Buff-window filter
 

I posted this suggestion on the official EQ2 forums, without any official reaction, sadly. Someone did recommend that I should inquire about the possibility of circumventing "the man" via a custom UI. Quite honestly, I'm expecting that the answer is no, but if someone knows the extent of modding possibilities, please let me know what you think.

the original post is here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/p...opic_id=452143

contents copy-pasta'd below.
========================================================


I'd like to submit a feature request for you consideration.

When in raid my buff window is often 40+ icons long. What's worse, at any one time anywhere between 5 and 10 of them are near-expiration and blinking, making it even harder to make out what they are. Many of them are similar enough or unintuitive enough to distinguish at a glance. Bottom line is that it's close to impossible to say in the heat of battle whether or not I have a particular buff on me.

And it's a shame. Especially with recent introduction of various proc-based self-buffs. My character's effectiveness, and my enjoyment of the game, would go up significantly if I had the tools at my disposal to properly react when such buffs are on me. It would provide that aspect of response-rewarding behavior that dpsing in raids today is severly lacking. Frankly it's often down-right dull unless you're just learning the encounter. Something that the chain-triggering system didn't quite succeed at.

There are probably only 4-5 such buffs that I want to actively monitor in a separate window where it would be easy to see them at a glance. It would be awesome if there existed a filtered buff bar that is basically a mirror of a normal buff bar, but would only show such spells that I define as "interesting".

I believe in the current state of the game the lack of this feature is quite limiting.

thanx in advance for consideration.

If you're talking about Maintained Buffs(Alt-M), then yes... you could do filtering on it. If you mean the Effects or Detrimental Effects windows(Alt-E), then no. Not enough information is sent to the UI API to filter by name.

Depending on your computer, it could introduce a fair amount of FPS impact as well. I have released a specific mod that checks maintained buffs for a specific list of things on demand and some users say that when the script is active their framerates become very poor. If such a script was active constantly, I think it would be worse... even if it were better optimized. Somewhere on these forums someone released a WIP of a window that sounds to do what you're asking... though I have never tried it.

I think another point that should be made clear - filtering will not show effects that are past the limit.

sounds like you mostly answered my question, Aditu, but something you followed up with doesn't make much sense to me. why would this be an FPS hog?

let's make sure we're on same page via example: i want to be able to look at this modified buff-bar and tell whether "Peace of Mind" (a 20sec group by cast by an Illusionist in my group) or "Darkened Celerity" (a 15sec proc from my gauntlets) are on me.

what i had in mind is that this new window will be an exact copy of the existing Alt-E window, with one small change. so i guess let's start easy: is it possible to have another copy of Alt-E windows on screen?

if yes, then the change would be: upon receiving a notification to register a new buff-icon (aka a new buff is cast on me) it would run down a list of configured spell names and only do what Alt-E window normally does if the incoming buff is on the list. this kind of behavior should have 0 performance penalty.

unless of course there is no such thing as API hooks for this kind of stuff and the script that you're referring to just scanned the Alt-M window on a timer in an infinite loop?

Aditu already answered your question, it can't be done.

We don't get the same sort of information from the Alt-E window as we do the Alt-M window(why your idea is impossible). Nor do we get a detailed enough API where the game tells us a new buff is appearing. All we get told is an icon goes from hidden to visible. It is then our job to check all the names of every icon now visible to see if they match our list. Add to that we don't get anything fun like arrays so we must check the list in a linear code fashion. No for loops or any thing fun like that.

Looking at one of my own mods that checks for maintained buffs on demand(not a timer)... checking for the existence of one buff in 30 slots takes 130 lines of code. If I were to unravel the so called code loops from the so called code functions, checking for 10 buffs would end up being 1300 lines of code for every check. A bit more because you can't prematurely "return" in a UI script... it goes through all of it... but in my case I don't call the external function. Anyhow... 1500(up to 3900?) lines in itself isn't overwhelming, but UI script isn't pre-compiled as far as I know and EQ2 doesn't run it very fast either. If you were to spam-click the toggle button on my UI, you would certainly notice a considerable frame rate hit. If you were to attach that button to the event of any of the 30(or 45) icons appearing and disappearing you would be in for a lot of trouble. Of course, maybe I'm a crappy UI programmer and it could be done without the noticable framerate hit. :p

well ****. no wonder there isn't much in terms of addons for EQ2. i appreciate the detailed explanation, Aditu, despite my obvious lack of EQ2 api knowledge - my curiosity can go back to slumber.

Well filtering is possible because I did it in my mod. There was a forum discussion about my mod regarding what you seem to be asking for. FPS does seem to drop a somewhat, but I'm going to continue to make improvements on this mod to increase performance.

I just released my mod just now. It's been done for a while, but I never got around to releasing it up until today. Enjoy!!!


If this is not what you were looking for than please inform me what it is you are.

Right, filtering is possible, but when you pass the limit of numbers of spells showing in the maintained window, your spell won't show up, or it won't consistently display.


My mod-description color scheme isn't too shabby, eh Dragowulf :D hehe

Well they would have to increase the max amount of Maintained which is currently 30.

Hi drago, good to see you finally released your maintained window mod! The OP is looking for filtering on the effects windows however. ;)