[v1.3.0+] Curse Levels

[Zizzo]

By request, I'm investigating writing an addon to display more information about the curse effects from Defiling Touch. The actual implementaiton looks easily enough; should be as simple as adding a charges() method to the relevant effect definitions. It's been years since I played any Afflicted characters, though (the Hate mechanic never really appealed to me), so I'm not sure exactly what extra information I should be adding.

From some source diving, the most likely candidate effect properties appear to be 'level', as assembled from the number of worn items with the corresponding curse, or 'unlockLevel', basically 'level' capped by your Dark Gifts raw talent level. Preliminary experimentation suggests that we have only one or two characters of information to work with, based on the font size used (which doesn't appear to be directly controllable short of overloading yet another chunk of the UI, which is always risky).

So. Thoughts?

[Zizzo]

Re-reading the original request more closely, I think the OP wanted 'level' here (plus that's what seemed most useful while playing my test Cursed character), so that's what I went with for my new Curse Levels addon. I hope the icons for the various curses are still clearly distinguishable behind the surprisingly large charges display, because there's not a whole lot I can do about the latter.

[Looking ahead, this seems like the kind of entirely informational UI modification that would be entirely suitable for possible future inclusion in ZOmnibus or ZOmnibus Lite.]

[Zizzo]

For the record, I've never been particularly fond of the cursed-aura mechanic; IME, it just seems to add more semi-random equipment micro-managing, and it can render an otherwise highly desirable piece of equipment useless because it got the wrong curse. sixteenmiles' new auramancer thread, however, extolled the value of stacking Curse of Nightmares up to the heavens, so I tried it, and holy carp:

nightmares.png (117.65 KiB) Viewed 4009 times

So, now that I've got a character going with this, I've built up a few QoL mods, and I figured I'd add them here instead of starting a new addon for them:

• One minor annoyance is looking at your equipment window and having to mouse around to each piece of worn equipment to see which curse it has. Obvious fix to that is to add a tag to the tags list that each piece of equipment gets:

  

  curse-tags.png (16.09 KiB) Viewed 4009 times

  That's controlled by new game option "[ZOmnibus] | Tag cursed items in equipment", which is on by default if you're using the stand-alone addon but off by default if you're using ZOmnibus or ZOmnibus Lite.
• Another minor annoyance is Defiling Touch's Cursed Aura Selection dialog at level 5, which gives no indication of the actual effects of the curses you're being asked to choose between. We add a tooltip for that.

That's all going out as v1b.

[Zizzo]

I have got to stop testing these addon changes on live characters instead of dedicated test characters… Turns out I botched the logic on when to add our curse-identifying keyword to the equipment display; I was unintentionally requiring the item to have ego keywords, so it wouldn't display for a "white" unenchanted item. That's fixed in v1b.1; We Apologize for the Error.™

[Zizzo]

…okay, this was a nasty one. *shudder* Short version: the most recent updates included what I thought was a clever hack to get some data we needed, but it ended up breaking stuff like temporary effects defined by other addons. If you've been getting errors like "attempt to index local 'ed' (a nil value)" from ActorTemporaryEffects.lua, that was me. v1b.2 fixes the error. We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

[Long version, on the off chance anyone's interested: Defiling Touch' talent definition includes a .getCurses() method that returns a list of curse temporary effects that the talent can apply — which is information we need, since we need to modify those effects to add our level display. Alas, we don't have an Actor at the necessary point through which to call said method, so we were previously hard-coding those values. While making my recent changes, though, I had a… *ahem* "clever" idea: why not just make a stub Actor and use it to call .getCurses()? The answer, as it turns out, is that doing so has the effect of "pinning down" the module's Actor definition, at a point before other addons have added their temporary effects, which leaves stuff broken. My fix was to dig even deeper and find a way to call the .getCurses() method without needing an Actor in the first place… ]

[Zizzo]

v1b.3 includes a workaround for a small bug in deogo's EquipDoll - Clean Item Names addon. Short version: we superload Object:getShortName() to add curse tags to the inventory dialog, but EquipDoll - Clean Item Names does its own fiddling with Object:getShortName(), in a way that breaks our superloading. In this release, we clean up behind that at the last minute, just before handling Actor tooltips, which is where it was breaking. We Apologize for the Error.™