for slightly more advanced users (in terms of coding) you can remove a fair bit of your addon folder/management overhead, and it has a superior (imho) system for handling profiles/complete interfaces as a result. Desktops - RDX's version of the ace2 profile system - are much more widely used in my experience than the Ace2 equiv.

While it's entirely possible to create (for instance) caith or halcyon's UI using either the Ace2/Rock or RDX frameworks, it is much simpler to switch between the two of them in the RDX world. Of course, creating them initially is potentially less intuitive for a new user. (It depends on how well the initial distributor builds their package).

From what I can tell, the initial RDX package is barebones with nothing extra whatsoever. The toolkit, with no premade birdhouses as it were.That's one of the downfalls for new users under this "new" version of the system.

Right, downloading just RDX only gets you the framework. When Veni was working on it initially and there were dozens of guilds beta testing it, you could grab any number of pre-made setups and then just tweak them for your guild. I did that for my guild on Sargeras, it was my job to find new ways to utilize the RDX engine and then bring that into our guild package. It has a huge learning curve and a very lengthy setup time from scratch, but you can cut a lot of that down by using some pre packed windows and then adjusting them from there.

"Feature bloat"??

Is this something that invented on internet? Because being a software engineer for 7 years, it is the first time I hear something that is against having more features.

There's a reason a "minimalist" UI is so popular. Extraneous functions, doodads, and buttons are just as annoying in wow interfaces as they are in cars, consumer electronics, and all sorts of other stuff. You want your device to do just what you want, and not have features you don't use. It's one of the big reasons the Ipod is so successful in comparison to other feature filled mp3 players.

You're not a very good engineer, then. Features are only good if they're used, and bloat implies that a given feature is relatively unused - for a framework or library, a feature used by less than the majority of users of the framework probably doesn't belong.

So you are in favor of MS Office having a Flight Simulator built into it that can be activated with a certain key combination? You find that useful in your spreadsheet programs?

Someone once said famously (well, not famously enough that I can remember who said it), 'A project is only finished once there's nothing left to remove that can be removed'.

There's a fine line between 'feature bloat' and 'wide appeal' though.