Spellcast Help Thread (Link your XML using Pastebin.com for help!)

[Linktri]

Hey Aikar,

General windower question for you.

When using vent push-to-talk (Using either the left or right Ctrl button) along with Windower, the camera rotates on axis. Any way to put a stop to that?

[ringthree]

Hey Aikar,

General windower question for you.

When using vent push-to-talk (Using either the left or right Ctrl button) along with Windower, the camera rotates on axis. Any way to put a stop to that?

Yes, assign you push-to-talk button to R1 on your controller. :D

[Linktri]

That's an excellent idea. I never thought of doing that.

[ringthree]

That's an excellent idea. I never thought of doing that.

LOL Sorry, I thought you were a keyboard player so I was just trying to make a joke. If you do play with a controller then that's the best way to go definitely.

If you are going to use R1 on the controller make sure you go into the FFXI configuration and change the gamepad setting for Button 6 (Screenshot) to nothing. If you don't it will hit enter whenever you are typing any text.

[Belgaer]

Crap... I'm getting the old "Proxy connections are not allowed." error message on all pages of the site. I can't view anything. This has happened before. I'm not really sure why it's happening again, but is there anything I can do about it? I've been really looking forward to this and windower 4.0 too.

Anyone know a practical solution for this? ._.

[arus2001]

Even if a wizard doesn't generate the XML itself, just having somewhere where we could input conditions and it'd spit out something we could copy and paste would be nice.

Either way, I've looked a bit at some of the stuff people posted earlier, but haven't had the chance to try adapting any since RL's been a bitch.

Hell, this kinda reminds me of when I was younger and took a VB class in HS and thought about making some kind of coding wizard for MU* DBs. Never did finish it, though.

[Kroot]

Hey Aikar,

General windower question for you.

When using vent push-to-talk (Using either the left or right Ctrl button) along with Windower, the camera rotates on axis. Any way to put a stop to that?

I use the windows start button for my PTT. Having the start menu pop up when not having FFXI active is not that annoying to me

[dejet]

I wouldn't consider things like "nighttime" and such to be particularly advanced, that's a really easy rule to set up. Honestly, the more I think about it, I'm really having trouble coming up with something that would be too hard to do with a decent GUI. If anyone can come up with some examples of things that they think would be too complex, I'd really like to see them. Concrete examples of things that people think would be too hard would definitely help me think through the design.

the things i was wondering how you would do is, Mob based code, Such as groups and such.
And to me that is one of the best parts.

sry its a few days late forgot i posted here LOL

[Khamsin]

the things i was wondering how you would do is, Mob based code, Such as groups and such.
And to me that is one of the best parts.

sry its a few days late forgot i posted here LOL

What's difficult about that?

When...

Target is part of <group>

or

When...

Target is <monster1/family>
Target is <monster2/family>
Target is <monster3/family>

?

[dejet]

What's difficult about that?

When...

Target is part of <group>

or

When...

Target is <monster1/family>
Target is <monster2/family>
Target is <monster3/family>

?

what are you waiting for then! get to it.

[Khamsin]

what are you waiting for then! get to it.

If I had the time, maybe, but it sounds like someone is already giving it a go.

My point is, it's spellcast's job to decipher what groups and other features are, and how to employ them. All a GUI has to do is write the xml, and it's incredibly easy to make a program write something based on the input you give it. For any feature X, simply have the GUI ask you to input the necessary parameters regarding X.

The tough job of actually handling all the code and making it do something is done by spellcast.

[Wenslydale]

I'm guessing this is a no, but is there anyway to write up rules for zones inside/outside nations control?

[rithridan]

If I had the time, maybe, but it sounds like someone is already giving it a go.

My point is, it's spellcast's job to decipher what groups and other features are, and how to employ them. All a GUI has to do is write the xml, and it's incredibly easy to make a program write something based on the input you give it. For any feature X, simply have the GUI ask you to input the necessary parameters regarding X.

The tough job of actually handling all the code and making it do something is done by spellcast.

Spellcast XML optimizations would be a major feature in this. There are many ways you can make spellcast do something and not all of them are very efficient. You would also need to build an interpreter if you want to read existing spellcast XML because you can't expect an XML to be just the way it would be built through your program.

[Khamsin]

Spellcast XML optimizations would be a major feature in this. There are many ways you can make spellcast do something and not all of them are very efficient. You would also need to build an interpreter if you want to read existing spellcast XML because you can't expect an XML to be just the way it would be built through your program.

That's the beauty of XML. XML is easy to parse. That's why it's used in the first place.

It doesn't need to be structured the way it would be when the GUI writes it. It just needs to be properly formatted XML.

[Deimos]

My point is, it's spellcast's job to decipher what groups and other features are, and how to employ them. All a GUI has to do is write the xml, and it's incredibly easy to make a program write something based on the input you give it. For any feature X, simply have the GUI ask you to input the necessary parameters regarding X.

Yeah, I actually think the "prep work" may end up taking longer than getting the actual functionality working. By "prep work" I mean loading all the valid options/gear/spell names/etc into a database so that users can only make valid choices, and so they don't have to worry about typos and such. I'm also still working on a generally-flexible database setup for everything so that I hopefully don't hit any walls when someone asks "cool, but can you make it do ______?"

Related to rithridan's comments, I'd definitely eventually like to have it both output optimized XML and be able to load in XML files that people have already written or modified, but those aren't really my priorities. I just want to get it doing basic output first, because I imagine the people that will mostly want to use something like this are the people that find the whole XML thing too complex, not so much people that are worried about whether their XML is optimal. They just want to be able to use the plugin.

And yeah, XML is nice and simple to parse, so I wouldn't imagine that being a huge problem when I do get to it. I'm already going to have my own internal format that I'll have to define a conversion to SpellCast XML for, so I'll just have to write the reverse of that to allow importing.

[Khamsin]

Yeah, I actually think the "prep work" may end up taking longer than getting the actual functionality working. By "prep work" I mean loading all the valid options/gear/spell names/etc into a database so that users can only make valid choices, and so they don't have to worry about typos and such. I'm also still working on a generally-flexible database setup for everything so that I hopefully don't hit any walls when someone asks "cool, but can you make it do ______?"

Related to rithridan's comments, I'd definitely eventually like to have it both output optimized XML and be able to load in XML files that people have already written or modified, but those aren't really my priorities. I just want to get it doing basic output first, because I imagine the people that will mostly want to use something like this are the people that find the whole XML thing too complex, not so much people that are worried about whether their XML is optimal. They just want to be able to use the plugin.

And yeah, XML is nice and simple to parse, so I wouldn't imagine that being a huge problem when I do get to it. I'm already going to have my own internal format that I'll have to define a conversion to SpellCast XML for, so I'll just have to write the reverse of that to allow importing.

I don't know about restricting input to only "valid" choices, unless you intend to keep it updated every time a new patch comes out. Maybe just have a tab-completion setup like the game, so they can type haub(tab) or if a new armor comes out before the GUI is updated, they can just type it all out. It'd go quicker than selecting armor and such from a comprehensive list.

I think right now though, the best application of a GUI would not be a full featured GUI for everything spellcast can and may do, with a database of every armor in the game, but rather as a tool to convert your text script files into spellcast XML with some input from the user to direct where these armor sets go and how they get used.

e.g. your script file may have 10 lines of /equips, but there's no indication of when that equipment is put on. So a GUI could import that file for the equipment, then you just say under what conditions that armor is equipped.

Once you've moved over to spellcast in the first place, keeping it up to date with new equipment you acquire and such will be easy.

[Aikar]

I finally have this working, You can now paste your XML into this:

SpellCast 2.x -> 2.30 Format Upgrader

and it will update it to 2.30 format for you!

[Kriz]

I finally have this working, You can now paste your XML into this:

SpellCast 2.x -> 2.30 Format Upgrader

and it will update it to 2.30 format for you!

Thanks, this will be pretty helpful. It does seem to be a little quirky, but not that hard to see what it was trying to do. It seems to switch off action and equip- here is a snippet of my result which shows how it glitches.

<equip when="AfterCast" set="Standard"></action> <!--Swap to Standard after cast-->
<action type="equip" when="Idle" set="Standard"></equip>
<equip when="Resting" set="Resting"></action> <!--Swap to Resting when rest-->
<action type="equip" when="midcast"><main>$%SpellElementStaff</main></equip><!--Swap to spell element staff on cast-->

[Aikar]

that bugged cause you didnt use a self close when there was no actual data in the action, which i didnt expect people to do so, 1 simple change will fix that.

fixed

fyi, <action type="equip" set="a"></action> is the same thing as <action type="equip" set="a" />

so <equip set="a" />

works w/o needing an extra </equip>

[Aikar]

RC12 Released

Fixes JP character issue that still remained in RC10. Confirmed and working now.
Fixes SpellInfo crash
Fixes crash on invalid XML
Fixes crash on disengage (at least it better)
Speed improvements on parsing rules by removing alot of redundant lookups that didnt need to be done but once.
Adds when="all" or when="any" (both work the same, just redundant multiple names to use) for all the when tags instead of having to do when="precast|midcast|aftercast|idle|engaged|heali ng" etc...
Fixed JP regex issue.
Added debug messages to advanced functions.

http://windower.net/plugins/dev/SpellCast.dll?RC12 - 2.30 RC12 - Normal build (this is the one you want unless you got a crashing problem and trying to help)
http://windower.net/plugins/dev/dbg/...st.dll?RC12dbg - 2.30 RC12 Debug build for crash dump creation (Read first post).