Omen - Ace Threat Meter - Page 55

Eruil · 07/19/07, 9:06 AM

It was more all healer who seemed to have trouble with the reset than just paladin (not a huge issue since healer are very unlikely to aggro, but it's quite annoying since they destroy the visualisation of omen).

On a side note, there is no reset when Supremus switch back to "tanking phase", but you are probably aware of this.

• Marroc · 07/19/07, 9:42 AM

Originally Posted by sp00n

On Sunday we were killing Void Reaver and a Fire Mage had exceptional threat, although the fight had just begun. I suppose the threat wasn't cleared between attempts, but I cannot tell you if he had Omen installed (forgot to scroll up on the screenshot).

He is, in fact, running omen. There is no * at the end of name to suggest that he's running KTM :P

Gurruk · 07/19/07, 10:35 AM

The description on files.wowace.com says this addon is still in beta. Is this your opinion Antiarc?

Because of the issues of last night with Omen, even after 3 updates and downloads of the whole guild, it had to be scrapped and we moved back to KTM just so we could continue. The change pace is frenetic and your responsiveness is appreciated. Could it be time to freeze the existing code base, work out all the bugs with threat calculations, display problems, and get a good known stable release so we can all move to it with confidence?

"Its built with Ace", "Its coded better!", and "It takes less memory!" only go so far with a guild full of people who could care less about development religion or don't know and will never know the difference between "embed" and "external".

I really want your mod to be successful, and maybe its just my guilds makeup and we shouldn't be using an "use at your own risk" mod. However, being a software guy myself I do know at some point you have to get a release out the door that is solid and stable.

• Marroc · 07/19/07, 10:44 AM

Originally Posted by Gurruk

The description on files.wowace.com says this addon is still in beta. Is this your opinion Antiarc?

Because of the issues of last night with Omen, even after 3 updates and downloads of the whole guild, it had to be scrapped and we moved back to KTM just so we could continue. The change pace is frenetic and your responsiveness is appreciated. Could it be time to freeze the existing code base, work out all the bugs with threat calculations, display problems, and get a good known stable release so we can all move to it with confidence?

"Its built with Ace", "Its coded better!", and "It takes less memory!" only go so far with a guild full of people who could care less about development religion or don't know and will never know the difference between "embed" and "external".

I really want your mod to be successful, and maybe its just my guilds makeup and we shouldn't be using an "use at your own risk" mod. However, being a software guy myself I do know at some point you have to get a release out the door that is solid and stable.

Yes its beta quality. It's also in active development, and is updated 1-5+ times a day.

There have been many 'good known stable releases' you just happened to have made the move when antiarc had dry coded in something that didn't work >_< (Note to antiarc: stop dry coding things :P)

Why should you use omen over ktm right now? If you can't get everyone to keep it updated, you shouldn't, but if you can it's MUCH smaller and better written than KTM. Hell if you don't believe me open up KTM's code and look around, then go look around in Threat.

Elhana · 07/19/07, 11:07 AM

Originally Posted by Marroc

Yes its beta quality. It's also in active development, and is updated 1-5+ times a day.

There have been many 'good known stable releases' you just happened to have made the move when antiarc had dry coded in something that didn't work >_< (Note to antiarc: stop dry coding things :P)

Why should you use omen over ktm right now? If you can't get everyone to keep it updated, you shouldn't, but if you can it's MUCH smaller and better written than KTM. Hell if you don't believe me open up KTM's code and look around, then go look around in Threat.

atm Threat+Omen uses more ram with libraries than KTM
KTM is modular and easy to read, well commented

Threat-1.0.lua, 1st glance

function ThreatLib:PLAYER_ENTERING_WORLD()
	local previousRunning = self.running
	for _ = 1, 1 do
	...
	end
	...
end

now explain me what for "for _ = 1, 1 do ... end" is here?

• Marroc · 07/19/07, 11:14 AM

Originally Posted by Elhana

atm Threat+Omen uses more ram with libraries than KTM
KTM is modular and easy to read, well commented

Threat-1.0.lua, 1st glance

function ThreatLib:PLAYER_ENTERING_WORLD()
	local previousRunning = self.running
	for _ = 1, 1 do
	...
	end
	...
end

now explain me what for "for _ = 1, 1 do ... end" is here?

That is there to fix an issue with blizzard's code I believe. Has to do with the lag between when the entering world message fires, and when the player actually shows up in the game world.

Omen itself is like 10kb. Threat running is comparable to KTM's size, but it can be used by any number of ace addons that want to take advantage of it. Omen and Threat are also completely load on demand and are disabled 99% of the time.

KTM is NOT easy to use, you have to physically set main targets every single pull. Threat does this for you, tracks ALL mobs in an encounter (not just the ones the tank is on) and easily displays the information for your target.

Long story short, you don't want to use it? Fine. I really don't think Antiarc cares that much :P Omen was developed as an alternative to KTM, not a replacement.

• frmorrison · 07/19/07, 11:22 AM

Originally Posted by Antiarc

(I really shouldn't be allowed to drycode away from WoW)

That was a bad evening yesterday, I really like Omen and hard locks are annoying. I ended up disabling all addons because I didn't realize what was causing the issue at first, it was interesting playing with a base UI for a bit

.

Thanks for updating I had no issues with an update around 10 EST, but try not to do that again.

I appreciate all your work!

Myonax · 07/19/07, 11:31 AM

Originally Posted by Antiarc

TPS numbers and hardlock are fixed.

(I really shouldn't be allowed to drycode away from WoW)

As the above poster, we do appreciate your enthusiasm but a bad update pre-raid start can make the entire night of raiding miserable. Thankfully I figured out it was Omen causing my lockups and had all the omen users turn it off for the raid, but I still lost 7 gold in repairs figuring out it was omen locking me up.

Bag · 07/19/07, 11:44 AM

Pshh, 7 gold is what I spend on repairs when I DON'T die.

Gurruk · 07/19/07, 11:47 AM

Originally Posted by Marroc

Yes its beta quality. It's also in active development, and is updated 1-5+ times a day.

There have been many 'good known stable releases' you just happened to have made the move when antiarc had dry coded in something that didn't work >_< (Note to antiarc: stop dry coding things :P)

Why should you use omen over ktm right now? If you can't get everyone to keep it updated, you shouldn't, but if you can it's MUCH smaller and better written than KTM. Hell if you don't believe me open up KTM's code and look around, then go look around in Threat.

I made the move to Omen two weeks ago for the entire guild. Because of the issues last night I had to move back to KTM. I was updating to a newer version thinking it might be a good idea to get all the fixes from the last two weeks. Since I really can't tell what's changed and fixed from release to release easily its a crap shoot.

You don't seem to understand that most people don't care its "well written". To them, they downloaded the latest version last night and what happened? TPS calcs and threat was all wrong in one (that was the perception at least) and then a pop-up made it impossible to use it after a second update. To the average non-coding gamer that says "poorly written".

And I would hope Antairc cares if people use his addon. What I'm not sure he realizes is just how many people are using it and how important it is to move to a more pragmatic approach to updating.

• Marroc · 07/19/07, 11:57 AM

Originally Posted by Gurruk

I made the move to Omen two weeks ago for the entire guild. Because of the issues last night I had to move back to KTM. I was updating to a newer version thinking it might be a good idea to get all the fixes from the last two weeks. Since I really can't tell what's changed and fixed from release to release easily its a crap shoot.

You don't seem to understand that most people don't care its "well written". To them, they downloaded the latest version last night and what happened? TPS calcs and threat was all wrong in one (that was the perception at least) and then a pop-up made it impossible to use it after a second update. To the average non-coding gamer that says "poorly written".

And I would hope Antairc cares if people use his addon. What I'm not sure he realizes is just how many people are using it and how important it is to move to a more pragmatic approach to updating.

That would be the reason for my "(note to Antiarc: stop dry coding things :P)" comment.

You'll have to excuse my use of terms as I'm a CS major, so when I say well written, I'm talking about elegance of code and efficiency, not if it has bugs or not.

There is a reason Omen is in Beta and not RC, so we, the community, can help Antiarc find these sort of problems before Omen is widely used.

Unfortunately, given KTMs current monopoly, Omen is being used far more than it should be at the moment.

There is a reason it says 'Use at your own risk' and that's because it's still very much a work in progress, it's just not crashing 24/7 so it's testable now. Honestly, I'd suggest waiting for an RC release (which is what my raiding group is doing). We have encouraged some of our more tech savvy raiders to make the switch, but for the general group we've let them make the decision on their own.

edit:
note to self: lrn2spell

Spider · 07/19/07, 12:10 PM

I have a problem/Bugreport about Omen (More likely, Threat-1.0..) and wanted to poke in and see.

As an Elemental Shaman, Your main spell is Lightning Bolt
This gets affected by your lovely little talent called "Elemental Precision" for a nice amount of threat reduction.

However. If you add another fun little toy, Called [The Lightning Capacitor] you end up throwing out another Lightning Bolt once in a while. (Well, With a 43% critrate you end up tossing it out 1 in 7 bolts, but that's another matter) which in fact -doesn't- get the Threat Reduction from Elemental Precision talents.

Now I'm in a bit of a bind, as a threat-restricted class you are very dependant on your threatmeter to hold you back, and finding out that after, say, 4 minutes of combat you are ~13-18k higher in threat than you are according to the threat meter, you have some nice issues. :-/

Sad to say, I've wiped my party on the prince due to this bug a couple of times before I figured out what the heck was up. Hopefully this means someone will either fix it, or b) that its reported for posterity.

• Marroc · 07/19/07, 12:15 PM

Originally Posted by Spider

I have a problem/Bugreport about Omen (More likely, Threat-1.0..) and wanted to poke in and see.

As an Elemental Shaman, Your main spell is Lightning Bolt
This gets affected by your lovely little talent called "Elemental Precision" for a nice amount of threat reduction.

However. If you add another fun little toy, Called [The Lightning Capacitor] you end up throwing out another Lightning Bolt once in a while. (Well, With a 43% critrate you end up tossing it out 1 in 7 bolts, but that's another matter) which in fact -doesn't- get the Threat Reduction from Elemental Precision talents.

Now I'm in a bit of a bind, as a threat-restricted class you are very dependant on your threatmeter to hold you back, and finding out that after, say, 4 minutes of combat you are ~13-18k higher in threat than you are according to the threat meter, you have some nice issues. :-/

Sad to say, I've wiped my party on the prince due to this bug a couple of times before I figured out what the heck was up. Hopefully this means someone will either fix it, or b) that its reported for posterity.

Out of curiosity are the shaman lightning bolt and [The Lightning Capacitor] bolts named the same in the combat log? If so, that may pose a problem for figuring out threat of lightning bolts for an elemental shaman with the trinket.

Hopefully Blizzard did something to the combat log message that says like 'from Lightning Capacitor' or similar, and Antiarc just isn't catching it.

edit:
If they are the same, you could possibly watch the charge debuff (don't think it has a duration) and just apply what ever the threat difference is when it is removed. Though, that may be a kind of shaky solution to the problem.

Elhana · 07/19/07, 12:25 PM

Originally Posted by Marroc

That is there to fix an issue with blizzard's code I believe. Has to do with the lag between when the entering world message fires, and when the player actually shows up in the game world.

oh... lol... really? Are you sure? Do you ever wrote any code yourself?
I remember writing some simple code in basic when I was 7 yo and to make code run slower, I'd put some empty loop, but it's not even a case there. It is most likely used to mark a code block there or it might have just been left after some change and line can simply be removed. Just to clarify it was just an example or something useless in Antiarc's "clean" code, just opened a file for a few seconds. Nevertheless Threat code atm looks like a bunch of hacks all over it with variables/functions defined in order they were coded.

10 kb of code? well, then you can take addon A, get all of it's code into some other file, call it a library and keep a loader 1 kb in size and claim your addon is 1kb. Fact is Threat and Omen being run alone with it's libraries take more memory than KTM being run alone.
The only major advantage of Threat library is a fact that it uses parser library which is in fact the greatest advantage Ace mods have over standalone ones since it allows the most intense part of addon to be split between multiple mods, but it is hardly a Threat/Omen accomplishment.

On the other hand seeing how Threat/Omen doesn't really care about users, but more of it's bloated greatness and virtually less resource usage at the same time allowing such silly things as softlocks to be committed without any testing whatsoever into the main code branch, KTM with it's pcalls and slow paced updates seems way more friendly to end user atm

ps. besides that new KTM feature of user made bossmods that can be created and broadcasted to the raid RDX alike seems really sweet for when you learn new encounter or want to test your threat theories during the raid. Really looking forward for it to be released

• Marroc · 07/19/07, 12:35 PM

Originally Posted by Elhana

oh... lol... really? Are you sure? Do you ever wrote any code yourself?
I remember writing some simple code in basic when I was 7 yo and to make code run slower, I'd put some empty loop, but it's not even a case there. It is most likely used to mark a code block there or it might have just been left after some change and line can simply be removed. Just to clarify it was just an example or something useless in Antiarc's "clean" code, just opened a file for a few seconds. Nevertheless Threat code atm looks like a bunch of hacks all over it with variables/functions defined in order they were coded.

Last time I checked that event did have an issue where you couldn't act on it right away, but I didn't write the code, so it's just a guess.

Originally Posted by Elhana

10 kb of code? well, then you can take addon A, get all of it's code into some other file, call it a library and keep a loader 1 kb in size and claim your addon is 1kb. Fact is Threat and Omen being run alone with it's libraries take more memory than KTM being run alone.
The only major advantage of Threat library is a fact that it uses parser library which is in fact the greatest advantage Ace mods have over standalone ones since it allows the most intense part of addon to be split between multiple mods, but it is hardly a Threat/Omen accomplishment.

Except again, only 10kb of code is loaded into memory most of the time, this is something KTM can't do, it's either off completely, or on. It can't just go 'oh it's raid time let me turn myself on' and then when you get out of the group go 'i'm not needed anymore, guess I should get rid of my code until i'm needed again' Also multiple addons use threat... That's 200-300kb of code that only has to be running once, rather than a number of times.

Originally Posted by Elhana

On the other hand seeing how Threat/Omen doesn't really care about users, but more of it's bloated greatness and virtually less resource usage at the same time allowing such silly things as softlocks to be committed without any testing whatsoever into the main code branch, KTM with it's pcalls and slow paced updates seems way more friendly to end user atm

ps. besides that new KTM feature of user made bossmods that can be created and broadcasted to the raid RDX alike seems really sweet for when you learn new encounter or want to test your threat theories during the raid. Really looking forward for it to be released

Wow. Did you even read this thread? Not care about it's users? Antiarc is putting in a very little feature, that I'm pretty sure I'm going to be the only person using it, solely because I asked him to.

What part of BETA AND IN ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT did you miss the first time? The code is NOT intended to be 100% stable. Bossmods can be created by users of threat as well. Yes the RDX feature is kind of nifty, but threat can do it as well, there just isn't an interface for it.

I really suggest you read the thread, and try and grasp why the mod was developed before you come here and start bashing it randomly because you jumped the gun and forced your raid to rely on a beta quality mod. Again, it says "Use at your own risk" on the addon for a reason.

Spider · 07/19/07, 12:40 PM

Originally Posted by Marroc

Out of curiosity are the shaman lightning bolt and [The Lightning Capacitor] bolts named the same in the combat log? If so, that may pose a problem for figuring out threat of lightning bolts for an elemental shaman with the trinket.

Unfortunately, Yes. *sighs* Not as with the extra one from Lightning Overload, anyhow, I'll get a proper logparse out for it in case you need one.

• Marroc · 07/19/07, 12:42 PM

Originally Posted by Spider

Unfortunately, Yes. *sighs* Not as with the extra one from Lightning Overload, anyhow, I'll get a proper logparse out for it in case you need one.

Would probably help, though I have a feeling it may lead to an exception having to be put in by Antiarc >_<

Alternatively, we can just bug Blizzard to change the name of the attack :P

◊ Praetorian · 07/19/07, 12:47 PM

Ehlana, stop trolling. Take it to the curse-gaming KTM thread.

Originally Posted by frmorrison

That was a bad evening yesterday, I really like Omen and hard locks are annoying. I ended up disabling all addons because I didn't realize what was causing the issue at first, it was interesting playing with a base UI for a bit

.

Thanks for updating I had no issues with an update around 10 EST, but try not to do that again.

I appreciate all your work!

And yes, basically, this. Antiarc, I think we all know we're using "beta" software here, and that development builds are grabbed with WAU, and so forth. I think we've all come to accept that sometimes we'll run WAU and some mod will stop working due to a library screwup, or will start spitting LUA errors, or will have odd behaviors. And then we either live with it, disable it, or revert to a stable build. But I can't say I've ever had a WAU download that hardlocked WoW without any obvious indicator of what was doing it except checking a changelog from my last WAU runthrough to see which mods might have changed in ways that might be likely to cause something like that. Not to belabor the point, but beta or not, the reality is that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people are downloading each new build that goes up on wowace every evening before raid time. It's reasonable to expect that things won't work perfectly and that maybe threat will be wrong for a given class or a given mechanic or there'll be a display glitch. I don't think it's reasonable to have an infinite loop that occurs 100% of the time in group combat, because something was never tested at all.

If there's a change to some random bossmod, or to threat calculations with a particular trinket, obviously you as developer can't run out and test that, so of course it's quite reasonable to expect the userbase to test it. But changes that may or may not completely crash WoW should not go live without a basic confirmation that they don't, you know, crash WoW, or pop up a bunch of errors. There are an awful lot of changelog entries like "drycode fix to blah blah" followed 15 minutes later by "fixed typo in blah" and 10 minutes later by "fixed another typo, oops." Stuff like that just makes me glad I didn't happen to run WAU during one of those windows.

So yes, thanks for all the work, but please be mindful of the practical implications of untested releases.

• Apate · 07/19/07, 1:29 PM

Rather than incite the KTM vs.Omen debate within this guild, can anyone give a range of revisions to be avoided? I'd like to be able to tell people individually "hey, your Threat is going to freeze you up, please update" without making a big post about it. I'd hate for a badly coded release to make me switch back to KTM - the performance increase on my girlfriend's computer is hugely noticeable.

◊ Praetorian · 07/19/07, 1:44 PM

Originally Posted by Apate

Rather than incite the KTM vs.Omen debate within this guild, can anyone give a range of revisions to be avoided? I'd like to be able to tell people individually "hey, your Threat is going to freeze you up, please update" without making a big post about it. I'd hate for a badly coded release to make me switch back to KTM - the performance increase on my girlfriend's computer is hugely noticeable.

4413X to anything before 44144, I'd say? 44144 was:

* r44144 | antiarc | 2007-07-18 19:52:42 -0400 (Wed, 18 Jul 2007) | 1 line
* Threat-1.0: Fix to the hardlock error. Infinite loops are bad, mmmkay?