In the Beginning, there was Cosmos... In the end, there wasn't.

[KarlKFI]

First of all I'd like to thank all the programmers who have worked on Cosmos recently and in the past. Their contributions have not gone unnoticed, even if their name wasn't on the staff list.

Second I'd like to thank all the Cosmos super-fans and forum addicts for helping us maintain a fairly decent support system for an "open source" project.

Thirdly I'd like to apologize that it never really was fully open source, even tho the source was readable. A lot could have been done to make things more transparent that may have prolonged the project's life span.

Fourthly I'd like to thank the Cosmos user base for many years of patronage, word of mouth advertising and a little financial support over the years.

On that note I'm sorry to announce that Cosmos will not be surviving the WoW 3.0 patch with anything like it's former glory. As you probably noticed, development has slowed to a standstill and developers are hard to get ahold of. In fact, when posting recently on the staff forum in preparation for this announcement only Gryphon, Yarko and Telic responded. Thanks to you three for sticking around.

I, AnduinLothar, or Karl Isenberg as I am known in the real world, have recently graduated from University and have finally succumb to a full time job, programming. And since I spend most of my day getting paid to look at code, naturally I'm not that inspired to come home and look at more code. So I think it's high time I drastically cut back on maintenance and development, or at least let it be known officially.

That being said, I'm still playing WoW and still plan on using a hand full of addons that I find crucial and have worked on that don't have some sort of replacement readily available by other authors. Of course I make no promises, but I expect to keep alive a few addons such as FluidFrames, ChatEdit and ChatBar (possibly others).

I'm still slowly working on Portfolio and integrating things with that, but it's in considerable flux so it's probably not worth letting people try to code against it yet. I also have a working, but unpolished version of UnitFrameTweaks I will probably release once I get Portfolio in a state well enough to release embedded. I may or may not get a version of UnitFrameBuffs working to go with it. Chronos also should still work with minor changes.

And already that sounds like a lot. So don't go thinking I'll have all that ready on patch day. I suggest you look for replacements now that work with the ptr/beta so that you will be ready on patch day when all the other addon hosts get swamped.

My suggestion on a first place to look:
WoWInterface.com - http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/index.php

I have some good friends that host and post addons there. Cairenn and Dolby have been dedicated admins there wrangling the community and constantly improving the site for authors and users alike. There's also a fairly sizable collection of beta/ptr compatible addons there from a variety of sources.

Of course curse and wowace also have huge repositories which I've used over the years.

And don't forget WoWWiki. They may have fallen far from the tree, but they're thriving and growing on their own now.

As for Thottbot, you can still find it on thottbot.com as well as thott's uploader if you want to continue helping to supply their data.

So in conclusion I'll point out that I'm currently maintaining about 3/4 of Cosmos addons and the rest are either maintained by Telic, Yarko, are abandonware or the authors will show up at the last minute and post updates. I suggest they host them on another site, for simplicity and because I cannot guarantee how this site will be maintained, tho Gryphon has done a wonderful job of that up till now...

I'll also point out that most major libs will no longer be supported including Khaos, Sea, Earth, Satellite, Telepathy, Ace2Khaos and MCom. I'm sorry but that's the way it is.

If you'd like to use any of my work for derivative works or fix them up, I'd love if you asked, but you don't really have to as long as you reference who the author was or who you borrowed code from at least in name somewhere int he distribution of the new creation/modification. I can't give you permission to modify or redistribute anyone else's copywritten work, do so at your own risk.

It's been fun. It's definitely not the end of the world (of warcraft).

[dbdatvic]

I stopped by to check on the site because I hadn't looked in on it for a while (and hadn't been actively participating since the questions about MobInfo2)... and find that this got posted (edit)only a few hours(edit) before I got here. I really do hope that maintainers for the libraries and add-ons that use them can be found; Party Quests, in particular, has proven invaluable to me since I started playing, since I literally cannot stand using the game's default quest screen because PQ works so much better. But PQ depends on about eleventy-six of the Cosmos libraries... ChatBar's 'sticky channels' feature is also irreplaceable for me, and several others make some feature or other much easier for me to use. I'll bet there are isolated add-ons out there from other sources, each of which does +something+ I want - but Cosmos has had them all in one convenient place Forever.

I wish you luck and success in your new career, Karl! (pauses to move paladin onto Exodar boat) And I hope the Cosmos community can manage to keep the libraries and add-ons going...

--Dave

[Dixon Butz]

A sad day for the Wow addon community
/cry

Been using Cosmos for over 3 years. It will be sorely missed. I really hate to see this project die.
Thanks to all that contributed and maintained Cosmos! Really great work! Wish you all the best of luck!
Now start writting addons for Warhammer Online ;p

[Yarko]

Thanks to all who have been with Cosmos since the beginning. Thanks for all your hard work, Karl.

As me and my friends and family move into the expansion, I will most likely be adapting and enhancing all the addons we currently use, which include EasyMail and Durability Status, and my own versions of pieces of many of the Cosmos addons such as cooldown counters, party quests, and auto loot mods. I might also develop my own versions of things like unit frame buffs. As I get these to a reasonable level of completeness, they might end up on the various addon sites. I'll be sure to use the name Yarko out there for search purposes for those of you who might be interested in these addons.

I wish I had the bandwidth to take on a redevelopment of Cosmos from the ground up and on-going maintenance, but I just don't.

[Minotaurcd]

First off,

I want to say thanks for all the hard work and great mods that we have all come to love and [hopefully] appreciate here! It's very sad news that this will be winding down.

In order to help us "non-programmers" out (i.e. the ones who can't fix the mods themselves to program new ones to do what they need), I was wondering if folks might be able to take some time to compile a list of recommended alternative(s) for each of mods in the Cosmos family. That will help ease the hardship on folks as they deal with having to update mods for the patch and not having a great resource such as Cosmos to fall back on for that.

Thanks :-)

[xerty]

I guess this day was inevitable.
With the way Blizzard seem to like to make things hard for addon authors, at least it seems to me as a lay person.
Also life does move on. People have to change priorities as their livelihood changes.
I will add my thanks to all the Cosmos authors/maintainers/administration/community for all the hard work they have done.
I also wish Karl all the best in his new career and hope he enjoys it. Or if he doesn't enjoy it, at least makes tons of money
Hopefully, we can all come up with some alternatives or recommendations for the user base to take into WOW 3.0.
Here's looking forward to a new home for all Cosmos users.

[JMHammer]

The addons in the Cosmos package were the first mods I used with World of Warcraft. They were a fabulous introduction to modding the game. As time went by I learned which addons in the Cosmos package did things I wanted and which didn't, and I eventually ran a fairly trim set of Comos mods. To which I added a huge number of non-Cosmos mods <smile>. But Cosmos was always the core of my UI addon collection, and I always liked the way I could load and unload mods easily with a simple reload of the UI using Kaos - which became even more useful when Ace2Kaos allowed me to use Kaos to config my Ace mods.

At this point, after four years of playing the game and the night before the big World of Warcraft 3.02 patch, I still have quite a number of Cosmos mods active which I consider absolutely indispensable: AltInvite, CastTime, ConsisTint, EasyMail, FluidFrames. FriendsFacts, Kaos, MinimapZoom, MobInfo2, Notepad, PartyQuests, ReloadUI, Thottbot, UnitFrameBuffs, WorldMapInfo.

Fortunately, of those, I was able to determine that CastTime, ConsisTint, FluidFrames, MinimapZoom, ReloadUI, Thottbot, and WorldMapInfo all work more-or-less normally and completely without errors on the 3.02 PTR, and so should do so on the 3.02 live patch coming on Tue 14 Oct 2008. There are some options which can't be set for FluidFrames and Thottbot since Kaos does NOT work and those addons don't have slash commands or other ways to set their options - but they work fine otherwise.

I was able to confirm that Kaos, Notepad, PartyQuests, and UnitFrameBuffs either do not work at all, or throw a lot of errors and aren't fully functional under 3.02. It seems to me that NotePad and UnitFrameBuffs would be easy to adjust for 3.02, as they are relatively simple and the errors that are occurring are relatively small in number. PartyQuests and Kaos, however, rely on a bunch of Cosmos libraries which Karl has stated will not be updated, and so are probably dead. I've looked around, and sadly there are no good replacements for any of these Cosmos addons except for Notepad (there are lots of notepad addons around - I'm trying out TinyPad myself).

I was not able/did not have time to test AltInvite, EasyMail, FriendsFact, and MobInfo2, so I have no idea if these work under 3.02. It's possible that those which don't have any of the Cosmos libraries as dependencies might continue to function - I'll edit this message tomorrow after I've had a chance to work with 3.02 on the live realms.

The main point though, which I started to make in my first paragraph, is:
I wish to express my thanks to Karl and the entire Cosmos team. I do hope you'll continue to work on some of these mods (especially EasyMail, FluidFrames, and UnitFrameBuffs) so they will work as stand-alones in coming WoW patches. But either way, you have my sincere appreciation for the work you've done in the past - my gaming experience has been more fun thanks to your work on Cosmos.

[KarlKFI]

I've been updating some of my mods on wowinterface:

http://www.wowinterface.com/list.php?skinnerid=18098

[Pidgeot]

The Cosmos package were the first addons I used, so it's a bit sad to see it go away now - but I suppose it can't be helped. Thanks for all the value Cosmos has added up to this point, it's made WoW a much better game.

In order to be prepared for those addons that DO break, I've been looking for alternatives for all the Cosmos add-ons I still use. I've found (potential) replacements for most of the addons that I use, mostly on Curse, but for some, I haven't found any options that look like they're still being maintained (ActionBarColors, AltInvite, ArcaneBar, BetterItemCount, Clock, ConsisTint, EquipCompare, PartyCastingBars, PartyQuests, TellTrack, UnitFrameBuffs, UnitFrameTweaks). I'm assuming MobInfo2 and TasteTheNaimbow will still be maintained by someone, at least on other sites (but I can't say I know).

I'm assuming at least a few of these will continue to work, and a couple might even be updated still, but if anyone has ideas for replacements, I'd love to hear them. I'm very sad to lose Clock, due to the statistics, but I could probably change the code to at least give me some other way of seeing those, if I can't extract EarthTooltip and embed that into the addon.

On a related note - Karl, will you be uploading/updating those mods on Curse as well? It's no problem if you won't, but seeing as how most of my other addons are on Curse, it would be more convenient.

[Broken Hope]

I really do hope that Unit Frame Buffs gets a much needed update, or someone decides to take the project on. I don't think there is any alternative to it other than a full blown unit frame replacement which I'd rather not have to use.