Graphical clock for ToME 1.0.1

[nate]

Graphical clock widget for classic or minimalist UI. See your speeds at a glance, so you can quickly tell whether cooldowns will expire after an action. Compare your speeds to a moused over mob or projectile to see if you'll get a "free" action on it. Widget behaves properly, so you can move it and scale it and such in Minimalist, or mouseover the clock to get detailed energy info.

This is now at version 2.3.2, which has an altered interface from the first implementation. Here's how the display works:

Noon (ie, game turn "rollover") is at north, and the clock goes clockwise.
Arcs are drawn for each kind of action you can take (unless they're working at global speed) that show how many ticks that kind of action will take.
If you mouseover your clock, it will give you detailed energy information, in colors that correspond to the arc colors (in case you couldn't tell what was what).
If you mouseover a mob or projectile, a black dot or bar will be placed on your clock, indicating when that entity is next going to act (if its actions are actually going to occur before you get to act again, at least! If you're guaranteed a free action on the mob, no matter what kind of action you take, a white circle appears around your clock to make that perfectly clear.)
If your actions are going to take longer than a turn, you'll see that your arcs make a full circle and then continue on in a straight line. They continue on proportional to how much longer your action is going to take! If both you and your moused over target are working really slow, you might just see some bars across these extensions, way off from the circle.

That makes it sound more complicated than it is. Just try it out, it should be pretty intuitive! Or scroll down a bit for a screenshot.

addon link: http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/chronometer

Very special thanks to lukep for his recent clock addon and for the original idea! Thanks also to jotwebe, for the idea for the graphical style, and darkgod and aardvark for coding help. Extra thanks to darkgod both for making ToME, and for making the code so accessible.

Changes in v2.3.2:
--Offhand weapons will no longer affect your displayed speeds when wielding a ranged weapon in the mainhand.

To do:
-- Nothing besides fix bugs as they are reported.

EDIT: I am no longer bothering to preserve outdated information. I'll try to keep this top post updated with most recent version info.

[nate]

The first version of the add-on was causing errors on uninstallation. That's because it was writing to settings files that didn't know what to do with .chrono variables. I've uploaded a small update that disables saving of the clock's position and scale. That will prevent problems in the future.

If this has already happened to you, and you're fuming after trying to uninstall the addon, what you need to do is navigate to your settings directory (something like /T-Engine/4.0/settings) and edit tome.uiset_minimalist.cfg with a text editor. Remove all of the lines referring to "chrono". After that, your game will work again.

If you don't mind losing your UI settings (just the positions and scales of your UI elements, nothing else), then you can delete tome.uiset.minimalist.cfg safely, instead of editing it. The game will write a new one for you.

This problem is fixed with the updated version, but at the cost of saving clock position. If there's any interest in this add-on (none so far, but my fingers are still crossed ) then I will figure out how to save the position data safely.

I apologize to anyone who has been affected by this.

[darkgod]

Nice!
Not exactly sure how to read the circles though

[nate]

Oh, I was hoping it would be obvious, but I guess not

Your clock goes clockwise. It has a red radius representing the current tick. It has a black radius representing the zero tick (when cooldowns count down, etc). It has an arc for different each kind of action you can take, showing when you'll be able to act again if you take that action. If it will take you more than 10 ticks to complete an action, that is shown by a line extending from the end of the arc (which in this case is a circle).

The moused-over-monster clock goes counterclockwise (that was to make comparison easy-- I wonder now if it is a good choice or not). It's basically the same. The red radius represents when the monster can move next, the arcs represent how long that action will take. If the monster can't do anything until more than ten ticks in the future, it's just a big black circle.

Hope you got the "doesn't break your settings folder" version. I feel bad about that, especially since the first thing people will tend to do on an error (reinstall ToME) won't fix the problem.

[nate]

v.2.0.0 released.

For some reason, the filename when downloaded is tome-chrono_1.teaa, so I imagine you'll have to rename the file.

Changes added to top post, or check the init.lua comments.

[darkgod]

no need to rename

[rexorcorum]

Hey, nate. Just trying the new version and it works great. I'm still not quite sure how to read the NPC and projectile info, but I assume this will become more obvious with effects like slow and such. All in all it is really impressive. Just one minor issue - the latest version 2.0 fails to register the online profile. I'm not sure what is causing that, but maybe is the fact that you have given the addon version number (2.0.0) in the required field for the engine and module version number (1.0.0) on http://te4.org/addons/tome.

Cheers and keep up the good work

[nate]

Hey, thanks for giving it a shot! Yeah, it doesn't look like much when speeds are all default, just a big red circle Projectile and NPC act times are just black dots/bars on your arcs while mousing over the entity. If they're running at default speed, and you're running at default speed, you should see your arc interrupted at some point or another.

Heck, here's a pic:


That's my little lvl 1 cursed cornac rampager. I scaled the clock way up for the screenshot. The mouse cursor doesn't show, but I just moused over the wolf. Red is global arc (1 turn), yellow is combat (9 ticks), blue is movement (5 ticks). The black bar across my arcs? That's when the wolf is going to act (7 ticks from now, so I've got a free move on it, but no other free actions on it).

If I only had one speed I was acting at, like most lvl 1 characters do, I'd only have a black dot over my global arc, at the same position (7 ticks from now). In other words-- the bar just extends as far as it needs to for comparison with all of your arcs.

If you're not seeing that bar, let me know, because it means I did something wrong, hopefully something that won't take me days to fix

Looks like I didn't understand all the fields in the add-on upload page correctly-- I was giving it my version numbers, obviously pretty dumb. I've fixed it (I believe in the right way?), but I bet the reason it wasn't validating for you was because I had the wrong MD5. Fixed now. Thanks for the heads up.

[rexorcorum]

Aha - finally I've got the knack of it - the NPC's and Projectile black bar (NPCPBB ) corresponds directly with your action bars! Great - thanks for the visual clarification and the swift reply.

[jotwebe]

Awesome!

Just what the doctor ordered.

Been using lukep's clock addon so far, but from now on all new characters will have a chronometer in their pack, right next to the transmo chest.

[Row]

This looks great, unfortunately I can't use it as I hate the Minimalist UI. Care to do it for the Classic UI as well, please?
It can be positioned in the unused area bottom left.

[nate]

Yay! Thanks to people for letting me know you're trying this. It's fun to make add-ons, but only if they're used. Anybody know why it's not showing up as a filter for the character vault? Seeing it in use would be good motivation for my next project

This looks great, unfortunately I can't use it as I hate the Minimalist UI. Care to do it for the Classic UI as well, please?
It can be positioned in the unused area bottom left.

I just had a look through the classic UI code, and it doesn't look too complicated. The reason it's harder for me to do a classic version is because I don't use classic, so I don't have any intuition about how things ought to be for the classic version. So let me pick your brain:

1) Where should it be? You said bottom-- like right above the menu, inventory icons? Should it be the same size as those? Should I put it on that same line and rescale the line for the extra icon?

2) What should happen if a player is running multiple widget add-ons with similar code? Should they stack up along the bottom? (I really want maximum compatibility-- I did my best to write everything so that this add-on can be used as a template by other mod authors to make widgets that are cross-compatible.)

3) What size should it be? Same size as the lower options/load/etc icons? Same size as the effects icons? Rescaled depending on how much room it has?

4) Should the effects icons cover up the widgets if there are too many for the sidebar, same as they currently do for options/load?

5) Should the clock do anything on click?

You know, the sky's the limit here. Modding ToME is very unlike modding, say, Creative Assembly games I'm pretty sure that anything imaginable can be done. There's nothing special about classic UI that limits placement-- I don't have to put it on the sidebar. If I do it, I want to do it the right way. So any thoughts?

[Row]

I think it should be just above the icons, and bigger than those. As big as a picture in this thread is good. Or, the size of standard square (such as the PC icon, or a skill icon)
On click, it should behave as it does in the Minimalist UI. It can as well do nothing (just display tooltip on mouse over)
So far there isn't any addon using the unused area above the bottom left mini-icons, so I wouldn't bother. And I think fixed size is fine, there will always be enough room.

[jotwebe]

I realize this isn't classic, but here's where I like to put it:

positioned by a master of UI element arranging

chr0n0.png (54.62 KiB) Viewed 10804 times

I really like the white circle idea by the way. And while doing something similar for the mouse-overed enemy is problematic due to differing speeds, how about:

1) circle the clock face in the movement color if the NPC under the cursor
a) is not adjacent to the PC
b) could make at least two steps if the PC moves

This would be great for the question "should I wait or move back so that next round I'm right next to this hummerhorn/wolf/other fast thing?" And since special spell/mind speeds are rare, this should also do a decent job on predicting double spells on hasted casters. Less useful for archers, but them's the breaks.

2) circle the clock face in the combat color if the NPC under the cursor
a) is adjacent to the PC
b) could attack at least twice if the PC attacks in melee

This would be nice to have for melee dudes if they get stunned or are ghouls. Since most spellcasters won't have any combat speed modifications, this would work well for them too. Archmages with Quickened Spells have it coming anyway, they deserve all the uncertainty they can get.

[jenx]

SyWhat about also adding dynamically symbols or colouring to talent icons, to indicate those that take less than full turn?