Brinuw

Ill start off by saying that this plugin has covertly changed my lotro expirence for the better. Recently got a new computer and just got around to redownloading plugins, and setting up alerts and I can honestly say that without the indicators on screen I have not been nearly as productive.*

I currently have a Lore-Master and gambler Burglar (yes I'm a Blue line junky) at endgame, and a Captain/ Rune-Keeper/Hunter (ugh) ranging from level 20-35 and was wondering other applications LotroAlerter could better my game play. All of my toons have a reflected damage warning and my LM has Flanked! alerts for all pets (limrafn requires a different pattern fyi) and as soon as I get a chance I'll set up the Steamworks "Shock" system.*

I personally don't think I need any of the social setups; already have a separate tab for kinship and the emotes would come down to myself and my burglaring friend spam emoting each other just to aggrivate (possibly during a fight). I was wondering possiblities of keeping track of debuffs for a set time after they have been applied, particularly useful for a Gambler or if there were other fights where the fight mechanics can be amplified through this plugin

With all that said, very nice work developing and improving this program.**

Araward

Oh, didn't even know about that 'Feature' button. Thanks.

I like the idea of a 'snooze' ability to temporarily hide an alert. I guess that would make the alert persistent until you dismiss it (just hidden for a period of time). Though there still might also be value in an alert sticking around visibly for an indefinite period of time until dismissed.

This feature might also necessitate a list like behavior for alerts. For instance I have 5 Auction Outbid notices that all came in at different times that I was too busy to address, or get to the AH to increase my bids, so I'll want to see all of those when I have the chance to take care of it. (Although I guess technically in that example if I address one at the AH, I'll see all my outbid auctions. Still you can imagine examples where you want to see a list of related alerts at a later time).

As far as clicking on alerts, I just thought of a potential problem. What about click-through behavior? Often alerts will be on top of, or floating past, things you need to click on the screen (even the open background for camera manipulations). If alerts become clickable then this could conceivably interfere with being able to click on parts of the screen. For instance I have quick slots that appear in various places on my screen, or I can be clicking anywhere to turn my camera, etc...

Not sure if that will be a problem, and if so what the solution is. Maybe just a check box next to an alert while the remainder of the alert window allows full click-through functionality. Or maybe you have to hold down a key <Ctrl> and click on the alert, whereas otherwise an alert window won't recognize your clicks.

Araward

Do NOT use the Chat Logger when looting, your client may lock up. I am looking into the cause of this and should have a fix for it later today.

Ah! Yep, I had the crash while using Alerter. Wasn't quite sure about it though. It may have been related to trying to use the Chat Logger. I was waiting to see if it happened again to get a better idea. Though I was suspiciously avoiding the chat logger.

Garan

Garan

I had held off on a number of things, including additional triggers due to bugs in the GetAttributes() method. However, the combat state does not require accessing the Attributes so this may be a possible at this time. I will look into it further and possibly add it to the ToDo list.

As far as your "persistant alerts" suggestion, that is kind of along the lines of the "Snooze" feature that is on my ToDo list - the idea being that you could temporarily dismiss an alert and have it pop up again after a set period of time. I'm currently planning on using the right mouse to Snooze, left mouse to Dismiss. Unfortunately that option won't show up for a little while.

As it stands, the next revision of LoTRO Alerts will probably focus on cleaning up the interface, probably separating the trigger and response fields on two separate tabs - I liked having everything on one panel so nothing was hidden from sight, but the window has become so "busy" that it is easy to overlook things in the clutter. I don't expect to work on that until after I've had a chance to give some other projects a bit of time.

Feel free to use the "Feature" button near the "Download" button at the top of the page to make suggestions - that way they go onto a feature request list so they can be tracked easier and are less likely to be forgotten.

Araward

Just checked out this scrolling option. I LIKE it! Very nice.

That will be useful in so many ways. Although I had envisioned it differently, like a list of alerts where an alert would appear in your window and then when the next one came in, the first alert was pushed up, forming like a list of alerts.

I still think that method would also be useful for some alerts. For instance I want an alert to always show up in a fixed location, and only be moved out of the way if another one comes in. So that might be a nice option to have too.

Anywho... I just thought of another idea since the scrolling made me think of alerts getting in my way. :-P Would it be possible to set alerts that they would only show up out-of-combat (or in-combat as the case may be). That way if I'm in the middle of an important battle, I'm not getting distracted by less important alerts that I have set.

It's nice to see a scroll of who's logging in or out, but I'm not so worried about that when I'm fighting a boss. I am worried about it getting in my way though.

Araward

Oh wait. The 1.03 update is out!

Awesome! Thanks!

Araward

Hey here's an idea that could be useful.

What about having an alert with persistent text until you address it.

Say for instance I have an Outbid on Auction alert, but I'm in the middle of an intense fight. Well a) I might miss it if I put it in an out-of-the-way part of the screen, or b) I might see it but then by the time I'm done with the instance/raid forget that I got that message.

It would be nice to have the message stick around until I decide to dismiss it in some way. Not sure if that could be done on an alert that's become a list of items.

This could be useful for a lot of messages you receive that you can't address immediately but want to have that reminder for later. Or even to see a series of related messages for review later (What LFF requests did I miss in the last 10 min, What were all the fellowship /rolls, What items did I win or pick up, What were those NPCs talking about while crazy things were happening all around me, etc... )

Araward

That solution sounds great! Hopefully it can be done.

Also really like the other things on the todo list. Looking forward to those!

Garan

Just some of the neat/fun things that can be done with ver 1.03:

Here's a simple alert for showing your self heals as scrolling text - it can fairly easily be modified to show any heals.


or even modified to show scrolling incomming damage or other effects.


or you can create an alert that let's you return a Wave without having to stop to find the person that waved to you...


For the Quickslot alerts, you can either manually enter the SkillID/ItemID/Alias and manually select the type or you can simply drag a skill/item/alias into the quickslot and the interface will set the data and type for you.

Garan

Actually, what I'm shooting for is a two prong solution. Since each alert can display in a different area, I want each alert to be a separate instance so that multiple alerts can be displayed simultaneously. In addition to that I want to add a "scrolling" alert option that allows alert text to scroll up within it's window with optional fade that way text alerts would be able to scroll out of the way of incomming, overlapping alerts.

Queing up alerts would have potentially undesirable results since the main point of alerts is to warn you of something that requires immediate attention and delaying that for even 5 seconds could cause a party wipe.

Just an FYI, some additional features already on the ToDo list:
QuickSlots - will allow alerts to include Alias, Skill or Item quickslots which will appear with the alert and will respond to mouse clicks (and for the really tricksy persons can have their contents altered by the alert captures).
Mouse relative positioning - this option will allow the alert to pop up relative to the mouse position when the alert is activated allowing for quicker response times for the QuickSlots.

Garan

Thanks for the comments.

While sound would be great for alerts, there is currently no support for sound in LoTRO's Lua implementation. While I can understand that playing sounds from external files was a pretty low priority for Lua it would have been sufficient if they had given us access to the ABC music system so that we could use that to generate basic sounds.

Araward

Ah, just thought of another addition that would be nice.

Not sure if it would be possible, but it would be great to be able to attach various short sounds or tones to certain alerts. A set tone would be fine, but even better would be either a list of different tones/noises to choose from or allow us to choose ones on our systems.

That way I can hear a particular tone, and immediately know to look in the upper right corner of the screen to see who just came online, where I might otherwise miss it because I'm looking elsewhere.

In fact, you might not even need to show a visible alert for some things. Just a tone, and then you can know to check your chat window. Sort of like how you get a tone for IMs, but no other chat in other channels will allow you to hear a tone. For less busy channels, like Trade or user channels, it might be nice.

Araward

Great to hear!

I suppose some alternatives to multiple-lines would be to have new alerts overwrite the previous alert (and deleting the previous alert - so you can read the new alert). That might not be ideal though.

Or queuing up the alerts. So that if you have an alert that displays for 5 seconds, and others come in during that 5 second period, then it waits to display them until after the 1st one has completed it's 5 seconds. Then it would show each queued alert for 5 seconds each.

Maybe even a combination of these things. Always nice to have options! :-)

Garan

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm not sure about the disappearing alert box. I will have to do some more testing on it - if you or anyone else can replicate the disappearance and let me know more about the steps needed to reproduce it that would be great.
EDIT: After a bit of testing I realized that you can accidentally resize the alert box to a negative size and it will disappear. Note that if this happens you can manually enter a positive value in the size fields and it will reappear. I will put limits in place in the next version to prevent size less than 1x1.

EDIT: Numeric resource IDs are not working currently. I have located the bug and it will be fixed in a future version.

There are situations where you would want an alert to fire within it's own duration, effectively restarting the alert so automatically setting a blank cooldown to the duration is not necessarily good and could introduce confusion and/or undesired behaviour.

I'll look into changing fields with the tab key - it's not quite as straight forward as it would in an environment that actually lets us respond to keystrokes (our "key" events are actually "actions", not keys strokes )
EDIT: Unfortunately, after some additional testing, my original response about not being able to respond to key strokes was verified. The default "Tab" action (selecting a target) does not get fired when a text box control has focus. Sadly, the text box control doesn't even add a tab character to the field, it just suppresses the key without allowing us to respond to it so there is no practical way to implement this at this time.

I will look into increasing the displaysetting the max number of alerts in the dropdown box - since the dialog is significantly larger than it originally was, I should be able to add quite a few lines to reduce scrolling.
EDIT: I increased the dropdown list size from 3 to 12.

Glad to hear that captures are helping you. They seemed like a neat idea but I wasn't sure how many people would use them.