Ace Mods better than standalone? - Page 2

Kaelten · 05-09-06, 06:37 AM

I'm just going to say that "better" is a relative term and as all relative things it’s impossible to be definitive.

I've been using ace for over a year now and it makes my life easier. I enjoy coding with it more than I did when I tried to code stand alone mods.

And as the head of the ace project, I hate that we have become viewed as elitist and snobby. Only about half of the addons I use are ace'd

Ace, in its current form, has strengths and weaknesses. I hope that many of those weaknesses will be addressed in the next major version of ace (Ace2). I normally stay out of posts like this because I do not want to be misunderstood.

/sigh

I just hope that as a community we can overall work together and help one another be better coders regardless of whether an individual uses ace or not.

wereHamster · 05-09-06, 06:49 AM

I don't use Ace because I couldn't bother reading the documentation. I also don't understand why I should use Ace for the mods I develop, I don't see any advantage, or does someone want to tell me what could be donne better when coolDown used Ace?

FlareCDE · 05-09-06, 06:50 AM

There is no real definitive answer, as you can write a bad mod with or without Ace. Your milage may vary. When people advertise Ace mods, they frequently say "It's like this mod, but runs better." Which always frustrated me to no end. I mean, running better is great, but to me, features are more important.

I pointed this out in the Fubar comments awhile back. Back when someone was advertising Fubar on the official forums, if instead of simply saying "Titan panel sucks, Fubar is better," they had pointed out many of the useful features Fubar has over Titan, I probably would have switched then and there. Instead they just piled more angst on the already annoyed attitude I had towards Ace in general.

I have noticed a difference lately in the attitudes of Ace authors and users. I don't know if this is due to one specific person's presence, so I won't point fingers. But lately I've seen a pleasant change in how their addons are advertised, with a focus on features in addition to programming quirks. I haven't heard the canned "libraries make things faster" comment recently. In addition, I've seen a lot of the use of embeddable libraries and modularization, two things I do really like. Ace mods tend to do what they say they do, and nothing more, which is good for me.

I don't use all Ace mods. Some of the mods I use are known to be system heavy, with good reason. Some are fairly well designed, even not being Ace mods. But if there's an Ace mod that can provide functionality I'm seeking, I'm more likely to pick it up over other mods.

Hakker · 05-09-06, 07:24 AM

Well as an Ace user I can say this:

Many mods a basically stripped down versions of other mods. So you'll get like 100 mods instead of 25 but you get what you want instead of want you want and alot you don't want.

Lately Ace has made a trasition from more and more libraries to embeded libraries which keeps track of dependencies alot better. Also they start going more and more to a modular design (see Fubar, KC Items, oRa) you can just remove what you want and most of all most of the time the graphical option menu's tend to get loaded only when you need it.
These options make overall impact on performance and memory consumption alot smaller.

In the question are all ace mods better then non-ace mods I can say NO.

A good example for me is AceWardrobe. The could be awesome though but I find it to damn complicated to use where Itemrack is very easy to use.
I use Bagnon over Mybags and Onebag main reason is that those mods aren't updated anymore by the authors (Mybags is user maintained on the forums since Ramble is busy with his 3rd bag mod

) and Onebag seems to be discontinued. Besides that Tullers code is very good.

Besides the lean Ace mods I do tend to look the other way though ending up With Lozareths configurablity madness

Another genius in the mod community but with a totally different approach. give users maximum amount of freedom to his mods.

So to make a long story short NO not every mod that's aced is better. In the end you just need to test it yourself and what you like the most.

tralkar · 05-09-06, 10:17 AM

Originally Posted by Cairenn

tralkar, how about some reasons for your opinion? You are intitled to it and there is no such thing as a "wrong" opinion, but why not give the OP some feedback as to why you feel the way you do?

OK other than saying my NO, can you say LAG.. yes Ace and others alike are lag monsters.. If anyone knows about progaming will know this. Everyone that i ever hear say damn this lag, this game sucks and just have problems with the game use Ace, earth and others so I will still stand on my NO

Yes i make my own addons, have 7 of my own and use others. I also change others to the way i play. I have 30 addons and i don't have any lag useing them. Try this with your Ace, play the game and then turn all the addons off and you tell me WOW thats a hell of alot of lag....

Cladhaire · 05-09-06, 10:20 AM

Originally Posted by tralkar

OK other than saying my NO, can you say LAG.. yes Ace and others alike are lag monsters.. If anyone knows about progaming will know this. Everyone that i ever hear say damn this lag, this game sucks and just have problems with the game use Ace, earth and others so I will still stand on my NO

Earth has nothing to do with Ace, and Ace does nothing more than provide a framework for mod authors. I know more about programming than you may be able to possibly realize-- and your claims are outlandish, have no basis, and are completely ridiculous. Give me one user who experiences this-- and I'll either resolve it personally, or prove you wrong.

Devla · 05-09-06, 10:49 AM

Originally Posted by tralkar

OK other than saying my NO, can you say LAG.. yes Ace and others alike are lag monsters.. If anyone knows about progaming will know this.

I LOL'd IRL

jpupz · 05-09-06, 11:08 AM

I don't think tralkar could be anymore wrong. I recently switched from Titan Panel to FuBar (I was a faithful user of TP and never thought I'd switch, mind you), and it improved my performance significantly. I'm not as educated about Ace as some people on here, but I can say that FuBar, whether it's because of Ace or not, is executed 100 times better than TP.

Gnancy · 05-09-06, 11:14 AM

Unfortunately Cladhaire trying to convince someone that is unreasonable using reason rarely works

:shrugs:

***Cairenn*** · 05-09-06, 11:15 AM

I'd remind folks that debate is great, as long as it remains civil. I'm not saying it has degenerated yet, just reminding folks that it needs to continue to be civil.

Ratbert_CP · 05-09-06, 11:18 AM

You're funny...

Originally Posted by tralkar

OK other than saying my NO, can you say LAG.. yes Ace and others alike are lag monsters.. If anyone knows about progaming will know this. Everyone that i ever hear say damn this lag, this game sucks and just have problems with the game use Ace, earth and others so I will still stand on my NO

Technically, you can say that about *any* AddOn. They all contribute to the CPU and memory load by some measurable quantity.

Yes i make my own addons, have 7 of my own and use others. I also change others to the way i play. I have 30 addons and i don't have any lag useing them. Try this with your Ace, play the game and then turn all the addons off and you tell me WOW thats a hell of alot of lag....

BS. Your AddOns generate "lag". See my previous comment.

Also, read the other posts. An Ace AddOn can suck resources if improperly coded, and a standalone AddOn can be svelte and very low-impact. But in general (and I recognize this as a potentially flawed generalization), most Ace AddOns are written with a philosophy of minimal resource consumption. Hence the heavy use of embedded libraries and shared resources. Heck my own AddOn is probably bloated (while my data cache is nifty, I may very well be doing something bad), but I like to think I'm trying to be kind to the user.

Personally, I don't use Sea, Earth, Chronos, or any other library set, but I've heard they can be less then optimal in their resource utilization.

***Cairenn*** · 05-09-06, 11:22 AM

Just as an interesting, and somewhat related, aside. There has been a lot of coding practices improvements on the behalf of a very large number of authors since the inception of the WoWI-lounge where they (authors) hang out, compare notes and assist one another with improving their code. It's great to see the authors from multiple different "schools" [of thought] hanging out and helping one another. I'd invite any author that wants to improve to join us.

**Iriel** · 05-09-06, 11:28 AM

Originally Posted by Ratbert_CP

But in general (and I recognize this as a potentially flawed generalization), most Ace AddOns are written with a philosophy of minimal resource consumption. Hence the heavy use of embedded libraries and shared resources. Heck my own AddOn is probably bloated (while my data cache is nifty, I may very well be doing something bad), but I like to think I'm trying to be kind to the user.

I've been trying to stay out of this discussion, but just had to chime in here - most of the AddOns written by ANY who are active in the UI customization community (and a big nod to those who hang out in the #wowi-lounge IRC channel) are written with a philosophy of minimal impact.

And there's no way to be 'perfect' either, every shared resource is a balancing act between capability and actual use - you want an embedded library to have capabilities that make it useful to as many AddOns as possible, but a given user may only be using a fraction of those capabilities at one time (yet still may have to incur the runtime cost of the ones that aren't being used).

Any GENERAL argument about whether X is better than Y fails because really all you can ask is whether for a given situation, the current X is better than the current Y, both will likely evolve and improve (or maybe deteriorate).

Wobin · 05-09-06, 11:47 AM

Originally Posted by tralkar

OK other than saying my NO, can you say LAG.. yes Ace and others alike are lag monsters.. If anyone knows about progaming will know this.

I thought we were just talking about Ace?

Anyway. Please look at my addons and tell me what I need to do to reduce lag? I would certainly appreciate the help that you can provide, as your addons do not cause any lag whatsoever.

Gnancy · 05-09-06, 01:13 PM

Hehe this thread kinda became an all star cast of some of the addon communuity

Tuller · 05-09-06, 01:28 PM

Given two addons of similar coding quality and functionality, one Ace'd and one not:

In an enviroment without other Ace mods, the Ace'd one will probably more negatively impact performance.
In an enviroment with other Ace mods, the independent one will probably more negatively impact performance.
The Ace'd version may not be downloaded as much as the non Ace'd version, due to having a dependency.

If you're not going to take advantage of whatever functionality Ace provides (mainly small, it just works type addons) its probably not the best idea to use for that addon.

I'll note I'm saying this without actually having coded anything using Ace, nor having actually used any Ace addon for a long duration.

CrisCr0ss · 05-09-06, 01:58 PM

wow i wouldnt think this thread would pickup so much speed from original posting about 24hours ago, but im glad my overall feelings toward ace are that it saves on resources because it lowers the amount of depenencies and as a result reduces everything else I want more ACE'd Addons :P

Ratbert_CP · 05-09-06, 02:41 PM

Don't ask for Ace'd addons. Ask for well written addons.

Originally Posted by CrisCr0ss

wow i wouldnt think this thread would pickup so much speed from original posting about 24hours ago, but im glad my overall feelings toward ace are that it saves on resources because it lowers the amount of depenencies and as a result reduces everything else I want more ACE'd Addons :P

***Cairenn*** · 05-09-06, 03:49 PM

Originally Posted by Ratbert_CP

Ask for well written addons.

As the expression goes ...

QFT

Tekkub · 05-09-06, 05:26 PM

Originally Posted by Tuller

The Ace'd version may not be downloaded as much as the non Ace'd version, due to having a dependency.

As I said earlier (yea I know, it was burried in rant, you may have missed it), Ace itself is evolving into an embeddable framework (based off Iriel's amazing embed framework^^ ). Once things get hammered out and published for us to use *glares at Clad*, the dependancy will go buhbye. We've really taken a great liking to the embed design, it lets us maintain our libraries, manage updating them and sharing them, all without the user ever having to worry about anything. Heck, some people may end up using "Aced" addons and never even knowing that they're in some way different from the "normal" addons out there.

It really is the wave of the future *grin*