[v1.7.0+] Automatic Notes

[Zizzo]

As I mentioned over in my annual mass gift collection ritual, the annual Santascape gifts event that started up last night seems like exactly the sort of thing this addon should be handling, to remind you to go to Last Hope or Kruk town to go get your presents. The sticking point was that I couldn't figure out how to detect that the player has gotten the present and thus doesn't need the note anymore. Eventually I decided to go with the simple approach: the first time the player goes to the relevant town after getting the event, we assume the player has collected the presents and make a note to ourself to no longer add the relevant reminder under "Events of note". (We don't bother with a reminder in the Infinite Dungeon, since the presents will be on the next level anyway.)

Anyway, that's going out as v1a.3. Hopefully I'm getting this out early enough to be useful to users this year.

[Zizzo]

Few more tweaks in v1a.4, just pushed out:

• The "Backup guardians killed" header now includes a count of backup guardians killed, just for convenience.
• A new entry under "Events of note" for the Lost Knowledge quest, first to remind you to take the book to Limmir, and then to remind you to go find and clear the Valley of the Moon.

[visage]

The "Backup guardians killed" header now includes a count of backup guardians killed, just for convenience.

Is there a point at which the list of killed backup guardians goes away?

[Zizzo]

Is there a point at which the list of killed backup guardians goes away?

Should there be? The goal, remember, is for these notes to be a reminder of things the player may want to go back and do later; is there a game-detectable point beyond which the addon logic could reasonably conclude that the player is no longer interested in going back and picking off any backup guardians they might have missed?

[visage]

Is there a point at which the list of killed backup guardians goes away?

Should there be? The goal, remember, is for these notes to be a reminder of things the player may want to go back and do later; is there a game-detectable point beyond which the addon logic could reasonably conclude that the player is no longer interested in going back and picking off any backup guardians they might have missed?

Well, once I've killed a backup guardian I no longer want to go back and kill it, so the whole approach there seems backwards to me.

I assume it works this way because there's no good way to catch "we've come back west, so it's time to start tracking un-killed backup guardians". In that case, perhaps use "player has killed any backup guardian" as the signal that there are backup guardians to kill and start listing the un-killed guardians?

EDIT: If the point of listing killed backup guardians rather than un-killed backup guardians is to avoid spoilering people on how many there are and where, then perhaps a minimum of spoilage could be permitted in the interests of UX -- clear the category from the automatic notes UI once all have been killed?

[Zizzo]

Well, once I've killed a backup guardian I no longer want to go back and kill it, so the whole approach there seems backwards to me.

Granted, listing the backup guardians we haven't killed would have been more in-theme, but that was deemed too spoily.

I assume it works this way because there's no good way to catch "we've come back west, so it's time to start tracking un-killed backup guardians". In that case, perhaps use "player has killed any backup guardian" as the signal that there are backup guardians to kill and start listing the un-killed guardians?

Nah, that would be easy enough; just check for the presence of the "Back and there again" quest, or maybe the "talked to the Elder in Last Hope" sub-goal thereof.

EDIT: If the point of listing killed backup guardians rather than un-killed backup guardians is to avoid spoilering people on how many there are and where, then perhaps a minimum of spoilage could be permitted in the interests of UX -- clear the category from the automatic notes UI once all have been killed?

Hmm, perhaps a game option? Might disqualify it from future inclusion in ZOmnibus, but that's no big deal. What do people think?

[visage]

In order to avoid banishing it from ZOmnibus, perhaps an option that simply disables tracking of Backup Guardians?

[Zizzo]

In order to avoid banishing it from ZOmnibus, perhaps an option that simply disables tracking of Backup Guardians?

Sure, that's easy enough; that just went out as v1b.

[visage]

Sure, that's easy enough; that just went out as v1b.

Awesome; thanks!

[Zizzo]

Started up a new Demonologist character recently (my plan is to cheeze the hell out of the items vault and try to get one character wearing as many of the Obsidian Treasures as can be arranged ), and discovered a couple more places for which we should be discarding notes after we leave since we can't go back: namely, both of the Ashes-specific zones, Searing Halls and Anteroom of Agony. That's going out as v1b.1.

[Zizzo]

So I noticed with one of my recent characters that Golem Graveyard was listed in the automatic notes as having two "weird pedestals" — which is odd, because those usually come in threes. Investigation revealed that one of the three pedestals was inside the blighted aura of a nearby blighted soil feature, changing its name from "weird pedestal" to "weird pedestal (blighted aura)", which screwed up our detection by name. That should be fixed in v1b.2, just pushed out. We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

[Zizzo]

I just had a crazy thought. I was reading back over the discussion of how to handle backup guardians, particularly the wrinkle that listing the backup guardians that we haven't killed rather than the ones we have is what we'd rather do but is deemed too spoily. But it just occurred to me: I've been focusing on collecting notes for the current character, but we could just as easily reach into the world{} table and accumulate notes across all characters.

So, for instance, once you've killed Aluin the Fallen with one character, it could arguably be considered no longer a spoiler that Aluin exists. So if we record in world{} that the player now knows Aluin exists, then on other characters we could potentially list him as a known unkilled backup guardian once said characters have returned to the West. (This is actually similar, now that I think of it, to my handling of potentially spoilery stuff in Talent Point Planner: once one character has completed the Arena quest, for instance, the planner dialog starts showing the points from the quest as a talent point source you can include in your plan.)

So, what do people think? Am I off base here?

[Zizzo]

As we noted over in Go to Landmark, floor glyphs are sorted left-to-right when they're placed on the floor. They are not, as it turns out, also sorted top-to-bottom, which means that if two glyphs are vertically aligned (as could easily happen in, say, Vor Armoury [not that I have any recent experience with that or anything… ]), they could appear in either order in the actual glyph sequence. And Eidolon help you if you have three or four glyphs vertically aligned…

Now, for simple collection and display purposes, that wouldn't matter so much. We also make an effort, however, to clean up our collected notes and remove any floor glyph sequences that are single-use and have already been used, like the brain-in-a-jar sequence — and to check that, we have to have the glyphs in the right order, which can't be determined from x/y ordering on the floor if any of the glyphs are vertically aligned. In practice, that will sometimes mean that we falsely detect the glyph sequence as used and fail to record the floor glyphs. Which is exactly as annoying as it sounds.

So, in v1b.3, we detect vertically aligned floor glyphs and try every permutation of them when checking against "live" glyph sequences. This could be considered very slightly spoily, I suppose, in that as a result it will show the correct ordering of vertically aligned floor glyphs in the glyph sequence, but I don't really consider that enough of a problem to worry about.

[Also still fishing for feedback on my backup guardians idea above… ]

[Zizzo]

As we've mentioned before, one of the conditions under which we consider a zone completed is if we've killed its guardian. Not all zones, however, define their guardians in the same place, as it turns out: the usual place is game.zone.generator.actor.guardian, but some zones define their guardian in game.zone.levels[n].generator.actor.guardian, where n is the last level of the zone — and some zones, alas, don't define their guardian at all.

In v1b.4, then, we try harder to find a zone's defined guardian, and hard-code guardians for some zones that don't specify theirs. We also add a few more zones to the list of zones that we recognize as completed if we have their corresponding achievement.

[Also still fishing for feedback on my backup guardians idea above… ]

[astralInferno]

So, for instance, once you've killed Aluin the Fallen with one character, it could arguably be considered no longer a spoiler that Aluin exists.

This seems logical to me!