Overview — ROARSounds

ROARSounds — let Azeroth roar again

GitHub repository: babunidev/ROARSounds
In-game addon folder / title: ROAR
Declared interface: 30300 (WoW 3.3-era, not the Vanilla 1.12 interface number)
Source of truth: ROAR/ROAR.lua and ROAR/ROAR.toc
Verification: Git/source inspection on 2026-10-26. In-game playback and client compatibility were not tested in this documentation pass.

ROARSounds restores a missing bit of character presence to the /roar emote by calling existing World of Warcraft client sound files. When the addon receives a recognized text-emote event, it can play the appropriate built-in roar for the player's own character or another identifiable character. The sound depends on the resolved character's race and sex.

There are no bundled WAV replacements. The addon maps 16 race/sex combinations to existing paths under Sound\\Character\\PlayerRoars\\; the game client must actually contain those files.

What the addon can identify

The code recognizes the local player and attempts to resolve the text-emote sender using these unit contexts, in order:

Your own character.
Your current target.
Mouseover.
Focus.
Up to 40 raid unit references if in a raid, otherwise up to four party unit references if in a party.

If an emote sender cannot be resolved to one of those units, or there is no sound mapping, the source does not play a roar for them. Seeing a message in nearby emote chat does not by itself provide the race/sex information needed to choose a file. This is not a nearby-player scanning system and does not estimate distance.

The event is CHAT_MSG_TEXT_EMOTE, not a direct hook into the emote command. The recognizer searches English text for " roars" or " roar" (case-insensitive). That matching rule is broad, not language-independent, and should be tested for false positives and localized clients.

Installation

The repository contains a ready-made folder ROAR/ and a separate ROAR.zip download artifact.

To install from the current repository files, copy the ROAR folder so that these two files appear together:

World of Warcraft/
└── Interface/
    └── AddOns/
        └── ROAR/
            ├── ROAR.toc
            └── ROAR.lua

Restart or reload the game, enable the addon where supported, and test the built-in /roar emote.

Compatibility caution: The TOC declares ## Interface: 30300 rather than 11200. On a different era/build, the client may flag it as outdated or fail to support its event/API behavior. Do not change the interface number without testing the Lua code and sound paths on that client. The ROAR.zip archive exists in Git, but its contents were not independently compared with the working source during this review; inspect it before distributing it as the authoritative build.

Supported sound mapping

The source maps both male and female variants of these eight race tokens: Dwarf, Gnome, Human, NightElf, Orc, Tauren, Troll, and Undead. Scourge returned by UnitRace is normalized to Undead.

There are no mappings for Blood Elf, Draenei or other races beyond those eight. For a race not in the table, the addon silently has no matching built-in path. The map is source-declared; successful playback of every asset has not been verified.

Behavior and limitations

Plays through PlaySoundFile(path) using game-supplied sound files.
Initializes the local player's name/race/sex on PLAYER_LOGIN; refreshes the local mapping on a player UNIT_MODEL_CHANGED event.
Suppresses candidate roar events from the same normalized sender name within 0.3 seconds of one another.
The timestamp is recorded before checking whether a nonlocal sender can be identified. An unresolved event may therefore consume that sender's brief cooldown without making a sound.
The code strips realm suffixes from sender names; this may confuse different people sharing the same name across realms.
Current source has no slash commands, configuration panel, persistent saved variables, chat messages sent by the addon, or addon-to-addon communication.
It does not confirm physical distance beyond whether emote chat is delivered and whether a matching unit reference is available.

The sound remains a game-client asset. The addon creator authored this detection and playback system, not the underlying game audio.

Project history

This repository began April 19, 2026, with a local-player-only emote sound restoration. It explored addon messaging for other players, then changed direction to chat-event and unit-identity resolution on April 22. A 0.3-second deduplication gate followed, along with packaging in the ROAR/ folder and a ZIP upload.

That brief, traceable sequence is documented in the development journal. The historic source changes are verified in commits; no missing personal discussions or feature approvals have been invented.

This is a separate repository from roar, roarr, ROARRunlimited, and RoarGuild. Those projects use similar names but different implementations.

License and development documentation

The existing MIT license credits Babuni.dev (2026). The license covers repository software; it does not grant redistribution rights to Blizzard's game audio assets.

Document information

Creative author: Babuni.dev

ROARSounds: Overview