VanillaMinimapTracking

Adds custom blip icons to the minimap in WoW 1.12.1 (Turtle WoW / VanillaFixes). Lets you see your target, focus, vendors, auctioneers, mailboxes, and other NPC types as recognizable icons on the minimap, hover them for tooltips (including unit subtitles like <Innkeeper>), and toggle each category from a small button next to the minimap.

What's in this repo

• src/ — a C++ DLL that injects into WoW.exe via the VanillaFixes loader. It hooks WoW's per-frame visible-object enumeration and the minimap render pipeline to draw extra blips and inject hover-tooltip text. It owns the per-character config (lazy-loaded from WTF\Account\<account>\<realm>\ <character>\VanillaMinimapTracking.txt on first API call after login, flushed back on UI shutdown — same convention as AddOns.txt) and exposes a small Lua API + a custom MINIMAP_UPDATE_TRACKING event.
• MinimapBlips/ — a companion WoW addon that ships the blip artwork (in MinimapBlips/icons/), registers it with the DLL on load, draws the toggle button next to the minimap, and renders the category menu. It's a thin UI on top of the DLL's Lua API — no SavedVariables, no path knowledge, no tracking state of its own. Without the DLL loaded, the addon shows a chat warning and does nothing.

Categories

The current category menu (managed in MinimapBlips/MinimapBlipsMenu.lua):

• Target — your current target.
• Focus — a pseudo-focus unit (vanilla 1.12.1 has no native focus). Set with C_Minimap.SetFocus([unit]) (defaults to "target"), C_Minimap.SetFocusByName(name), or C_Minimap.SetFocusByGUID(guid).
• Auctioneer, Banker, Flight Master, Innkeeper, Repair, Trainer, Stable Master, Battlemaster, Vendor — NPCs matched by their m_npcFlags field.
• Mailbox — game objects of type MAILBOX.

Self-targeting and self-focus are filtered out — your own character won't get a target/focus blip placed on you.

Build

Install Visual Studio Build Tools 2019+ and check "Desktop development with C++" in the installer. That workload bundles CMake (via the "C++ CMake tools for Windows" component), so no separate CMake install is needed.

Run the build commands from a Developer PowerShell for VS (Start menu → "Developer PowerShell"), so cmake and the MSVC toolchain are on PATH.

git submodule update --init --recursive
cmake -B build -A Win32
cmake --build build --config Release

-A Win32 is mandatory — WoW 1.12.1 is a 32-bit process. Output is build\Release\VanillaMinimapTracking.dll.

Install

1. DLL: drop build\Release\VanillaMinimapTracking.dll into the folder VanillaFixes loads DLLs from (typically next to the WoW.exe loaded by VanillaFixes).
2. Addon: copy the entire MinimapBlips/ folder to <WoW>\Interface\AddOns\MinimapBlips\.

Both the DLL and the addon need to be installed — the addon detects the DLL via the C_Minimap namespace and refuses to load if the DLL is missing.

Lua API

Functions live on the C_Minimap namespace table (Blizzard's C_* style). Pass type names from the Enum.MinimapBlip table — keys are PascalCase (Target, FlightMaster, StableMaster, Battlemaster, Mailbox, …) and values are the lowercase strings the engine actually uses. Hard-coded strings work too if you'd rather skip the enum.

Function	Returns	Notes
C_Minimap.RegisterIcons({{type, icon, scale}, ...})	—	Bulk-register icons in one call.
C_Minimap.RegisterIcon(type, icon, scale)	—	Single-icon variant.
C_Minimap.Track(type, 0|1)	—	Set a category's tracked state. Saved on UI shutdown (logout / /reload).
C_Minimap.Toggle(type)	—	Flip a category's tracked state — caller doesn't need to know current value.
C_Minimap.ClearAllTracking()	—	Disables every currently-tracked category. Fires one MINIMAP_UPDATE_TRACKING.
C_Minimap.IsTracked(type)	1 or nil	if C_Minimap.IsTracked(t) then ... end.
C_Minimap.GetTracked()	{type=1, ...} set	All currently-tracked types as a set keyed by lowercase name.
C_Minimap.ListVisibleGUIDs([type])	array of strings	GUIDs (hex "0x%016X") for every blip currently on the minimap, optionally filtered by type.
C_Minimap.SetFocus([unit])	—	Pins unit (a unit ID like "target"/"party1") as focus. Defaults to "target". Errors if not found.
C_Minimap.SetFocusByName(name)	—	Captures a unit by name (silent fail if not found).
C_Minimap.SetFocusByGUID(guid)	—	Pins a unit by GUID hex string (e.g. "0x016000000123ABCD"). Errors on invalid input.
C_Minimap.ClearFocus()	—	Drops the focus.

To detect whether the DLL is loaded, just check the namespace: if C_Minimap then ... end.

A real WoW event fires whenever tracking state changes — register it with frame:RegisterEvent("MINIMAP_UPDATE_TRACKING") and dispatch from the addon's OnEvent like any built-in event. arg1 is the type that changed (e.g. "vendor"), or "" from ClearAllTracking meaning "everything changed". Listeners still query the on/off state with C_Minimap.IsTracked(type) / C_Minimap.GetTracked() — arg1 exists for fast-path dispatch, not as the source of truth.

Notes for the curious

The DLL hooks a handful of well-known WoW 1.12.1 functions to render extra blips (see src/Blips.cpp) and reads creature subnames directly out of the in-memory creature cache (unit + 0xB30 → cache + 0x10). Per-character path resolution uses three engine session globals (0x00BE1C0C, 0x00C28130+0x20, 0x00C27D88) — the same trio WoW itself reads to write AddOns.txt and other per-character WTF files (see ClassicAPI/docs/SessionGlobals.md). The custom MINIMAP_UPDATE_TRACKING event is dispatched via the engine's own event table by claiming an unused slot — addons listen for it exactly the same way they would for a built-in event.