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07-17-12, 11:21 AM | #1 |
Power Auras Classic 5.0
It's been a 'small' while in the making, and it involved a 'minor' change to the codebase, but YEEHAW! Public alpha quality release, yeah!
Link: Click me. No, seriously, do it. Feedback/suggestions either go in this thread, or in the comments. I'll look at both, and ignore them just as equally <3 Last edited by Meorawr : 08-28-12 at 01:44 PM. |
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07-17-12, 11:25 AM | #2 |
One more reserved post that I can use should something require it. If nothing does require it, then this post shall become neglected and will probably cry. In the event of crying, please offer this post some warm milk and cookies. Thank you.
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07-17-12, 01:01 PM | #3 |
/applause
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07-17-12, 10:52 PM | #4 |
One of my favorite addons
Great job on the tutorial, thanks for the update! Looking forward to the beta.
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07-18-12, 09:18 PM | #5 |
We really need some sort of upvote system here. I'd so give you some Meorawr.
Will a couple dancing bananas do?
__________________
"I'm very feminine. And I'll beat the crap out of ANYONE who disagrees!" |
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07-19-12, 04:35 AM | #6 |
I love the new version but there's a small problem I'm trying to sort out for like an hour now, pretty much made account just to ask about it. Where do I enter a name of buff that is supposed to activate my aura/timer? You used HP level for example.
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07-19-12, 09:36 AM | #7 |
Three dancing bananas is offensive to my people. Two would be acceptable.
In the dropdown that had you select "Unit Health", you'd instead select "Unit Buff/Debuff". I'm intending to add tooltips to each of the items in the dropdown that covers what each type is actually for, just not gotten around to it yet. |
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07-19-12, 11:50 AM | #8 |
is normal i cant use Flame Shock icon on an aura thet need only show me if FS isn't on the target?
the aura itself work when fs expire it show but eaven if on surce>texture i select buff/debuff on target id 8050 (flame shock) it instead show a WoW icon logo XD |
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07-19-12, 11:54 AM | #9 |
Half a bug, half unimplemented. Will fix soon-ish
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07-19-12, 12:07 PM | #10 | |
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07-19-12, 01:14 PM | #11 | |
btw authors... try redoing the ui i have in live i noticed few thing 1st - spell cd triggre work reversed XD to make it show if the spell is in cd i got to invert the trigger. 2nd - the spell CD is triggered with few second of lag (in bot direction when cd get triggered and expire)..... for example i normaly track LvB for surge proc, in live it work amazingly eaven a lil before omni cc and spell key say it, on beta it get triggered atlast 1-2 second after 3rd - is ****ing hard positioning things without see them on bkground 4rth - timers with spell cd trigger seams not working propely (suppose is still not fully implemented) |
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07-19-12, 01:29 PM | #12 | |||
Known issues cover this, I disabled them a few days ago because of a few changes I'd made. Next release should have them re-enabled. Not yet implemented |
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07-19-12, 01:48 PM | #13 |
A small note on releases, we'll aim to do them fairly frequently (at most, a week between each), but they'll contain enough changes between each one to warrant actual testing.
Next release will hopefully have the previews on the main screen re-enabled, also aiming to clean up/polish the trigger editors as well as fix issues with them. On top of that, I've added keyboard shortcuts as an experiment, they're only implemented on the browser for now but you can do things like Ctrl+N for creating a new aura. If they're stable enough we'll consider additional ones for the editor window (Ctrl+Shift+N for creating a display?). Plus if we do keep them, I'll be sure to add in some way to change their bindings Currently working on the activation editor, and with that I'll also put in more triggers/sources to play around with. P.S. Don't expect a weekend update, GW2 and all. Last edited by Meorawr : 07-21-12 at 10:48 AM. |
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07-22-12, 03:00 PM | #14 |
are u kidding me?
Where is the logical navigation in using this utility versus its predecessor?
You have to program for the end user in mind, not to pat yourself on the back for making a utility convoluted in it's utility. It loses its function & purpose. I applaud your exceptional skill in coding, but I disgusted by the underlying premise that one has to be perplexed by a simple addon (that is so widely used,) that uses simple logical functions, only b/c you have to prove something to your audience. Are we supposed to traverse the app from left to right, top-down, or a combination of both? What a mess. What were possibly thinking in this monstrosity in design navigation? Occam's razor |
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07-22-12, 04:42 PM | #15 | |
Wow. Unnecessarily scathing, given that the original post clearly stated:
__________________
Whenever someone says "pls" because it's shorter than "please", I say "no" because it's shorter than "yes". Author of NPCScan and many other AddOns. |
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07-22-12, 05:13 PM | #16 | ||||
Warning: This is a literal wall of text.
I'll help you out here. Now, after reading that feel free to elaborate on the following points, 'cause all I got out of that post was one usable piece of feedback. The point I got was: GUI too complicated in terms of navigation. I'll cover it in a lot of depth.
Regarless of this however, the end user is still in mind at all times. The difficulty comes in balancing power with ease of use, and the ugly truth of it is you simply can't have both. You can try, and do a damn good job in the process, but ultimately some things will be sacrificed on either side of the fence. As an example, I'll say that even with the 'advanced' editor you cannot match the power of just outright manually editing the saved variables. Let's imagine for a second that ease of use and raw power are two fields of grass, right next to each other. The current state of the GUI is what you'd get if you tried to ride a unicycle across the field while juggling pianos and breathing fire. And that's perfectly fine, because:
But for the sake of testing, we don't want that - an unused system simply gets a lot less interaction and will be subject to far more bugs than a simple one would, and we want to iron out the issues with the advanced systems as a priority. Having the advanced ones work mean that we can safely say, should something go pear-shaped, "oh you'll need to do x and y to get it working, here's how". In addition, the basic tools need work so that they're easy to use for the average end user, so delaying an alpha release just for them is a bit of a silly idea when we can just slap in a basic tutorial and the words 'alpha', which it would seem that too many people are skipping over. As for patting myself on the back, I'm curious where you're getting that impression from. Generally that happens after a job well done no? Well we're lacking the critical 'done' point still, and the 'well' point is still somewhere over the hills. Judging from this and the patting on the back, I imagine you view me as some sort of highly conceited egotistical person just out to ruin the addon. I don't do this stuff for kicks and to show off, I can safely assure you of that.
The thing is, the 4.x series is comparatively weaker than most alternatives. There's no possible way you can refute that, let's list some of the limitations or great 'user experience' choices that 4.x has:
Now let's see how 5.0 solves these issues (in order of what was mentioned before):
And I'll point out the tutorials tab while I'm here. Before you retort with 'if I need a tutorial to use the GUI, then it sucks', I'll happily point out that the contents of the tutorials are actually going to cover a broad spectrum of areas both basic and advanced. And I might even drop the most basic tutorials, simply because they sound so condescending. I do like to imagine our users having the aptitude to at least tie their shoe laces correctly. Either offer constructive feedback without personal attacks, or get out. Curiously enough, we have a place where users can submit suggestions and vote on them. Know what the highest upvoted feature is? Changing the styles of displays in response to events. Take a guess as to what the core feature we decided to do all this work for was. Then we expanded on it to match the feature set offered by various alternative addons, and now we're at that point where we can say 'yep'. To infer that we did all this work just for accolades and to show off is downright insulting, especially when combined with a post from someone who clearly missed the word 'alpha', which has appeared in the first post alone three times, and is even mentioned ingame via that huge changelog dialog which covers a lot of points. One is also led to assume you skipped over that.
Character/global auras were removed because profile support was another heavily requested feature, and logically we can't keep trans-profile (global) auras in without messy hacks that threaten the stability of parts of the loading code. Moving on to the editor, that's changed. Completely. So let's begin with the immediate issue. Tabs at the top will confuse new users. They likely won't know what an action/trigger is, as they're not common terms. A display is pretty straightforward, so that's not an issue. The tutorials tab is hosted in the editor temporarily. The immediate and 'simple' fix to this is to hide the top tabs unless the user says they want full power. But let's say we did do that, where would we put the option? We need somewhere obvious that isn't a hunt for the user to find, 'cause that's equally just as bad. We could slap the checkbox on the window, and then it looks ugly and fixes nothing, because now you've got controls sticking out that don't make any sense. We could slap it in the Displays section, but then it's not relevant to the displays. See the issue? Next up, use of breadcrumbs as the main navigation. Hate to say it, but it's the best choice. We tried many navigation methods, but this was by far the best of the lot. 4.x navigation isn't really 'navigation', it's more "how many controls can we blind the user with at one time". It has one real advantage, it's quick to use if you want to edit one specific thing within ~0.1 second. The downsides on the other hand are fairly numerous; we can't add new features to it simply because there's no space. The window is already far too large, and having half a million controls in your face isn't user friendly. In addition, a lot of the controls are poorly labelled, or completely lack labels, and some of the behaviour is just bizarre. We tried a treeview approach, whereby the displays were listed on the left inside of a tree and on the right was a tab frame with each tab being dedicated to a specific task (style/activation/animation). This was almost the one we settled on, and was pretty effective. We then moved to the breadcrumb style we have now, and stuck with it for the following reasons:
Comparing the breadcrumbs and 4.x style navigation has kind of been done, and as I said they both have advantages and issues. One point you could raise is that the breadcrumbs make things too 'distant', and that there's too many clicks to get to a certain section. It's something I'm highly aware of, and have been desperately trying to avoid for a while now, however this is an issue that is mostly only prevalent with the 'advanced' editors - simply because 'advanced' things include multiple animation channels, display actions, and complex trigger logic. The 'basic' editors won't include any form of support for these. In fact, the 'basic' animation editor is going to be completely akin to the existing 4.x one with the whole "single"/"repeat" concept hidden, along with channels. Coming to the list of categories after selecting a display, we tried various ways of sorting and filtering that list too. Alphabetically is just a 'nice' way of doing it, but is far from ideal. The problem is how do you weigh each area in importance? Style is important, but Activation is what you need to make it show. Animations aren't too important, neither are sounds, but how do they weigh when compared to the advanced features, more or less important? I'd argue that the look and feel is the least important, but there's many people who would disagree when sorting those out. We could filter them, but going back again I mentioned that this release is designed to test the advanced components, because we need them to be working. You aren't going to do a whole lot of testing if I just filter half the categories out, and most people aren't going to read a simple 'please test this', because as has been proven time and time again, people don't read stuff. We cover a lot of 'basic' things in the addon description, yet it still frequently crops up in a comment. There's a significant amount of things I particularly hate about the current system, most notably I think the Sources system is still a major thorn. It adds a lot of power, but is about as friendly as a hungry shark. We can fix this with the basic editor by simply outright removing it in some way, but that's a little off right now in terms of priorities (in fact, the 'basic' components are quite low on priority until after the next release). Another thorn in our side is the handling of action 'sequences', but as actions are an advanced feature on purpose it's likely going to be much less of an issue than I'm thinking. One solution I frequently see is some sort of basic/advanced toggle. We'll be using them, but they'll be used very sparingly. For instance, the basic activation editor has one of these toggles for swapping between the basic version and your current advanced one. Basic will automatically become unusable if you create something too advanced for it to handle safely, but otherwise all's good. Judging from your post, you've seemingly got some ideas (which you chose not to share) on how to tackle navigation so I'll invite you to constructively give feedback. Simply calling the current system a monstrosity and implying it need to be scrapped immediately is far from constructive. We've tried many systems and settled on these ones, and it'll make a lot more sense why we've done so when all of the editor features are actually implemented. Jesus, thirty paragraphs... * Google translate, if it makes no sense blame it, not I. Last edited by Meorawr : 07-22-12 at 05:35 PM. |
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07-22-12, 07:29 PM | #17 |
Looking forward to the progress
I personally love the new look, unfortunately it'll take a bit more time to get from option a and b with the tab / menus however I still like its new approach.
One thing I'd deeply love to have implemented is text coord support and perhaps a media table that can have 3rd party addons implement 'texture packs' or 'sound packs' which would easily be implemented and not hurt any coding if done properly. I'd love to work with you if you're interested. I worked with Smacker a while ago and gave him some textures, sounds, and font graphics. Looking forward to helping your testing!! Also, to those going crazy in the thread, stop exploding please |
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07-22-12, 07:34 PM | #18 | ||
Lua Code:
There's also one for fonts and 'counters' (timer/stack fonts basically). Iterator returns vary based upon the resource type, but for sounds it's "index (number), path (string), name (string)". For textures, it's just the first two items. The PowerAuras/Media.lua file contains the default ones. The function is safe to call immediately, don't need to wait for ADDON_LOADED so long as the dependency on it is there. Texcoords were kinda planned but I backed out of them, I'll reconsider it. Issue is exposing them in a 'pretty' way. |
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07-22-12, 10:22 PM | #19 | |
Perhaps a simple 'advanced' button or checkbox to enable some hidden options. |
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07-23-12, 01:36 AM | #20 |
I don't know, in the final product, when we get a basic and advanced (current options), switching to advanced mode and see i have to click on an advanced button to see texcoords seems kinda redundant.
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