CoolLine 

I read a few posts back that said that the latest update fixed a problem with talented abilities/skills not showing up until you reload your UI. However, I am still having this problem whenever I swap specs on any of my toons. Talented abilities/skills don't show up until I reload my UI. Is there a way to fix it with any slash commands?

Well, I have a lot of addons that look like it's conflicting with it. I'm trying to narrow it down to which two addons conflict but there's a lot and I'm going to start with the one's I suspect (Talented, Ghost Pulse, etc). I'll try that this week when I get a chance.

The good news is, I disabled all addons except CoolLine and it works fine when swapping around specs so it seems like it's just a conflict. Thanks again for the script command, that actually works quite well for now. I'll post more once I get more information.

I'm loving this addon as an alternative to CooldownButtons (which I've been using prior to this). One thing I've noticed is that its often very difficult to see what spells I have on cooldown when they're in the same general area (like when I pop two 1 min cooldown spells at roughly the same time). The spells also seem to flip back and forth between what is being shown.

I wonder if there's been any discussion about how it might be made clearer about what spells are on cooldown when they are close together.

Great addon!

Yeah, the best I could come up with was text that is shown above, below, or next to the bar showing what spells are in each group. This way you avoid "stacks", but you only need one font string for each conflicting group.

I'll keep playing with it as-is and see if I can get used to it.

My partial solution to this problem involves a couple modifications. First I changed the time scale to stop at 5m. Cool downs above 5m just hover at the end of the line blinking, which is enough information to tell me that they're on CD, and that I have a lot of time before I need to worry about them. I also changed the intervals to 0,1,3,9,30,90,5m. By "stretching" the time just before an ability comes of of cool down, it is much easier to see which one is ahead and plan for it.

In addition to these changes, I have changed it to use a Logarithmic function to determine the icon's position when it is more than 1s from coming off of CD (The 1s to 0 interval uses the original code). This provides a much smoother acceleration as the spell travels along the bar. I use a linear function to adjust the throttling based on the time left, so spells at 5m update every 5s and spells at 1s update 60 times a seconds. Spells less than 1s update at 60/s.

@Totalpackage, if you want to see my modifications, send me a pm and I'll email it to you.

Interesting, I'd love to see how this works for two spells that are a GCD or so away from each other.. but sounds nice!

Just throwing this one out there (I totally respect where you're coming from, there are way too many authors who have absolutely no restraint), but what about pre-computing the log tables beforehand and then using them. Would that make that model feasible? I'm not even sure if that's something that could work or be done.

I appreciate your concern, but in my opinion, I think you're over emphasizing the computational cost. In a couple of seconds my throttling could be tweaked to a more moderate level. Also, anyone who is actually running at 60fps in a raid has plenty of cpu power to compute a single log per moving CD per frame. Note, I'm doing no Log computations for CD's at 5m and higher, and any 1s and under.

Anecdotally, I have been running 25man raids for a couple of weeks on a moderate computer with a full set of addons with no perceivable degradation.

On a side note, I have little desire to use ForteXorcist as your program is exactly what I need after a few adjustments.

edit: grammar/spelling

Update:

I ran some tests and cannot measure a difference in cpu usage between a linear function version, and a log function version. I used Performance_Fu to do cpu profiling and watched the addon specific cpu usage as I increased the number of CD's. On my computer, with 9 CD's between 1s and 5m the max cpu usage for either version was the same at 0.35%. With a single CD, they both showed about 0.02% usage.

My first guess as to why this is would be is that the work of scanning for new CD's and then tracking current ones is so much greater than computing their positions that the extra cpu power needed to compute a log function is not significant.

I have not looked closely at Performance_Fu to see how it works and what it is actually measuring, but it seems to show both versions scaling as the number of CD's increases. This indicates to me that it is measuring something about the amount of CPU time that they are using. Given this, the relative difference it shows should be an indication of the performance even if the absolute value it generates is biased.

In conclusion, I appreciate your work producing this great addon and the care you have put into making it light and efficient. My interest here is only to try to help make it even better. Sincerely, ~Daphoosa

Could this discussion be concluded perhaps by creating a "fork" of Cooline in the form of a "patch" or "optional files" maintained by Daphoosa that contains the version with logarithmic scale and whatnot? This way both we, the users and you, the authors would benefit: those who want logarithmic scale could get it, and totalpackage would not need to answer requests for log scale...

Just an idea.

The value I see in a cool down timeline is not as much the ability to precisely tell the absolute time left on a CD, as it is to give an intuitive feeling for the relative chronological order of CDs at a quick glance. Given this, the value I see in programming efficiency is not that the CD's position perfectly reflects its time left, but that it runs without using excessive resources on a marginal machine. We are also talking about a server/client game with a very real inherent latency. To me as an user, the aesthetic smoothness of an icon gliding down a logarithmic curve is worth a couple of milliseconds of absolute accuracy.

Another change I am playing with is during the final segment having the icon grow to " iconsize * 1.5 " and then snap to 0 on the timeline and " iconsize * 2 " once it hits 60ms time left. This is because I felt that it was a bit difficult to see the exact moment that the ability came off of CD when it very smoothly increased in size and then very smoothly faded out. A nice side effect of this change is that now the spells fade out completely instead of clipping the last faded frame. This is due to my adjusting the program execution order to evaluate the fade equation before setting the icon fade value (since now an average player will have 2-3 frames with the icon at full before it starts to fade.)


If I understand you right, you want the numbers to be spaced evenly. With the current log function I use, my markings are very close to exactly spaced like yours (the largest deviation from perfect is " section * 2.93 " at the 4th mark). My current bar is about 180 pixels long and I can't really tell that they aren't perfectly spaced. My last tick should probably read "4m" but I have mixed feelings about doing this.