Project:

1. Make a button.

I can do that!

2. Make the button very customisable.

I think I can do that.

3. Make the button do animated thingies.

I'm pretty sure I can do that.

4. Find out if texture names can be equated to buff names in any way.

Errrr... I hope I can do that.

5. Pull it all together in one, professional module--

That's possible.

6. --which doesn't cause lag.

Aah. Right, that'll be interesting.

Away I go!

The idea I basically got from asian games, what it is is that the button would be invisible normally but it could be made visible to drag. You'd set it at a point and then turn off the anchor and it would hide itself again.

When you need to buff someone, it would adopt the relevant buff texture, grow huge, then fade out. When they have their buff, it'd just show and then get smaller before fading out. That or vice versa, I'd include an option to inverse it, I was thinking something like that. Basically you'd see a huge buff texture zooming out at your (or zooming away from you) before disappearing in a fade.

I'm wondering whether you'd prefer that or VitalWatch's system, I don't mind personally and I could have a go at coding either, which would prove more beneficial, do you think?

Holy crap, seriously?! I mean, uh... yeah, I was hoping it would. Though really, beyond some simulations I had no way to test it, this news pleases me beyond words. It means that soon I'll be able to get back to TOD, when all's been added to this that needs to be.

Okay, that means I'll need to do the code cleanup and updeate the manual, I'll be working on that a bit later.

I'm always happy to make the lives of Priests easier, they make things so much more pleasant and bearable for other folks in game, especially us Mages, what with their Priestly buffs and unholy amounts of healing. Yes, a drive-by Priest rescue is always welcome but I'm getting off track here.

Anyway, here's my thoughts on what you've said...

First of all, I'll look into VitalWatch. Would it be okay with you if I hijacked it or don't you actually use it? The reason I ask this is that it might create a framerate hit and I wouldn't want to include something that does that within Deranged, even if it doesn't it'd still be duplicated sets of code. It's much more fun to hijack things and share it all around. That is, if VitalWatch allows for hijacking...

Anyway, let me know on that count, whether you'd mind that or not.

Another thing that I'd been thinking about is basically a scalable button that you can move around, on gaining a buff it would show the buff texture, grow up to 200 per cent its size and then fade out. I'm actually pretty sure I can do this without creating a noticable framerate hit, thanks mostly to the new framerate functions and perhaps uiQuery. When the buff is lost I'm thinking it could show the buff and then shrink to 50 per cent of its size before fading out.

The reason I considered this is that I have Ranger stiting around (much love for the Ranger) and it'd make a fun little companion. It's just an idea anyway and your feedback would be appreciated, which approach would you find to be superiour?

I ask these things because when I work on projects, I often work with people. I accept that people know as much about things as I do and would likely have experience with mods and methods that I don't, therefore it's always a good idea to pay attention to their experience and learn from it. That's why I try to be as collaborative as I can.

What I was getting at though is that MSBT has an asymetry to it, it's an odd number. There's are left and right animations that float downwards and one center animation that floats upwards (but no center animation that floats downwards?).

I'd like to have sets of animations that can represent opposites, so the user could select the floating up animation for gaining a buff and the floating down animation for losing one or vice versa. That's why I opted for the left/right fields in MSBT, as to avoid that asymetry.

What I was wondering is whether MSBT has its own center-floating down animation anywhere, that way I could make it symetrical. If it doesn't then I'll just throw the option in anyway. I'm just being pedantic I am by wanting to offer that, I really shouldn't be so picky.

Regardless, I'll pick through the code and give it some thought, if I can't come up with something then I'll just toss the option in regardless, I promise you that.

Yup, Deranged did suit it originally but now, not really at all...

When the mod was originally conceived, it was a system for telling players when they were out of range of either their Shaman totems or Paladin auras. If the player wasn't a Paladin then it had the option of telling the Paladin to come back into range. Hence range, out of range, Deranged.

Except, then... it all exploded, it evolved and congealed, then segmented into many myriad and different encapsulated modules. It wasn't Deranged anymore since it didn't just work with those buffs. Suddenly it worked with every kind of buff, it worked with debuffs too, weapon buffs and so on. Sounds were added in, the ability to alert in different ways and now, most recently, party and raid support. Among other things. So while the name did suit it early on, it totally doesn't now.

So I can see what you're getting at, some people might think that it's some kind of bar mod to test the range of their spells with and that's something it isn't. So the name can be misleading and that's something that's been playing on my mind. I'd love to have a new name for the fourth milestone but I just can't think of one yet. After all, if we're too vague then people might end up thinking it's something like SmartBuff or CorkFu, when the way the Addon acts and what it can do is completely different.

So the question of a name is ... quite, quite baffling. This is another thing I'll be giving some heavy thought to before making a release version of the fourth milestone.

Of course, it'd help if my mind would stop trying to convince me that terrible pun names like 'Uhaura' are a good idea. <<

Added in preliminary debuff support! This was always an undocumented feature for self buffs but it's now in place in the party/raid module, too. Simply add a debuff in the same way you'd add a buff and you'll get all the same benefits.

Sorry for the extra post, I just wanted to get the attention of the users of Deranged. I have an interesting question...

When the fourth milestone rolls around, I'm going to change the description to better reflect what Deranged does now, since it does so much more than I could ever have imagined it would when I started. After all, we now have buff sounds, buff alerts, buff reminders, the original range-check systems, whisper alerts, chat-frame alerts, say alerts, raid alerts, we can mangle buffs in any way we want, copy 'em around, rename them, we can use weapon poisons, temporary enchants, wepaon buffs ... gawd, it's changed. So my question is this; with the winds blowing in a new direction, should we embrace change and opt for a new name to reflect the new functionality or should the name be left as it is? If we do opt for a new name, does anyone have any ideas?

Okay, so I got the print in, along with the ability to set minutes/seconds and I did a visual cleanup that makes me very, very happy. It's now much nicer to look at auras that're being edited. After doing the visual cleanup of the elements in the first two alphas, I knew this was coming.

Anyway, try that out and let me know what you think, also get back to me with that feedback on MSBT and I'll do what I can. With all that said... it looks like Deranged is shaping up to be a grand milestone. You can definitely count yourself amongst the credited Hjalte, for both your ideas and your testing.

1. Hm, for that option I don't know if it would be a good idea to allow more seconds in there as sliders can be annoying little bastards to set when there's a lot of numbers involved. I do have another idea though, I'm tempted to put in a selector for seconds/minutes. For exmaple, if you have the number on five and it's set to seconds, that's five seconds, if it's on minutes then that's five minutes.

2. I'll look into adding that. You're right though, yap is probably the best place for an option like that. Myself, for anything like that I'd gotten into the habit of setting up a self-whisper but that probably isn't very professional. So I'll add that option in, it's not a big deal to include anyway and it certainly wouldn't bloat out the code in any way.

3. The interesting thing here is that I could only actually seem to trigger three different kinds of animation with MSBT using the DisplayText function, those were basically verisimilitudes of SCT's HUD left, HUD right and up. The only problem is that I'd really need two options, one to represent gaining a buff and the other to represent losing a buff. If I include more than that it's going to throw off the SCT support. So here's what I'll do; if you can suggest two directions, one for gaining and one for losing, I'll switch the MSBT support to those. Just tell me when those directions pop up so I have an idea of where to look in the code (MSBT is all new to me, whereas SCT is an old friend and I'm used to its configuration).

Thanks for the suggestions, I do appreciate the feedback. I apologise if I sound negative at all, I don't mean to. I'm just giving you my honest thoughts on the matter and how I plan to proceed, that way you can give me frank feedback and this project can be better for it. What I've written above is genuinely how I plan to proceed. So if there's anything wrong with that, let me know.

Oh, one final note: The Dewdrop menu was totally blasted in the last couple of versions, I just hadn't noticed because... well, no one had mentioned it. The thing is, I don't catch all the bugs in my local copy because I have so much to test with each new version of Deranged. I do try but sometimes it's nearly impossible. I am appreciative though for testers who're there to let me know, it helps.

Basically, the thing is that I'd been using Niagara (files.wowace.com) to play around with my Deranged options, the Waterfall library (used by Niagara to make its GUI) doesn't seem to report errors in an AceOptions table like FuBar does. That's the only drawback of a bloody brilliant menu system, if you ask me. I'll have to keep Deranged on FuBar to test it out in future, I think, just to catch any errors.

Okay then, that's about it I think. Keep me apprised if you do test it in Party/Raid because I'm utterly fascinated by how that will pan out. Last night I actually had an idea about how to simulate Party/Raid interaction and why Reminder might not work properly for Party/Raid stuffs, so I'll look into all that and I might yet be able to find an answer for myself.

That's all I got, then. Look out for A3 or if my tests are successful, possibly B1.

(Edit): Ah, one other thing I forgot to tell you about... the Dewdrop menu actually wasn't triggering because it had an error in one of the options, as I mentioned Niagara didn't let me know about that. It actually had nothing to do with having SCT or not, so no worries there. The Scrolling module is designed in a way that even if you don't have SCT and MSBT, even if you still enable it it won't error out.

I was playing around with code in-game and I realised that this new system short-changed people who use temp-enchants (such as poisons) and weapon buffs. The checker in SpecialEvents Auras doesn't catch them like the checker in Pastmaster does. So I did some reshuffling and I've got all that working again. In moving code around though, I may have broken something so if you've tested the first alpha of m4 and it worked, you might want to test this one too.

Anyway, the Party/Raid system is my only worry at the moment, so I'll just keep cleaning up code around it in the interim in preparation for the release version of the fourth milestone.

(Edit): If anyone is willing to test but lacking a party to do so, I could always join someone on a server, we could both create Mages and use Frost Shield to bounce tests back and forth. Just a thought to consider, anyway. For now, I'm going to go kick back with some munchies and watch whatever's new on TV Links and forget about coding for a little, I think. If anyone wants to take me up on the Mage-testing though, just send a PM.

Okay... where do I begin?

I'd really like the help of some testers with this, I'm in a bit of a bind until I can get the current status of Deranged confirmed. Check out the Changelog to see what I've added...

First things first, the information is in the changelog, the manual hasn't been updated. So I hope it's enough, if I've forgotten anything or there are confusing elements. Let me know. The only thing I can think of though is the party/raid support. The two sets of options might be confusing, the single 'Party' or 'Raid' options in the main menu for example is to turn all buff-scanning on/off whereas the menus in the auras control scanning each member for each specific aura so you can fine tune your auras to alert you to only those you need to cast on. No being nagged about Hunters missing Arcane Intellect and the suchlike.

Everything else should be in the changelog, I think...

Also, delete your Deranged directory, it'll make for a cleaner install, there's been some directory shuffling, Pastmaster's gone, SpecialEvents-Aura is in, Deranged_SCTAlert has instead become Deranged_ScrollingAlert and Deranged_Baselist is out.

Okay, so here's the deal with the alpha status...

I've tested MikScrollingBattleText support, that works beautifully.
I've tested using the UNIT tag in Scrolling/Whisper/Yap lines, same as above.
I've confirmed that the change to SpecialEvents didn't break anything.

... but ...

Good help is so hard to find these days and the people I do know don't like testing in-dev mods and those I don't know so well... well, I don't like to impose. So it's really up to you. I'd like for people to test this out and give me feedback, to let me know whether it's working or not and what bugs there are (if any) and then I can move forward but no pressure. If you don't consider yourself a tester then don't worry about it.

Anyway, what I haven't been able to fully test is party/raid support, both the global and per-member systems. I will note however that the simulations I ran seemed to indicate that they were working (and without bugs, too) but simulations and actually testing something in the field can often yield different results. This is why the current version is in Alpha.

Once it's been confirmed that these things are working, I'll get to updating the manual and making this a polished fourth milestone release and after that, I'll start working on wipe elements for Reminder module lengths and for People module unit statuses.

Well, those that actually read this far, I do appreciate it and keep me apprised. I can't see any major problems with the way I've currently got things set up even if some of it is drycoded-ish. And I'm excited about the prospect of being able to use Deranged in a raid myself, complete with reminder support!

Oh, one last thing... you only need to test party or raid, you don't need to test both. They both work on exactly the same logic so if one works, the other will too. And I set the max raid number as 25, I think that's what it is now but I haven't raided in a while (new character and all) so I can't be sure. Let me know if it's actually higher than that and I'll get that sorted out.

Well, enjoy!

(Edit): Oh, one other thing. For those who'll be using party/raid support, tell me which you'd prefer out of the following...

A) Recast AURA on UNIT returns ...
Recast Mark of the Wild on Leeroy [This is as it is now.]

B) Recast AURA on UNIT returns ...
Recast Mark of the Wild on Raid7

C) Recast AURA on UNIT returns ...
Recast Mark of the Wild on Leeroy(Raid7)

(Edit): Replaced SCT with Scrolling above, gotta get used to calling that module Scrolling now. For those curious about the name change, that module is the base for both SCT and MSBT support.

Okay, a minor fix to the reminder code (spamming when dead is MDKBAD). I coded this after a long day though and after having nearly passed out three times, so try not to hate me if it doesn't work or if it breaks Deranged horribly or if the World encounters strange matter when I'm sleeping or... well, whatever.

Hjalte, I'll look into the possibility of those after a good night's sleep. I had actually pondered the possibility of that myself, party support especially... and perhaps even raid support. In my addled, tired state I'm not even sure it would be that hard, I'd just have to do three things (yes, I am leaving notes for myself for when I wake up); I'd have to pass the units to the buff scanner, I'd also have to provide options to turn party/raid scanning on/off and similar to the AURA pass, I'd need to include UNIT so that the alert could specify which unit it is. In other words, 'Recast AURA on UNIT' would return 'Recast Lark of the Mild on HappyDewd', where HappyDewd is the name of the unit.

If any of this sounds wrong then correct me now and offer ideas before I wake up, that'll save me some coding.

The other thing, MS...thingy support, might not be that hard. It might require a new module and that but that shouldn't be that hard either, it might just require a duplicate of the SCT module tweaked slightly. We'll see.

Anyway, I -really- need to get some rest. But you can probably tell that by now. So I'll tackle all this in the morning. For now, sleep, rapturous sleep and perchance to dream. Or something.