Ace Mods better than standalone?

[CrisCr0ss]

I've always wondered are Ace Mods better than standalone mods? As in do they use less resources, lower load times etc?

Also what is the different between Bosspanel/Fubar and Titan panel currently i use Titan Panel is Fubar/Bosspanel better and if so why?

[Inconspicuous]

I would say Yes, most of the time they use less resources and so on. If you've read up on Ace and/or the Ace forums you'd find out that their aim is to make and support slim addons without alot of options and so on. I myself have replaced nearly all my addons with Ace'd versions and the functionality remains, but the strain on my comp is reduced. So I'm a happy "customer" atleast

[iwod]

Read http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.p...ic,1336.0.html

Should answer your questions.

[tralkar]

one word... NO

[Cladhaire]

Originally Posted by tralkar one word... NO

Well thanks for your constructive feedback. If you'd read the thread you'd notice that the Ace Devs themselves say that an mod using Ace is not inherently better than another. Troll somewhere else, or give the OP some actual feedback.

[Tekkub]

Befine "better"

If you said "purdy, nice easy GUIs, tons of options, does everything I'd ever want and feeds my cat" then it's probably a NO

If you said "faster, smaller, less obtrusive" then the answer is generally yes.

We AceHoles don't necessarily think our works are "better" than everyone elses, it's just our sorta tradition to take other mods and make smaller versions. In most cases that's just weeding out all the extra bits we think are not vitally necessary. Some people like all those frills, we generally don't.

Fewer frills, faster mods.... generally

[Cairenn]

In many ways, your question is one of those subjective ones. "Better" for one person isn't necessarily "better" for another. Given that, thank you for providing context to illustrate the meaning in which you are using the word. Even with that context, however, it does still tend to be a case of personal preference. Some people swear by the Ace-based mods. Others don't like them. Go with what works for you

[Gello]

That thread improves my opinion of Ace a great deal.

I've previously had a bias against Ace. The bias disturbed me because it wasn't rooted in pragmatism so it wasn't really fair for an actual evaluation. But somewhere on the site it used to say everyone is too stupid to do slash commands on their own. Like wtf, how large was the team of geniuses that figured out how to do slash commands for everyone.

My opinion had changed lately as more and more Ace mods aren't copies of an existing mod, or they stop persecuting the mods they copy. And especially as actual performance took more weight than perceived performance.

Performance-killing mods can be made with or without Ace, but those signing onto Ace generally are disposed to making good mods. In the rare cases when they fail, they can be given some credit for trying (except when 90% of their description is spent patting themselves on the back. A classic example is the old Timex on curse-gaming.)

[Tekkub]

Hehe, Gello just didn't like Rowne *grin*. Rowne always did have a tendancy to say "my mod IS BETTER, the other one SUCKS" but not always back up his statements. And he always did talk too much

I am one that tries to steer clear of definitives at all costs. The only real case I can think of where I claimed my mod was better than another performance wise was PeriodicTable vs ReagentData, and I tried my damndest to back that up with numbers.

Although I do love the furry bastard, I must say that since Rowne moved on the general "attitude" of the Ace coders has shifted from "we'll just weed out all the GUI stuff and our mod will be better" to "okey, how can we improve upon this code's performance?" In some cases an Ace mod is a quickie "weeding" of an already fairly nice mod, other times it's a totaly redesign/rewrite based upon a good concept.

Oh and I always try to give credit to the initial source of a mod/idea I write up, like Gello's OnEventWatch had heavy influence on my own FuBar_DebugProfiler.

*edit* oh on a side note, Timex had some nastiness of it's own, mainly heavy use of tables as args (in most cases causing unneeded memory churn). The new author has improved Timex a fair amount. Heck, I find that same table-arg crap in some of Rowne's other mods too... he was too damn table-happy...

[Nuada Storm]

Here is my opinion. I am relatively new to the whole "Addon" and "Custom Interface" scene. I have only really been playing the game for six months. Currently, I am trying to move some things to ACE versions of MODs for a couple simple reasons.

1) Fubar. This has more options than Titan Panel and is easier to configure, arrange and customize than Titan Panel.

2) This is more important. Profiles. Now some mods have profiles but you have to go and create a profile for each mod. I have found that many mods store all their settings in one central file in the savedvariables folder instead of creating a new file in the character's respective folder. I don't know if it is a failing of the savevariables structure or a lack of knowledge. However, ACE provides profiles to all of its addons, it ties into MyAddOns (which allows you to control addons within the game) and has other nice features. If you are someone like me who has multiple characters with different layouts using the same addons, this helps. Right now my compilation of mods is being used on three computers and probably in 20 different configurations depending on the computer hardware and the character being played at the moment. Most of that is because of "ACED" addons.

ACE does have its shortcomings though. However most of this comes from the community around it. They tend to look down, in my opinion, on other ideas and libraries. A big failing on their part because they are missing out on what could be innovative ideas for the UI as a whole. I use ACE because it offers a few tools I desire and some of the Mods are nice for it. Some like AceWardrobe would never fit my needs because it doesn't have what I consider an necessary interface and relies on archaic slash commands. Nothing wrong with slash commands as an option but graphical programs should have a graphical user interface as well.

Ace is a tool, to be used and abused by WOW programmers everywhere. Nothing more, nothing less. If it fits your needs, then use it. If not, I am sure there is another solution just a mouse click away.

Again, all personal opinion.

[Tekkub]

Kinda funny the things you bring up Nuada:

Profiles: not all ace mods support this actually. I for one don't use AceDB very much cause I think it kinda sucks... yes, I think parts of Ace suck... anyway, my point is that although it's built into Ace itsself it's not always supported by the mods written in Ace.

myAddons: This support is actually kinda going by the wayside as Ace is evolving. It's a great idea yes, but myAddons can kinda be limiting at times. Plus it's a major hinderance with some of our module designs (like mine). The lack of metadata in modules was causing errors cause Ace thought they were addons and tried to register them. I'm not sure if that ever got fixed, honestly I kind astopped caring In the end Ace is evolving towards being an embeddable framework, so you're not going to have the dependancy on an addon named "Ace" in the (hopefully) near future in mods that take up the new system. As part of that transition I intend on maintaining an embeddable addon registrar. Think of this as kinda like myAddons, execpt it's always there. The user can install a mod to interact with the registrar (like my ModMenu from my Titan days will be reworked to do this). Basically in the end the user won't have to worry about getting mods to support myAddons or whatever, it will just be part of the mods that do support it.

ugh that was a lot of babble, you probably glazed over... I'm sorry. Short version: we like myAddons but we have plans for something better!

lets see where was I?

AceWardrobe: Honestly I think most of the Ace devs use ItemRack. It really is a nice mod and we don't feel a real need to try to improve upon it. Gello does some nice work, I've always liked his mods.

Slash commands and our attitude towards other mods/ideas: I think a lot of this did stem from Rowne honestly. He was a great guy, but he could be damn opinionated. If there's one thing I've learned of nerds, we're opinionated whiney lil bastards that can't hold up a proper debate. It all seems to end in flame wars doesn't it? Anyway, all things considered, yea we do tend towards slash commands, but not all of use like that. I hate it myself cause I'm suck a ****ty typer. In the end I really like menus, they're simple to use and simple to code. Especially with ckknight's DewDropLib now I'm heavily inclined to put my user interaction in menus. DewDrop was the "aceing" of blizzard's own menu GUI I was waiting for (remember that table-as-args thing I was *****ing about Rowne doing? I think he got it from Blizzy's dropdown lists ><).

I know the general stereotype of the Ace crew is the "holier than thou" attitude, and I really wish that stereotype would change. I personally compare the Ace crew to linux nerds (and a good portion of them are). There's this implied war between Ace and other mods just like the Windows/Linux war. I personally don't understand it... Anyway, I for one am trying my best to change that "stereotype" but who knows... I don't look down on all other mods, just ones that are poorly coded (like REALLY bad) or from certain people I can't stand (they tend to be people that have that "better than you" attitude being pined on the Ace group, ironically). Yea, in the end it's all highschool drama again isn't it? Funny that...

Okey, I'll stop rambling now. Just remember that the Ace devs don't all think they're better than everyone else

[speak]

i love ace mods, and most of the mods i use ARE either ace'd or done by authors who frequent the ace forums, but whose mods might not have an actual ace dependency.

there are mods out there like bongos/bagnon that arent ace dependent but which are still written very very well, and i use them

but still, whenever i see a new mod or a mod similar to one i'm using - whether it's ace'd or not, i do try to monitor the feedback it gets, the level of author involvement (this is where ace excels the most imo!) and might even test it out for myself to see how it compares to what i'm using now.

for instance, there are tons of tooltip mods, and i'm using Goodtip - have for months, just because i havent found a single (or even 2 or 3 together) that will give me that exact look/feature set.

i used flexbar, which was coming in around 5-6mb ui mem usage, and making my GC run faster and faster. i tested out VisorButtons (ace) and it pwns, but then i found Bongos and it does everything i need. with bongos i was able to replace flexbar and ctbarmod/ctbottombar mods all at the same time, since i dont do (or need) any of the fancy options or scripting that flexbar or VisorButtons support.

anyway, to answer your original question, are Ace mods better than standalone, i would definitely say a big YES!

[tralkar]

Still stand on my NO

[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?

[Tekkub]

Yea, why not back your opinion with some supporting arguements? Or would you rather I just say "Ace mods are better casue we write them"? That just puts us back at the whole issue of the "Ace dev stereotype" again doesn't it... :P

[Gello]

*edit* oh on a side note, Timex had some nastiness of it's own, mainly heavy use of tables as args (in most cases causing unneeded memory churn). The new author has improved Timex a fair amount. Heck, I find that same table-arg crap in some of Rowne's other mods too... he was too damn table-happy...

Hehe what made it even worse was it was a WorldFrame hook lol. He couldn't leave the poor WorldFrame alone. SwitchFix was another of his "perfect, can't be improved, you're an idiot if you don't use this" mods that not only did a WorldFrame hook but it did that unpack and 2-3 fairly expensive method calls every frame instead of only periodically.

And yeah the Timex here on wowinterface is much improved. I see curse-gaming has both changed and Timex doesn't appear there, but this is from a search cache:

As a coder, for the longest time I was against schedule-based AddOns because the task they performed was almost redundantly simple and yet, the two timers available at the time (CosmosSchedule and Chronos) were so ludicrously bloated it counterbalanced the whole ideal of a scheduler; which was to share and save resources. For quite a while I played the advocate of each AddOn creating its own timing system rather than relying on the bloat and resource-suckage of Chronos or CosmosSchedule but it seemed folks wanted the easy answer and more and more AddOns supported Chronos. I snapped, something had to be done. Timex is my answer to the issue, it does a simple task very effectively. The code is clean and everything that doesn't have to be there is an optional module that can be downloaded seperately (such as the slash-command system and the Chronos placeholder). << - Why should I use Timex? - >> For a long time now I've been something of a pioneer when it comes to resource-saving or so I'm told, I've inspired a couple of people along the way. I myself see this mentality as something of an obsession, one that revolves around not putting my poor beast of burden (my PC) through unneeded anguish. Due to this, I learned to code quite well, I scrimped and saved every last variable wherever I could. Thanks to being exposed to Turan's code, I went from being a decnet coder to a pretty damned good one. I still have a long way to go but my code is some of the cleanest you'll see anywhere. This impacts the timer because Chronos, despite what they say, does cause a performance lag even when idle due to their -always open- onUpdate. When it's not idle it's just nasty. Whereas Timex doesn't create an onUpdate at all, it hooks into an existing update (the WorldFrame_OnUpdate) and when it's run all the timers it needs to, it unhooks again cleanly. In this way we see the least amount of resources possible used, the execution is cleaner and it doesn't have an extra onUpdate causing redraw slowdown. Further, every aspect of Timex is written to be as small, lean and clean as possible. Timex is less than a tenth the size of Chronos, if you don't believe me then I invite you to look at both the code of Chronos and that of Timex. Finally, Timex has some features that Chronos and CosmosSchedule do not. However, in the end it's up to you which you prefer. Despite the fact that Timex is light-years ahead of other scheduling AddOns, some people will doubtlessly see it as a cheap knockoff because of the skilled marketing of the Cosmos team. I care not really. Those who try it and dare to look at the code will see the difference and those are the only folks that matter to me. << - How do I use it? - >> For both developers and users I've included a highly in-depth manual that covers the finer points of the Timex AddOn. Each of the functions that Timex has to offer is covered there, in great detail. Further if you wish to edit your .toc files instead of using the Chronos Placeholder then you can find out how to do that in there. The reason that and the chat-command are optional is because they're really not required for Timex to work. It just makes it easier for some people. Anyway, the developers won't even really have to look at the manual I doubt, just the code. The manual is there as more of a reference for those guys - I don't expect Timex ot be over your heads at all. The only reason I created such a detailed manual is because I know there are new coders joining the ranks every day and I wanted to give those guys as much help as possible. << - Got a quick-start guide? - >> Sure. Just delete Chronos, then toss Timex and the Chronos Placeholder in your AddOns folder and you're good to go. << - What extra features do you have? - >> Aside from infinitely cleaner code, better resource use, proper unhooking and hooking of functions (et cetera) ...

So yeah maybe it was disgust misdirected at Ace. :P I could go on but the guy at least tried and helped others make mods so that's a greater good.

I still squirm when I see mods heap praise all over itself. It's something I avoid doing at all cost because I know my stuff can be improved (and don't mind at all if others improve it), and when mods are actually perfect with no need for improvement, then our modding days are numbered.

[ploof]

Lol at Rowne's ego. I liked him anyways though, and some of his mods were amazingly fun (I used goldenrun until 1.1, and I loved his music mods).

Besides that, I Mostly see the ACE difference with mods that are obviously bloated, if neccessarily.

CT_RaidAssist/BossMods are an extremely excellent set of weapons most guilds could not manage BWL or MC or ZG or AQ, etc. without. The team of coders for these mods have consistently released a good product over and over again, to accolades and criticisms, for a very long time now. Without these coders, WoW would not be where it is today.

However, Since i've begun using an aced version of CT_Raid (Basically), xRaid and oRa mods, my lag has decreased so much in these same instances that it has renewed my interest in the game and revitalized my appetite for crawling through boring instances hours on end in search of loots.

Moral of the story? All mods do NOT need to be aced (imho), but the benefit of aceing some mods can be outstanding.

[dafire]

I think you can't say yes or no here. It's always the author that does the mod.

You can make a good standalone mod and you can do a bad ace mod. Just the label "ACE" on it don't tell you it's better or bader than the other one doing the same job.

I love fubar over titanpanel but I prefer itemrack over acewardrobe ... so take what you want
(not judging authors of titanpanel or acewardrobe, I never really checked their code just an example )

[ckknight]

The reason I wrote FuBar to use Ace is because Ace has a bunch of handy features that I don't need to write.

Safe hooking
easy event registering/unregistering
Profile support (which I consider horribly flawed, especially for something like FuBar, I have so many hacks because of this).
Standardized command line (I don't put much emphasis on this, as I don't really think FuBar, being a graphical tool, needs a command line)

Now I don't put AceDB up there. In fact, FuBar's system doesn't really use AceDB, I put in my own system (which is less "safe", but more raw, speedy, and handy).

Now if something came along that was better, I would probably switch to it, but for now, Ace works for me.

[Sykokaj]

I have been following Ace and been using Ace'd addons almost from the beginning of Ace (at least longer than I can remember). At first I only used smaller addons, partly because none of the "big" addons had been Ace'd yet, but also because I didnt pay much attention to memory usage. Then I started looking at my memory, and was shocked that I used almost 70mb of UI memory. I then threw out a bunch of addons that I rarely used, I started looking for replacement Ace versions.

Now I have an UI with the same, or perhaps even more functionality than before, but I only use about 42-46mb og UI memory.

Sure, Im not happy with the tooltip behaviour, but so far the addons I've found have either been totally bloated or lacking the things I wanted.

In general I would say yes, Ace is better than standalone addons, as long as you think about what the addons does, and how much strain it is to your system. A tooltip mod that causes garbage collection every 30 seconds is not really usable, and frankly not really a need-to-have addon.

But as already mentioned, an Ace'd addon is not automatically better, and a standalone addon is not automatically crap. You have to decide on your own what you like best