[v1.7.0+] Automatic Notes

[Zizzo]

This seems logical to me!

Awesome, thanks. I'm pushing that out as v1c, then, with a new option "Show known unkilled backup guardians" on the configuration dialog (default false, so be sure to turn it on if you're interested). As a courtesy for existing users, we pre-populate your list of known guardians using your already recorded list of killed guardians, to help build up your known-guardians list more quickly.

Also a few more features and bugfixes in this release:

• Broken naga/Fearscape invasion portals still looked like sub-zone entrances to our old notes-collecting code, which left them cluttering up the notes. We now check for the 'broken' flag on those.
• Finally properly detect that we've completed the Godfeaster zone and we should discard any notes about digestive sacks therein. [Yet another of those times when I wish Lua's syntax checking could have told me that I'd typed game,player instead of game.player… ]
• We now detect and count the entrance portal to portal vaults as a vault. (I hope there can't be more than one of those on a level, or my trick for detecting whether we've been in the vault will break… )

[Zizzo]

Aaand new record, I think, for quickest turnaround time for a bugfix release (51 minutes, in particular). There is, after all, a backup guardian that is only accessible to Dwarf characters, and we don't want to list it as a known unkilled guardian for characters that can't actually kill it. [For reference, we use the same player flag that the game uses to determine whether to put the entrance to the Iron Council on the map.] That's going out as v1c.1; We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

[Zizzo]

Finally figured out what I've been doing wrong. See, the sequence of events I was running into was roughly:

• Load character, saved in Sher'tul fortress.
• "Okay, what to do next? Ah, my notes say I haven't done Mark of the Spellblaze yet; let's go do that."
• Exit to world map, emerging at the Mark of the Spellblaze entrance.
• "…oh, right, I did Mark of the Spellblaze last time, and saved after recalling to the fortress. Well, now what do I do?"

The problem was that the "Unvisited zones of interest" section of our automatic notes is normally only updated when we're on the worldmap, so the stray note for the zone we just completed gets left behind until we go back to the worldmap. So in v1c.2, we prune that list a bit more aggressively, removing entries for zones we've visited (as detected by having the zone achievement or having killed the zone guardian). For now we only do this pruning when we're in the fortress, since that covers my immediate use case (and limits collateral damage if I screwed this up… ).

[Klootje]

But it doesn't show any of other zones than the special ones, right? It doesn't keep track of whether I killed all T1 or T2 zone bosses, which is something I would like to keep track of because of the backup guardians. That is the one thing I feel is missing in this mod, for the rest it's a lifesaver

To avoid clutter it could show maybe not unvisited T1/2 zones, but only T1/2 zones you entered but the boss still lives?

Edit: never mind for T2, those are in your quest log

[kikitomancer]

Hello, is there a way to remove an entry from the automatic notes?
I have this Blighted Ruins missing a door that keeps popping up but I can't go back there since it's the starting dungeon for skeleton race.

[Zizzo]

But it doesn't show any of other zones than the special ones, right? It doesn't keep track of whether I killed all T1 or T2 zone bosses, which is something I would like to keep track of because of the backup guardians. That is the one thing I feel is missing in this mod, for the rest it's a lifesaver

To avoid clutter it could show maybe not unvisited T1/2 zones, but only T1/2 zones you entered but the boss still lives?

Edit: never mind for T2, those are in your quest log

The zones that are listed under "Unvisited zones of interest" are configurable under "UI | Automatic notes…" (or at least they're supposed to be; I haven't tested that extensively). It sounds like you could just add the T1/T2 zones you're interested in.

Hello, is there a way to remove an entry from the automatic notes?
I have this Blighted Ruins missing a door that keeps popping up but I can't go back there since it's the starting dungeon for skeleton race.

Ah! We already have code that discards notes for zones like the Thieves' lair that can't be returned to after you leave; it should have occurred to me that Blighted Ruins would need similar treatment. Give me a little time to test it and I should be able to have a fix out soon.

[Zizzo]

Give me a little time to test it and I should be able to have a fix out soon.

And that seems to work as intended, so I'm pushing it out as v1c.3. If I've done this right, your stray note from Blighted Ruins should be automatically cleaned up the next time you're on the worldmap.

[Zizzo]

Bugfix and a new feature going out as v1c.4:

• New toggle "Highlight notes for current zone" on the "Automatic Notes" configuration dialog, to highlight notes for the zone you're currently in (hence the name ):

  

  notes-hilite.jpg (125.83 KiB) Viewed 14394 times

  Handy when you're revisiting a zone to pick off the vaults and chests and whatnot that you skipped on the first pass.
• As we've mentioned before, one of the conditions under which we consider a zone completed is if we've killed its guardian. Some side zones, though, like Intimidating Cave and Damp Cave, have randboss guardians that are defined as templates in the zone data — which makes it kind of tricky to check in Actor:die() that "yep, this is the zone guardian that just died, flag this zone as done". So for now, we just discard any "randboss template" zone guardian data we may have recorded and fall back to the basic "have we visited this zone" check for those zones.

[Zizzo]

As we've mentioned before, our notes collector automatically discards any collected notes for zones that we can't return to, like the Thieves' Lair. Well, in nsrr's new QUICK Campaign addon, that's pretty much all of them. So in v1d, we arrange to discard all per-zone notes every time we return to the QUICK campaign's modified Point Zero.

[nsrr]

You work Quick

Thanks for taking an interesting and supporting my campaign with your tools

[Zizzo]

I am deeply ashamed that it took this long for this to occur to me. So, as we did with Talent Point Planner and Inventory Sort Order, v1e adds some hooks that other addons can use to interact with notes collection. So far this will let you do things like adding entries to the "Events of note" list (which was my motivation in the first place ), or letting the collector know that one of your addon's zones is one-time-only, so we should discard collected notes for that zone when the player leaves it. As always, documentation for the hooks is bundled in the addon .teaa.

[Zizzo]

Found another zone for which we should be discarding notes when we leave since we can't go back to it: the Cave of Hatred in Embers of Rage. There's no quest or achievement associated with finishing this zone, so we key on having killed the zone guardian, Crimson Templar John — except that due to a stupid typo, we weren't properly detecting that John was that zone's guardian, so we failed to make a note of his death. If you've already killed John and you have leftover notes about chests in Cave of Hatred, they're pretty much stuck (as always, We Apologize for the Inconvenience™), but my tests indicate that this should all be handled properly in new games.

And by chance, I neglected to turn off graves in my test runs, which led to the discovery of another thing that needs fixing. See, there are actually two kinds of grave "events" in the game: the "old battle field" event, which drops you into a sub-zone where you fight a bunch of undead, and the "tombstone" event, which just throws a single undead at you. The former, as it happens, is set up internally so that its graves are listed in both the "Graves" and "Sub-zones" sections of the notes. AFAICT these two event types are intended to be visually indistinguishable until you actually trigger them, so in service of that, we now arrange for "old battle field" graves to be no longer listed as sub-zones. If anyone was depending on that information, well, We Apologize for the Opacity.™

Anyway, that's all going out as v1e.1.

[deus-misereatur]

Hi, been using your addon. Thoroughly appreciate the convenience it brings, though mark-spellblaze is acting a little weirdly. Even after killing the Grand Corruptor (either through being an anti-magic, or after destroying Zigur), it keeps getting re-added to the Unvisited Zones of Interest list. Is the only solution to this issue being to personally toggle off mark-spellblaze in the interesting-zones list in the addon's configuration? Again, really love the work done on this addon! Thanks!

[Zizzo]

[…] mark-spellblaze is acting a little weirdly. Even after killing the Grand Corruptor (either through being an anti-magic, or after destroying Zigur), it keeps getting re-added to the Unvisited Zones of Interest list.

Odd; that zone's always worked for me. I've pushed out v1e.2 with some debugging information added. The next time you have an auto-notes popup up for a character with this problem, type <Ctrl-Shift-D>, which should pop up a sub-dialog with some internal information. If you've killed the Grand Corruptor, then Mark of the Spellblaze should be listed under both "Zones with guardians" and "Zones with killed guardians".

[Zizzo]

Even after killing the Grand Corruptor (either through being an anti-magic, or after destroying Zigur), […]

[sound F/X: source diving] Ah, I am a liar; we don't properly treat Mark of the Spellblaze as completed if we go off to Zigur with the Grand Corruptor (I basically never go that route unless I'm working from someone else's build that includes Vile Life). v1e.3, just released, should now remove Mark of the Spellblaze from the "Unvisited zones of interest" list when you receive the Fall of Zigur quest. (If you've already done that quest, the zone should be cleared the next time you go the worldmap.) We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™