NuclearTonic

Thanks for the report. I have that corrected locally, and will be posting v2.4 very soon!

magill

Just found "redo"... kept downloading the wrong file...
it seems to be a pretty interesting extension of the original buff-bars!

At any rate. I have a lvl 51 RK and I'm trying to figure out where, and what the default quickslot bars represent.

For instance... on first load, with the main menu screen hidden, I have 3 icons showing...

My rune stone (in a 1 unit display with the main menu up)...
It is apparently called "Restoration," but "Bar Visibility" shows as "triggered," not "always." ... I'm thinking there should be a "default value" -- "not used" or "not appropriate" or some such phrase.
It is in main toolbar slot 8. (But rune of restoration IS checked.)

As I'm writing this, I just discovered a bug... expand the pulldown so that the box "always and triggered is showing. Scroll the menu window... and viola, that box runs off on its own up and beyond the bounds of the main menu box! (The box does not "shrink" until you select one of the two options.) Buff's active works the same way.

The other two are slot 10 in the main tool bar which appears as Attune 10-19
and slot 6 in bar 5 (I keep all 6 Turbine bars on screen.) which appears a Attune 1-10. Again, both are visible all the time, despite being labeled "triggered."

These 3 items appear to only be 1 unit in size, while other bars are different lengths.

Looking at "Attune1," there are 3 items present -- all of which require max attunement, not minimum... so I'm at a loss to figure out what is implied here, as the values make no sense. Just hanging out in the Esteldin craft hall and I notice... sitting in steady state... which is attunement 10, so I guess that is the answer?

So, I guess what is needed Is to examine each skill and find out what the required attunement happens to be.
And then, does the scale go from 10 to 20 incrementing positively, and from 10 to 1 incrementing negatively?
ARGH... it really does. What on earth is Turbine Thinking.... For example, Smoldering Wath REQUIRES an attunement of 9 but if you mouse over the attunement bar it shows 1!!! What a convoluted algorithm.... you have my sympathy.

Found another bug... "Opasity" should be spelled "Opacity."

magill

Rk ... expanded Attun 10-19 to two columns.

Tried to populate the new column... with the Main Menu showing
dragged the existing item into the new position - ok.
Tried to populate the "old" position by dragging from the existing
main quickslot bar... nothing.
Tried to populate by opening Character/skills and dragging a "fresh" copy ... nothing

Had to close the Main Menu and then populate from either Character or main quickslot bar.

NuclearTonic

While I appreciate the sentiment, TB was released at the same time as the original buff-bars. We both worked on our plugins in the Beta. The two have been developed seperately. I did borrow some menu graphics and menu items I didn't have. (As I really stink with designing graphics)

The easiest way to figure this stuff out is just to use the class using your existing skills and watch what happens. Especially for a RK. TB is designed around displaying quickslots you need when you need them. So, based on your current attonement which bars can be used right now, they should be displayed. As you attone one way, you'll be able to see the skills that you can use.

If a bar is "Triggered" and it's visible that means the conditions that made the bar a trigger bar is met.

I have corrected the menu floating issues locally and will be posting those up shortly.

For an RK the way things are represented is that 10 is balanced attonement. Healing is 11-20 and DPS is 0-9. I have to expose this to the user to be ]beneficial to the user. The bars that you are seeing labeled 10-19, 1-10 and 10 are all visible at balance (10) if you drop below 10, the 10-19 and the 10 should dissapear. If you go above 10 the 1-10 and the 10 should disappear.

As to Attune1, becuase Balanced is 10, Attune1 means fully DPS.

Well, the skill is trying to say you need 1 in the DPS direction from balance. While the TB value is strictly the value. Turbine tried to hide how they handle things internally from the user of standard interface. The problem is once you need to understand how it functions its a little confusing.

magill

OOPs... sorry got the naming confused... congrats on a tremendous interface.

I was referring to the drop-down visibility in the main-menu. It is somewhat misleading to find the description implying something which was not in effect.

yeah... this was confusing me until I realized that in "Turbine speak" 9 =1 !!!

magill

Tonight, attempting to put my new-found "understanding" into practice I had two interesting events occur.

On the "Class" page, I did something which caused a pop-up to appear in the Upper Left of my screen more-or less on top of the goblet.
It had a scroll bar, but I couldn't move it (the scroll bar). I could not select anything in the window.

Simultaneously, or subsequently, I could not tell you which, the goblet icon itself vanished.

I'm using Plugin Manager, so I tried to delete and re-apply Tonic Bars, but could not get the goblet back.
No error messages appeared in the chat window.

Don't know if these two things are related or not... or exactly what else I was doing at the time.

Tried logging out the toon and back in... still no goblet.

Next to exit game and come back.

Nope... still cannot get back to the main menu (no goblet).
I note that there is no file in "PluginData" -- however the 3 0-10 items and Rune stone appear on the screen.

Found the data file under "AllCharacers" ... don't see anything obvious...
Ok, moving that file and relaunching created a new file with the goblet back.
Found what was apparently the parameter: ["visible"] = false,

Interestingly, the old parameter file showed ["version"] = "v2.1.1", while the new one showed ["version"] = "v2.4_Beta2",

Guess this brings up the question. I see how to turn off the goblet under general settings -- display launcher, but I don't see a way to change it back if you can't launch the main menu from the goblet.

magill

Open "quick bars" and select the menu (edit settings)... it generates a pop-up list of bars.

Click on "easy bars" and the pop-up goes to the UL screen.

The Class Based bars list is always gray'ed out except for the "remove" option.
Ok, I believe I understand now why that is.

However, the listed bars do not match the naming in the quick slot settings menu.

NuclearTonic

Some people didn't like the goblet way of getting to the menu. By default the goblet will be displayed in the upper left of the screen. You can click and drag that anywhere on the screen. If you don't like it, you can disable it in the general section of the main menu. At ANY time you can get to the main menus using /tb or /tonicbars. You can re-enable the Launcher from there.

All settings are stored in "/the lord of the rings online/plugindata/<Server>/AllCharacters/tonicbarssettings.plugindata"

I'm pretty sure that they should match... I'll check, but I'm pretty sure it uses that name to remove the bar when you click REMOVE.

The point of easy Bars is to create an easy way to remove Pre-Configured bars if people don't want them. It will be used coming soon as a way to easily setup other bars... like Health bars, Wound/poison/fear/desease pot bars, etc Coming to a Plugin near you in v2.5

magill

I've looked over the documentation I can find and can't find any reference to this... so I signed up for curses and submitted at ticket to add the information to the documentation. Don't know if you prefer things there or here.

I had not noticed the "AllCharacters" entry before. Once I noticed it, it was fairly obvious...

Nope... the visible names are not even close... for one thing, all the entries in the "Class Based Bars" (at least for the Rune Keeper) are truncated, tags on the buttons could easily be the same as they do "work," for another, most all of the items are "attonement" instead of "attunement."

Restoration Sk...
DPS Attonemen...
Healing Atton...
3 DPS Attonem...
6 DPS Attonem
Full DPS Atton...
3 Heal Attone...
6 Heal Attone...
FUll Heal Attone...

On Quick bars:
Attun 13
Attun 16
Attun 4
Attun 7
Attun 1-7
Restoration
Attun 1
Attun 19


Very good! ... especially since I seem to have wiped my pot bars in playing around here... didn't realize it until the middle of a fight

magill

Trying to create an inventory bar...

It generates a small "ghost" bar... changing columns expands it, however changing rows does nothing.
The "ghost bar" created is not "big enough" to take an icon... and in fact, won't.

on closing the main menu after playing back and forth between screens I got
"...TonciBars\Bars\BaseBar.lua:61 attempt to call method 'RefreshKeys' (a nill value)"

jeredwolffe

I don't want to flame as I know that can be cause for banning. But I gotta say, Magill Where are you getting all these problems? The bars are not that hard to figure out. The names of the class bars for RK (which I use) are easily recognized and work fine. If you don't like em, remove those bars and create your own, name em how you will. This last one with the ghost bar, I can understand asking about that, but quit the nit-picking or take it somewhere private pls. I'm pretty sure you can PM on this site. I freely admit that I have used this board for Q&A as well, and would have been better to use the ticket system. Luckily Nuclear has been most accommodating, friendly and helpful.

I'm just saying, play with the plugin more before nit-picking every little thing.

If Nuclear or anyone else feels I've taken this too far, pls feel free to remove this reply but I felt it had to be said.

magill

I've been in this business for well over 30 years, most all of it doing QA work 90% of the time.
(I"m a retired Unix Systems Administrator from a major university.)

The product created has been outstanding. I have used it since the beginning and have come to depend on it in-game.

I am also well aware of the fact that NuclearTonic is working virtually alone.

This release represents a significant enhancement to the previous system.
It is clear, both from the "read me" and the display, that major changes have been involved.

Especially when working alone, a programmer has only one set of eyes, and one set of expectations as to how a product will be "viewed" and "used." It is impossible, no matter how hard they try, even for folks in QA, to view things as a "new user" once they have seen and used a product. "Expectations," "Prejudice" and "Memory" are facts of the human condition.

The simple fact is... what you call "nit picking" are the things which most individuals see and either choose to ignore, or like many people, use as the gauge of a product's "reliability." In the automotive business, it is what is called "Fit and Finish" -- it is what determines a "first impression," and therefore ultimately influences the purchase decision.

What are "nits" to an individual experienced with a product, can be seriously confusing to someone new to that same product -- different names for the same thing in different places are problems ... misspellings are simply annoying.

My comments are offered in hopes of making a good product better. ... especially where it is clear that the product is undergoing continued development and enhancement by the author. To date, I have only used TB with my Rune Keeper, but expect to be switching back to my hunters and minstrels to experiment using TB with them.

Personally, I have begun to view this new and enhanced version of TonicBars as a complete replacement for the Turbine provided system. As such, I would like to be able to recommend it to friends, both in my kinship, OTG/OTC, and on the forums in general. However, I know that 99% of them are not even vaguely "computer literate." They can follow explicit instructions, but have no idea what a "lua" is or how to find out (nor do they care) they just expect things to "work the way they expect them to work!"

As for the Curseforge system... I have just begun to figure out how to use it. It is similar to, but different enough, from other systems of the same sort (like sourceforge) which I use, as to be annoying and frustrating.

magill

Bullroarer went live with Update 2 this afernoon (Wed 9 Feb).

No obvious problems with the current (beta2-redo) version of TonicBars.
(Only about 30 minutes in-game testing.)

Lua chages from the release notes:

"Lua
Context menus should now support Unicode characters.
Fix for Quickslots becoming invisible after setting the shortcut. The behavior of IsVisible on Control changed slightly as well. It used to return true if the cotnrol was visible and all of the parent elements were visible. Now IsVisible returns true if the control is flagged to be visible. A new API IsDisplayed was added that returns the old value.
Enabled error reporting for syntax errors. Huzzah!
Fix so that activating a window as a response to the Activated event for that window will not cause infinite recursion.
Fix for ListBox SetSelectedIndex not translating from a one based system to zero based. Plugins will need to revert any offset correction they were doing themselves and use the values that GetSelectedIndex would return.
Last edited by Sapience; Today at 02:01 PM."

(Today = Wed 9 February)

NuclearTonic

magill and jeredwolffe

Let me start off by saying that I appreciate both of your points of view. In the last few weeks I haven't had the approperate amount of time to devote to this. I'm hoping to rectify this moving forward.

I have been meaning to put together a full up help document for some time. My problem is that as this grows, I'm finding I'm being stretched on almost every front. Adding simple things like inventory bars seems easy to you, but it's been probably 40-60 hours of work for me. As I have a wife, 3 kids (under 3), a full time job, and I still find time to work on this baffles even me! :P It just shows I really enjoy doing it.

Magill nailed it in his explantion. (And thank you for spending the time, because it helped me understand your previous posts.) I have been doing this realitively alone. Lots of things need to be fully tested before each release. That requires a TON of my time. That's why I've been posting Beta recently. I'm trying to get the feedback from the community because I have limited bandwidth. I have re-arranged code to help me make a lot of things easier. But even something like changing a menu string takes time. Because I have to do this in multiple files (for English, French and German) this is one of my next improvements. Right now, if I forget to add an item to one of their files, the plugin will not load for them. Not good.

I feel for both of you. I've learned this week (unrelated to this plugin) that perspective is such a Massively important thing. Knowing that magall was QA and re-reading a lot of his posts makes this a LOT clearer for me. As it's often hard for me to know how to read a Stream-of-conscience post without the context. Is this a new user that just doesn't understand a lot of technical? Are they annoyed by the problems? Just trying to help? It's sometimes hard to tell.

To this end I actually understand both of your points. Honestly, I need all the help I can get, from everyone (Inclusing posts like JeredWolffe!! Someone has a problem on the forums, please feel free to help out!). So, one solution I'm kicking around is making a forum in CurseForge that will allow this type of fluid discussion. Because Honestly I DO need it. But I also understand that a lot of people come here for status on the state of the plugin. Stability / Updates / Problems.

Turns out I already have a forum and just need to point people there: http://lotro.curseforge.com/addons/tonicbars/forum/14630-overall-discussion-of-the-plugin/

jeredwolffe

I tried to post back last night and lost connection so I'll say what I was going then.

Magill, your post explaining about your work history was well thought out and like Nuclear said it explained a lot. Now I understand why you get into such detail. However, that being said. if you look at your earlier posts and this latest (well second to latest), you will see that the tone is very different. In your earlier posts you come across as fairly rude and condescending. I'm not saying that's how you meant it, but that's how it reads.

Good Hunting