Deranged

I was tanking things of nastyness with my Mage earlier, quite unbuffed and I found myself thinking. "Bah, if only Deranged had a reminder system so I wouldn't keep forgetting these things," I thought... and then it hit me, "Hey, waitaminute, Deranged can do that, I can make it so!". So I did and now it has.

Okay, so ... new version.

There's a basic rundown of the new features in the changelog, I've added a more detailed version of those explanations in the manual. The chat parser isn't in there yet, that'll be in the next release which will likely be the fourth milestone (that will hopefully be filled with new and exciting things).

Still, even though the parser's not in there there are a number of things I felt I wanted to do before moving on, missing things that were bothering me, general polish, areas that suffered a lack of configuration options and so on. I feel satisfied with the upgrades I've made in that respect so I'm ready to move on.

The next release of Deranged might take a while to get hammered out but hopefully it'll be worth it.

So I've been giving the chat-parser some thought and here's the final design I have in mind (I always like having a design ready before I start plugging away at code, otherwise the code might be useless and bloaty and that's not something anyone wants) ...

Basically, it'll be modularised and it'll be primarily for raid applications. Here's an example, let's say someone sets up a raid say which has;

[dt I failed to interrupt %t, nastyness incoming!] [ds arooga]

What that would do is put 'I failed to interrupt targetname, nastyness incoming!' up on the screen via SCTAlert with anyone who happens to have Deranged. If they also have the sound module then it'll play the 'arooga.mp3' if they have that file.

In other words, I'm just thinking of a raid warning system which is dynamic (not bosstimers or the likes, that's best done by BigWigs) and controlled by the players. I might also include things like ...

[dt n-bob Pull back!]

And ...

[dt c-priest Against the wall!]

So that the messages are only intercepted by say, the person named Bob or those who're of the Priest persuasion. It could also be used by Priests and the likes to tell certain people or groups of people to come into range for healing, debuffing and so on. In fact, with the correct selection of macros it could make for a more pavlovian and instinctive solution in raids where people might get to relate sound X to action Y and so on.

Now here're my thoughts:

1. Should this be a separate addon or should it be part of Deranged? I could likely share more code around if it were part of Deranged, what I've been thinking is that Deranged could become more of a general alert system for things that aren't handled by other mods.

2. Am I missing anything? Before I start, can anyone think of useful features that I could and probably should include? Are there applications I haven't thought of or ways in which this could be expanded?

Now's your chance to have your say on this before I start plugging away at it (which will likely be tomorrow). I'm sorry this took so long but I wanted to let the idea percolate to be sure what I actually wanted to do with it before I proceeded.

If you use Internet Explorer, try this;

Make sure IE is closed and then right click on the Internet Explorer icon, it should give you the option to clear all the stored cache stuff, do that and make sure that the stored cache items are deleted too. If the file is still the same then, try repeating the procedure and rebooting.

In Firefox, it's somewhat easier;

Make sure that no pages at WoWI are open in any tabs, then go into Options > Privacy > Cache and hit the clear button. Close and reopen the browser then come back to this page.

The file should show as it's supposed to, then. For some reason, the page didn't update in my caches either after the 02.00.00 version. Wiping the cache helped me so hopefully it'll help you too.

As for what I have in mind, basically I'm thinking that you could enter a string, any string and Deranged would watch the chatframes for that string, if it sees it you can have it perform the standard Deranged items on seeing it.

I was thinking the same possibly for events, and expanding on it later.

Okay guys, so I'm curious of your opinions on a couple of things. I have a few ideas for Dranged but I'm not sure whether I should do them, so I'd like some input.

First of all, I'm tempted to create a module to allow buffs to be casted more easily. For example, I think it might be possible to allow Deranged to include macros, so you could enter a macro into Deranged that would be fired when the Deranged key is pressed. What the macro does is dependent on the last thing that Deranged parsed, it'd basically be an easy recast for things like Lightning Shield or Rockbiter. I'm not 100 per cent sure it's possible but I think it is, should I try or is that too much like botting? I'm not sure myself, this is why I ask.

I'm also tempted to make Deranged Dual-Core™ (hurr), by this I mean that I have a new idea for a couple of new bases in mind which would work off the same principle and using shared code. What I'm thinking is that I could have Deranged work with parsed chat text or events and do the usual Deranged things in response to those. What do you think?

Consider both of the above and let me know your thoughts, I'll listen to what everyone has to say on this but I think that Deranged has a lot of potential and right now it just isn't realising it as much as it could be, that's why I'm thinking along these lines of expansion.

Thanks for reading!

New version and a new milestone at that! No new features this time but a lot of reworked code, everything I've done in this release is contained within the Updates.txt file, either in the zip or at Google Docs. I'm certainly doing a better job of keeping track of what I've changed now that I'm consistently updating that file.

Oh and if there are modules you don't use, check out the manual as that details exactly what you can delete to get rid of all the parts surrounding those modules.

Okay, that's it. I'm done. I'm going back to bed.

(Edit)

Who can spot the typo in the library names? <<

I was swapping libraries and testing Deranged with standalone and embedded (as I do with each release) but this time I forgot to rename one back. So Pastmaster has found itself named *Cough* Pastamaster. Take out the a and everything will work peachy, if you have the standalone then you have nothing to worry about.

I really needed to go to bed earlier.

(Edit)

There, got that silly directory name typo fixed. Gaw, I would've made a perfect milestone this time too, if not for that.

Ah, the update's gone through, hooray!

Ah, it's done that to me before, I think the update system is a bit buggy. The thing is, according to my control panel for editing this page even, it says the latest file is Deranged.02.03.02.R.zip but you're right, on clicking the link it goes to 02.00.00.R. It's all very strange.

I don't want to keep you waiting, so what I've done whilst it's being revalidated is put it up on a file host. You can find the latest version at YourFileHost for the time being, I'm sure the latest will validate here quickly enough but just in case something goes wrong again...

Either way, you've got access to the latest now. Sorry about that.

(Edit)

Hm, that's twice it's eaten my 02.03.02.R version now, if this third attempt doesn't succeed then I'll try and get ahold of the management to see if they can't help out, it's probably some weird database burp or somesuch. Either way, the latest is up on YourFileHost (link above) until I can get this sorted out, I do apologise for the inconvenience.

I've been busy ...again. << Check out the changelog and see what I've done, I've fixed a few things I've found that needed fixing, I added a new element for better database control and most importantly, I got my hands dirty with my Pastmaster Lib and retooled the buffchecker to make it more robust and to ... allow weapon buffs! Deranged can now do weapon buffs, when they start, when they end, the whole shebang.

I don't know about you guys but I needed that last part because due to being a bit partially sighted, visual cues are hard to follow. Sound cues? Much easier. Of course, I mightn't have made it if I didn't need it but I hope the rest of you enjoy the inclusion too!

This was a hard night's work, pretty much. Just clearing up after the second milestone, I did a lot more testing in areas I hadn't thought to and I think I've dragged out just about every last bug. Let me know if you find any that I haven't spotted.

If you think that's something, just wait until you see the second milestone. I don't want to come over as big-heady but I am proud of this one, if only a little. I've put real effort into testing and polishing this release up, especially after the botched first two versions. I'm having so much fun running around with my Draenei technoshaman too and his little totems that now sound suspiciously like a proton pack. So I think the applications of Deranged just grew once again...

Anyway, I hope you and everyone else here enjoys using this as much as I enjoyed putting it together. There shouldn't be any problems this time but if there are, I'll do my utmost to fix them as quickly as possible. As always too, suggestions for new modules are always welcome as at the time of putting this together (after a little brainstorming), I couldn't come up with anything else myself. At least, nothing of worth.

So, give it a shot, play around with it and have fun. A final thought before I sign off with this post; it'd be really fun to start a sort of collaborative Deranged archive of sounds and settings for this mod. I wouldn't know how to go about it really so I'd have to give it some serious thought but this could become something special if we could get proper (non frivolous) alert sounds for all of the buffs that time out silently. Just a thought anyway, so off I go. Have fun!

I see the problem and personally, I plead the fifth and blame it directly upon the fever I had. << The problem is that I had made changes ages and ages ago to fix an error and I thought I'd committed them with .01 but comparing the code between my local version and the .01 uploaded, this is apparently not the case.

Try .02, that really should work for everyone. The embedded libs should be fine and SCT on any settings should be fine.

The next time I don't see problems that others do, feel free to hit me with a cluebat and ask whether I've actually comitted my latest changes. Le sigh.

(Edit)

Also, it's about time I started using a Changelog, too. I'll do that.