Damagemeter issues
 

Hi!

(If someone could paste this mail to the US Forum where Turbine Devs read more actively this would be appreciated, thanks in advance! As a EU-gamer I cannot access the US-Forum, and I'd really like the Devs to get aware of my project and maybe getting open to some discussion of what is needed to further this project)

I am currently working on a Combat Log Analyzer, a shell-tool (independent of LOTRO, you run it in a shell after you quit the game) which examines the Combat Log Data to provide data like "who has done damage how much?", "who has healed how much?", "who died how often?" - sort of an "external Damagemeter".

Unfortunately the Data the Combat Log provides is not fully sufficient to extract the data for a complete damagemeter. I will list below what additional data I would need to complete my project. It would be nice if the Dev working on the Combat log could look into it. For further discussion (I would be also willing to send a Beta version of my Analyzer tool to him, including source-code, if he wants) about the issue I would also be available at [email protected].

Data needed:

- Currently the Log only reports Heals, various things (people revived, people dying,...) and damage you do to mobs or which mobs do to you. It does NOT report damage people in the same fellowship like you do to mobs, or mobs do to them (asides from "... has succumbed to his wounds", "... has defeated ...").

For a working Damagemeter this information is ABSOLUTELY required!!!

- For decent DPS calculations timestamps are needed. I have some good ideas how this could be done:

* A line "Combat started." and a line "Combat ended." could be inserted, whenever the fellowship/raid enters/leaves combat. This way my log parser could filter out time where the fellowship does not fight (AFK-times and such) for the DPS-Calculation.
* It would be easier, if like at the start of the log the start-time is reported, at the end of the log the end-time would also be reported (currently I am using the "time of last file modification" instead).
* Start of the Log timestamp should include year and seconds (seconds being most important for accurate DPS-numbers).
* It would be nice if for every skill-usage the time the skill execution needed
would be listed.
* I am a bit in doubt if the heals reported in the combat log are "complete".
I wonder if really all of them have been reported in the log? But might be they actually ARE.

Further things which would be nice to have:

* The name of the skill causing a damage/heal/etc. This way a percentage could be calculated how often someone used certain skills.
* Currently only the amount of damage "coming through" is reported. How much damage was absorbed by resistances would be nice to know.
* If an attack was blocked/parried/evaded or if it missed would be interesting to know.
* For curing status effects currently it is only reported THAT they have been cured, but not by whom.
* a clear notation around player/mob names to distinct them from parser
keywords would be nice. For example instead of
* EDIT: Clear display if damage/heal was done "normally" or by a potion,
or by a conjunction


You wound the Dourhand for 77 Damage.

Player(Sorane) wounds Mob(the Dourhand) for 77 Damage.

This way for one thing problems like when someone calls his character "wounds" (my parser checks for this word ;-) ) could be fixed, and also it would be easier to filter out Mobs from the damagemeter. And the player
who runs the log would not be reported by the name "You" as currently ;-)

* If threat information would be included a threatmeter could be written.
To make a threatmeter make any sense, of course it would have to be
"real time" which means inside the game. Actually I would be willing to
write the Parser-Code for it and send it to the Devs, so they could
integrate it into the Game UI if they would be willing to do this.
Same about the damagemeter code of course. Some things actually
could be done much easier with game integration (like finding out
who is a player and who a mob).

Thanks in advance.

Sorane

Frosty read this forum from time to time, maybe you can also PM him.

Hi Sorane,

That's precisely why this forum is here. :)

We know for sure that Frosty reads the site, and actively responds, but there's nothing to say that others aren't as well, we just aren't aware of them. ;)

Thanks a lot!

Sorane

The text that comes out of the game is "owned" by the combat team and not the UI, if that makes any sense. The chat windows are essentially listening to notices that say "display this text". The text is colored and added to the chat list, we (being the UI) don't do special processing of the text.

The short answer is that it would be up to the combat team to do some of the things that you're looking for: begin/end combat, timestamping, reformatting of the combat messages, etc. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's generally not a function of the UI.

I can think of two things to follow up on: posting on the official boards or filing a bug/feature request in the game.

-P

My big problem in "posting on the official boards" is that as of now only people from the US can post there. There is a EU version of the board, but it seems not to be frequented by devs. But if someone could write a message on the US Board for me, or if you could forward my email address ([email protected]) to a developer from the combat team this would be highly appreciated. Clearly these people would be the ones which would
implement such changes. As it seemed this board here was my only possibility
to reach a Dev, which is why I used this opportunity here, even if it was nobody of the Combat Team.

I would like to add, though, that an idea for the future might be to integrate such a Damagemeter into the Game UI (a little window which can be activated on a hotkey, and if the hotkey is pressed again it gets "hidden" again). As mentioned before I would be willing to give the source-code of my
damagemeter-tool-in-works to Turbine once the source-code has reached a more finished state.

I will add some of my UI ideas to this board here, though, maybe there is something among it which would be interesting for you.

Thanks for your fast answer.

Sorane

Update: I implemented the following new features:

- List players sorted by incoming damage/heal
- List skills used to cause damage sorted for one player/one mob
- List incoming damage sorted by Skillname (and percentages)

What would still be nice, if for heals the name of the heal-skill would be listed like for damage-skills. So that it could be better seen what skills were used for healing at which percentage. Currently such a splitup is only possible for damage.

Sorane

Update:

http://files-upload.com/files/596321/lotrometer.exe

Some serious bugfixes (though reflects are currently broken):

- 1225 points were listed as "1,225" which earlier versions reported
as "1" point of damage/heal !!! This has been fixed!!!
- Min/Max/Avg for DMGDETAILS/INDMGDETAILS now works
- Deaths currently broken, not all deaths reported

Sorane

Hi!

Appearently there IS some functionality existing to report the damage of other players. There is a function in-game called

/damagetext.

And from the parameters I assume it is for this, like:

/damagetext others true

The problem: The function is bugged right now. It only gives a invalid stringtable error, if calling it.

Sorane

Hi!

Some more log issues:

I checked loremaster logs for the first time yesterday, Sadly it is not really
recognizable who is who's pet.

Instead of

Razor wounds ...

something like

Razor (Lynx Pet of Syrdon) wounds ...

would be much nicer!

Sorane

Hi!

I released the "for now" final version of my damagemeter. See here the details:

http://community.codemasters.com/for...45#post3308645

And here is my revised "Combat Log Changes Wishlist":

- Include Timestamps to each skill use (how long in milliseconds the skill took to execute)
- Add a line listing at what time the log was closed (currently filetime is used)
- Add Dmg/Heal from other to other people (or fix /damagetext!!!!)
- For Pets instead "Raven wounds ..." do something like "Raven (Raven Pet of Talieth) wounds..."
- Add a line whenever combat started/ends with a timestamp (whenever the group enters aggro!)
- With the start-log timing, include seconds, not only hours+minutes
- Include name of skill for heals, like for damage
- Include something like "Conjunction:" in case a damage/heal was caused
by a conjunction (ok, I could check for all skills of the various conjunction names... but I'd need a complete list of all relevant texts then)
- Include resists ("xxx wounds yyy for 123, of which 67 are resisted")
- include block/parry/evade/miss
- Instead of "You" include at least an option to list the name of the own character
- instead of "Barz wounds" and "You wound" do something like "Mob(Barz) wounds" and "Player(Sorane) wounds" (makes it possible to filter out mobs by an option to only list players).
- Add Threat information for threatmeter support

Sorane

New version:

- Possibility to list damage/heal caused by the mob/player to which it was
outgoing/incoming
- Small bugfix in the heal stats
- Splitted exe up into main exe (Shell command) and DLL
- Archive includes headers to use the DLL from a custom program (if someone
would like to create a UI for it, or it would be also useful if Turbine wants
to include the functionality into LOTRO I guesss ;-) )

Anyone who could post some information about my Combat Log analyzer on
the US Forum? (I am from EU, so I cannot post there). I could write up a summary.

Sorane

Ah, forgot the URL to the new version:

http://www.file-upload.net/download-...nadll.zip.html

Latest version:

- Fixed Crash-on-exit from DLL-version
- DLLs for English and german version included, French version is in works,
though the french one is not yet included.
- fixed several minor quirks and odds&ends

http://www.file-upload.net/download-...meter.zip.html

Sorane

This may not be the best place to post an opinion of damage meters but I feel I must at least say my peace. I really fear damage meters being brought into Lotro. I trully believe damage meters turned World of Warcraft into a gear grind game and I would really hate to see that happen to Lotro. I quite enjoy not worrying about such things. I know that people are curious of their own damage/healing output but to be able to see others turns the game into a competition instead of a partnership. I really hope you think hard on this project before making it live as it may hurt more then it helps.

Instead of damage meters, I'd much prefer to see a threat meter. I think it is much more conducive to gameplay that benefits all and allows for true team play more then damage meters ever could. It is refreshing for me to play the game w/o some high dps bragging his crits and tossing meters in chat every 5 seconds. Please dont' repeat the same level of immaturity WoW has. It is a major reason I left there.

Just an example why damagemeters are a good thing:

Recently we did boss #5 at the rift. Instead of the usual time (5 minutes or whatever, don't remember how long he usually takes but not long) it took *15 minutes* to take him down. With a damagemeter you can see what the problem was.

Please also note that lotrometer is not just a damagemeter. Actually the stats I look at most are:

- Splitup of Boss-damage to see what sort of skills bosses have and what
sort of damage THEY do
- splitup of my own damage after skill to check if I use all my skills enough

[quot€]
Instead of damage meters, I'd much prefer to see a threat meter. I think it is much more conducive to gameplay that benefits all and allows for true team play more then damage meters ever could. It is refreshing for me to play the game w/o some high dps bragging his crits and tossing meters in chat every 5 seconds. Please dont' repeat the same level of immaturity WoW has. It is a major reason I left there.[/quote]

If they include thread data into the Combat Log I could include thread support. Of course this would require some integration into LOTRO, displaying threat data makes no sense in an external program.

BTW, recent version, with GUI:


http://www.file-upload.net/download.../setup.exe.html

(And I am sorry to say this version actually supports ctrl-v'ing damagemeter results into chat by using the clipboard ;-)) Couldn't resist...)

Screenshot:

http://www.file-upload.net/view-5638..._shot.JPG.html

Sorane

Hi!

Latest version of the UI Version:

http://www.file-upload.net/download-...setup.exe.html

- Evenout option: Ignore damage/heal <= 20 for average calculation. Changing the option needs a restart of the UI to take effect.
- Continued on french language support (not completed yet)

Another thing:

If I ctrl+v results of the lotrometer into the LOTRO Chat the linefeeds do not arrive, so it is all in one line.
Neither \n nor \r\n works. Any possibility this can be changed in future LOTRO versions, so that Clipboard data with newlines can be posted into chat?

Sorane

to prevent message spamming, I am pretty sure we strip out newline characters as well as limit the amount of stuff you can paste at one time. I'm not sure if there's a workaround or planned change for this.

-P

Ah, I see the point.

Possible workarounds I could see:

- An API to display something into the LOTRO window using an external
application (a window handle or whatever, or possibly a DLL which
provides a function where you can provide a string and screen position)

or alternatively

- allowing linefeeds, but allowing only a certain number of linefeeds "per
minute" (for example 10 linefeeds per minute or even per 5 minutes) and
all in excess get filtered out as currently - this would also prevent people
from posting damagemeter results too often.

or (IMHO best)

- integrating of the functionality of lotrometer into the game (as I said before
I would be willing to give my source code to Turbine). I am of course aware
that probably other new features are more important than damagemeters.

Sorane

Would it be possible to release the source code as well? I am one of the untrusting sort you know and it would suit me well if I can have a closer look at it ;)

It's not a damage meter.. but a damage analyser :D
Looks pretty neat Sorane :)

I do not think that they will implement this into the game, as it will more or less turn it into an athletic sport, imo, and takes the fun away :D and once it's part of the game, people will probably adjust their gaming style to the damage analysis. It's part of the game to figure some things out :) If they want us to become drilled "mob sweepers" they could just give us all the exact mob details straight away ;)

Well, when I was talking to someone from the "powers that be" (Well, not directly to turbine, but to someone from codemasters who talked to someone from turbine) it sounded that if there would be more development time available they would consider it. Also please note, that the data lotrometer provides
goes *ways* ahead of just "who throws out the most damage".

About the source-code: As I still hope for future LOTRO-integration I guess it might be a bad idea to opensource it. They might not like to integrate something which is open source-code.

What for now I would still hope is that they finally add some feature that you can get the data from other groupmembers into the combat log...

And they DO give the mob details away in some way... lotrometer can exactly calculate which attacks of a mob do what amount of dps and what percentage of the mobs damage goes into which attacks and stuff ;-)

Sorane

Has there been any word back on if they are working on this? It would be really nice if they could implement a Damage/healing meter, and even a threat meter, that exchanges information with all grouped/raided players.

Just my thoughts on this.

Unable to download from File-Upload .eu
 

Sorane, I would very much like to download and try your damage meter. Unfortunately, every link you supply leads to a page inviting me to upload a file to a site called File-Upload.eu, but there is nothing to indicate how I would go about downloading anything. Could you possibly clarify? Thanks.