Camora

Since I started reading these forums, I have seen Ace2 based mods touted as superior to most other mods, but I am not sure exactly why. As the title says, what exactly are the specific advantages of Ace2 mods? Is it only low resource usage, or are they superior in some other specific ways as well?

 

Groglox

http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php?topic=6.0

Covers the other aspects well.

 

Shadowed

Sigh here we go again, the answer is simple.

Use what you want, the people who use only Ace2 mods (or claim that they are the best) are just as foolish as the people who only use non-Ace2 mods, base your choice of addons on the features it provide, not the library it uses which is only the concern of a developer.

 

Camora

Thank you, that is the kind of response that, believe it or not, I was looking for. A definitive "Yes they are just better, that is why everyone uses them." or "No, it is simply preference".

 

Elhana

First of all the benefit from using Aced addons for end user might be from non existant (might get worse than standalone even) if only 1 addon using a library to some decent amounts when there is multiple addons, but in general it is a positive thing.
On the other hand some addon authors are overusing libraries when it is clearly not needed. (/wave Nymbia - ArenaPointer used to be dependant 500kb of libraries for an addon that only adds 3 numbers to UI, eventually all dependancies got removed). Embedded libraries increasing GUI loading times.
Most people like Aced addons for ability to update it with WAU, however some addon authors never read the SVN manuals and commiting all changes directly to trunk, often breaking the addon.
Common GUI for most addons. This is a question of what you like. I can't stand dropdown interface for such a complex addon like Bigwigs for example, therefore I use DBM.

I wouldn't say there is really that much of a benefit for addon end user really, but for developer Ace gives ability to create addons quickly with less effort

In the end it's all about what suits you best really

 

◊ Kalman

One of the benefits people aren't mentioning is that many addon authors *aren't* particularly strong coders; the advantage of using libraries is that (at least in the case of widely used ones like CandyBar or Parser) the code tends to be reviewed by many eyes and is (usually) better as a result.

There's also a specific advantage in the case of addons that parse the combat log - basing it off a common Parser reduces processing requirements by parsing *once* and then passing the info along to each seperate addon, rather than each addon parsing seperately.

Ace isn't a magic bullet; not being Ace is by no means a black mark against an addon either. There are advantages and disadvantages to a library system like Ace; in the end, both are generally outweighed by the addon itself.

In other words:

don't use Cartographer instead of Gatherer if you like Gatherer better just because Cartographer is Ace-based. Use Cartographer because you like it better.

 

Kegsta

I switched to all ace addons simply because the auto updater is so easy to keep all my mods up to date, and it does have a version of 99% of other mods out there, some of them are a little more annoying to get used to (eg closetgnome vs itemrack) but in the end the hastle of manually updating 10 different mods just isn't worth it.

Omen also has the great function of telling you when someone else is running a new version than you are, This is a great feature and id like to see it in more mods.

 

Donjo

This is pretty much why I switched. It is a pain to dig through Curse's messy site to see if Bongos has been updated.

 

subscience

WoWAceUpdater sealed the deal for me as well. I've always liked the high level of polish of Ace mods, but when updating your entire library of mods becomes as easy as pressing F12, I don't think I could ever go back to manual downloading/updating.

 

Nomad_Wanderer

I opened this thread with a sigh thinking "Yay, another stupidfest incoming". However, glad to see that the same old topics are not being rehashed.

The updater is a huge win imo as well, but there are other Multi-site updaters out there.

My main reason for trying to use mostly ace2 mods is that there is a community out there. Somewhere to ask questions, peer review, share ideas/layouts, etc. Also, they use a consolidated source code repository. If 1 developer checks in a VERY bad change that causes significant harm, there's a chance that another dev might step in and disable that change, or use IRC/messaging to get in touch with the original author to get it fixed quickly. The community is pretty active and helpful in identifying bugs, suggesting features, or other improvements.

Also, whether it truly helps or not, I like the idea of a shared library/common spec... I think the common spec might assist with content localization too...

 

Lazare

There are some benefits to users, although they mostly only pop up if you have a lot of Ace addons. The big one, as others have mentioned, is WAU and its friends - but it doesn't make much sense to run WAU to update 1-2 addons.

The big advantages to Ace are mostly for developers, however. Since there are a lot of Ace libraries, it can rapidly speed up the development process. Need to make some timer bars? Already written. Need a simple config gui? Already written. Need a big list of localized spell names? Already written. Need to parse the combat log? Already written. And so on.

Te downside is that if you've got a single addon which is using a lot of Ace libraries, it'll typically be something of a resource hog. The upside is that if you've got several addons which are all using the same Ace libraries, you'll typically see some resource savings (and probably fewer bugs). After all, what's typically going to be better - 5 addons each with their own custom timer bar implementation? Or 5 addons all using one timer bar library?

 

• Chicken

I actually found this recent addition to the WoWAce Wiki a pretty good explanation of the who's and what's. It's not really written from the point of view of what Ace2 actually is, but it does a good job of explaining the (dis)advantages.

In particular I personally find that some of the mods on there suffer from very, very bad 'feature creep', that is, additions to the basic mod which should really should be included as a separately downloadable plug-in, but others might very well like that. I recently stopped using Pitbull for that reason; even with disabling the parts I didn't care about in the addon configuration screen I found it taking up too much memory.
I've switched over to a version of oUF someone else was updating instead now, downside is that it's only configurable through modifying the LUA, but that's not really much of a barrier for me personally. It means I get all the features I care about for a way smaller performance cost.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Triton

On the upside, at least Ace provides a straightforward mechanism for the modularization of AddOns; Cartographer's instance maps and Quartz's buff bars are two examples of functionality I already get from different AddOns so it's nice to have the option to just not load those modules but keep the other, more useful parts of the AddOn.

I also like the option of being able to use Niagara as a centralized location for configuring 90%+ of my AddOns without having to go through all of their individual slash commands or FuBar/Minimap icons.

 

◊ Anias

The three largest reasons to use Ace mods are:

Peer Review makes addons better - for a number of reasons, not the least of which is keeping the developer interested and proud of their work.

A structured system of libraries for common functions provides meaningful savings for the avg user that has a large number of mods (and the ones who only load 2 mods don't get sucked into the "ace is better" discussion).

The SVN model is simply a better distribution model than the WowI/Curse HTTP distribution model. Not surprising as HTTP wasn't developed as a file sharing first protocol in the same way that SVN was. Yes, you can have a multi-site updater grab your addons for you from curse et al, but it's not going to be as smooth as the WAU/SVN implementation.

I'm honestly shocked noone else has gone to FTP or SVN as a distribution method for the large sites after seeing how well it fit the need for the avg wow player with the ace solution.

 

Shadowed

Memory usage is a useless number, 99% of the time a user isn't going to notice the difference between 10 MB used and 20 MB, or even 30 MB, when people notice a performance issue, it's typically because an addon is using an OnUpdate incorrectly, or registered for an event that wasn't needed, which isn't really related to memory.

People also have a habit of getting paranoid when something changes, minus the obvious "Onyxia deep breaths more" comments, when something changes you pay more attention and may mistake a random occurrence for a real change.

Given how much cladhaire was complaining about having to setup and just deal with the AceSVN in general, thats probably why. WoWInterface has around 2,000+ addons in the database not including the out dated/unmaintened category, where as AceSVN has around 80-100 and I believe around 40-60 authors which is going to be a lot smaller of a scale then a resource site. Not positive on the authors numbers but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm off.

 

mitsukurina

In defense of Curse, their favorites functionality makes it very easy to see if changes have been made to the mods you use, assuming you can be bothered to create an account. I love WAU, but I've never found downloading the mods I regularly use from Curse significantly more difficult or time-consuming. In fact, given that it seems like there's a new version of WAU to download at least three times a week, using Curse can arguably take less time.

The only real advantage I see from using WAU vs. something like a favorites page is that you tend to get your updates in a much more timely fashion -- i.e. you're waiting for new features/fixes to be checked into the SVN as opposed to waiting for the author to find time to bundle and upload a new build to Curse (or wherever you go for mods). Of course, there's a downside to that, too -- with some authors, you're perennially alpha-testing their mods via WAU...

 

◊ Kalman

Replication of events is not a useless thing, though; reducing processing by making things like log parsing a common function *is* a performance gain.

Memory usage is nearly useless, but that isn't the gain from library usage.

AceSVN has ~650-700 active addons, actually, and probably 300+ active developers. Still somewhat smaller than WoWI, but not anywhere near an order of magnitude.

I'll let cladhaire address his complaints about Ace if he wishes to, but it's my understanding that the reason he removed his addons from there had very little to do with SVN and a lot to do with people modifying his addons without his permission.

 

Shadowed

Not really sure what you mean by replication of events, could you clarify please?

It's only a performance gain if people take advantage of it however, Glory is good example of something that didn't really need to be in a library due to the usage being very specific, where as Parser-1.1/3.0 is a good exmaple of something that benifits from being a library.

Was going off the files.wowace.com listing mainly, my bad.

Cladhaire setup the AceSVN originally, or at least what I've heard could be wrong.

 

Antiarc

The WowAce SVN has 825 addons with at least one download in the last month.

I think one of the biggest advantages of Ace-based mods is consistency. They're virtually all configurable through DeuceCommander or Niagra, and the configuration methods tend to be similar, so there isn't a learning curve for each new addon.

When Kalman says "replication of events", he's saying that, for example, in the combat log parser case, one parser library does the parsing on a combat log entry and then feeds that data to mods that request it, rather than 14 mods each parsing the log, resulting in redundant work and wasted CPU time. That's a very definite advantage to Ace mods; not having to do the same work one per mod can be a very noticable performance booster.

 

Shadowed

Only if enough addons are using it, you still take a performance hit adding an extra layer and if 3 people use it and all of them are only doing one obscure thing you aren't gaining anything.

Parser is useful if you have say, Threat-1.0 + SCT because they both require a large range of combat events, where as if all you care about is detecting when a players crit, you don't need a library for that and gain very little using it.

 

Opioid

Thats my mod layout.

ACE2 grabbag: 30 MB on load, 38 MB under intense situations

Assorted non-ACE2 equivalents: 64 MB on load, 70-75 MB under intense situations, with KLH Threat gobbling a significant amount of CPU because the author has grown complacent.

Your comment about 10-30 MB holds true for people with a few mods. For a significant number of mods, however, the numbers are much larger and ACE2 series mods are the only realistic choice.

 

Antiarc

Naturally. The "official" Ace community stance is "use Ace for big things, don't use it for small things" for that reason.

 

Opioid

I would assert that perpetual alpha tests with the qualifier of intense competition (see how fast Pitbull came up after AGUF was "stagnant") is a much better situation than the incredible difficulty of maintaining a significant codebase from patch to patch where you've built everything from the ground floor up to the window dressing. See Discord* for an instance where, despite the incredible popularity and demand for the mod, the task of working through the Burning Crusade Revolution became too much for the people involved. In the ACE2 scenario, where the majority of the "guts" are independent and based on the expenditure of effort on behalf of many people unrelated to you or your project, your update work as well as the ability of everyone else to offer a new competitive front-end is much better.

Sure Discord was rock-solid with infrequent gamma releases during all of its heyday, but its not worth a hill of beans today.

 

Shadowed

It's Ace2 not ACE2.

Even reaching 50-70 MB you aren't going to notice much of a change unless your computer can barely run WoW already or you're doing something resource intensive in the background, in which case you'll have issues regardless if you're using 30 MB over 60 MB.

Cartographer, MobHealth, MyMedia (If it does what I think it does) and Prat all record data, if I had to take a guess you probably see a bit of your memory usage coming from those depending on the data settings you're using so seeing high numbers wouldn't be that suprising.

You cannot associate memory with performance most of the time, it's CPU that you want to look at and even then a normal user doesn't know enough to tell what the number means because the author could have decided to run something a bit more resource intensive when it didn't matter instead of in the middle of combat.

And no, you are simply incorrect Ace2 is not a magic bullet.


Not really, I can't think of many Ace2 libraries that actually specifically deal with secure headers and that was "The Big Thing" that required people to rework unit frame mods along with learning how the new system works or getting used to the restrictions, even if someone had been using Ace2 libraries it wouldn't have changed much of the work required for learning.

 

TheOnly

I had about 20 distinct mods to download one at a time from curse, unpack and copy. If I update WAU, then click a button to get the (now 30 or so) ace mods it takes < 2 minutes. It used to take 15 minutes easily, and often 30. Hell, just my old Titan Panel + plugins was a ton of individual downloads.

When I want just a few and don't want to risk the 'alpha-testing' I just get those couple. Usually I don't have to update that often at all however.

But on a patch day, nothing was more painful than trying to get everything from curse/wowinterface in the past.

The only way I could see usingWAU as taking more time is if I had 2 or less mods.