[b41-1.0.5] Talent Point Planner

[Zizzo]

Took my first serious stab at an Adventurer recently; the idea of a character that walks around and passively kills everything has a visceral appeal. Finding some of the talent trees I was looking for, though, turned out to be more difficult than necessary, since they're not presented in the order you might expect. Specifically, rather than being in alphabetical order by name, they appear to be listed in the order their definitions are loaded — so Spell/Undead drake, for instance, will be down with the steamtech stuff instead of with the rest of the spell trees defined by the main module.

So the obvious thing to do is re-sort the talent trees by name. I was going to write a new separate addon to do just that, but then I noticed that this addon was already sorting the trees internally, so we could just tweak that. And so v10h.7 adds a new game option, "[ZOmnibus] | Sort unlearnt talent trees by name", which does… well, exactly what it says on the proverbial tin. Known talent trees still sort in the default order, to reduce confusion. (And how well this works for translations will probably depend heavily on how well Lua handles lexicographic sorting for non-European languages…)

And while we're here, this release also fixes a small bug in handling of Wild-gift/Antimagic from the Zigur quest. Specifically, we weren't properly handling the case when the player already had the tree locked (again, Adventurers).

[astralInferno]

oh my god I have wanted to make a mod that does that exact thing.
Have I told you you're a treasure recently?

Honestly, I would appreciate a "yes, and known trees too" option for that feature, but I understand if that would be extra effort.

[Zizzo]

oh my god I have wanted to make a mod that does that exact thing.
Have I told you you're a treasure recently?

*blush* (bows)

Honestly, I would appreciate a "yes, and known trees too" option for that feature, but I understand if that would be extra effort.

Nah, that's easy; I can just tweak the game option to have a tri-state None/Unlearnt/All value. That just went out as v10i.

[Zizzo]

Was looking for an excuse to start a new character, and GrayStillPlays' recent Ogre Marauder guide gave me a perfect one. Said guide depends heavily on the Legacy of the Naloren prodigy and the Exotic Weapon Mastery provided thereby, though, which the talent planner didn't support. Well, it does now, as of v10i.1, just released. We Apologize for the Convenience.™

[Zizzo]

Okay, now we support Exotic Weapon Mastery from Legacy of the Naloren. Should've known I needed to test it on a new character instead of an existing one. That's going out as v10i.2. We Apologize for the Error.™

[Zizzo]

So, I guess no one has used the planner in conjunction with the Worldly Knowledge prodigy? I tried that recently for the first time, and discovered I'd screwed it up a bit. In particular, talent categories from Group 2 like Psionic/Feedback are supposed to be available to any character without the "has_arcane_knowledge" flag (ie. not a magic user), but I was only making them available to antimagic users. That should be fixed in v10i.3, just released. We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

In the process, I also made a useful discovery: the Worldly Knowledge talent category groups are built from the escort rewards list, and those can be queried in-code. Which means not only do I no longer have to maintain (and keep updated) hard-coded lists of escort rewards and Worldly Knowledge groups in the planner dialog, but we should now be able to automatically detect and include escort quest rewards added by other addons.

[Zizzo]

Fun planner-related discovery, while I'm in the neighborhood: see, I had originally believed that the talent point planner would be basically useless for Wanderer characters, since they got completely random talent categories. Turns out, though, that all that randomness is pre-computed during character generation — which means your leveled-up planner clone will get exactly the same talent categories as you will. Now, obviously some will consider that cheating; I leave that to your conscience.

[Disclaimer: there are various addons that influence Wanderer levelup handling, like Wanderer 3 in 1 or Resourceful Wanderers. I haven't examined these addons or used them extensively, so I cannot attest to whether or not they invalidate the above.]

At any rate, one of the things Wanderers are presumably expected to do, and that other characters will also sometimes do, is spend a category point in an unlocked category to boost its multiplier. The planner, alas, does not record in its point plan that you have done this, and thus does not put a marker in the level-up dialog to remind you to do so. Let me correct that: it didn't do so:

category-markers.png (118.59 KiB) Viewed 43625 times

That's going out as v10j.

[Zizzo]

I know, I know, I keep bumping this with more stuff, but this is something I've actually been considering adding for a while now, and I just ran into a perfect use case. In particular, I was working on an Adventurer build whose shtick (in part) was to take as many passive stat-boosting talents (Augmentation, Unified Body, stuff like that) as possible. And my train of thought basically went: "Oh, hey, Massive Physique is a stat-booster. Oh, wait, I can't spare a cat point for it. Oh, hey, I've already got an addon that will let me just buy it for money. Oh, wait, the talent point planner doesn't know about that. Oh, hey, maybe I can arrange for the addon to tell the planner about it. "

And so, since I'm nothing if not an inveterate overengineer, v10j.1 is a massive overhaul that adds hooks "TalentPointPlanner:talentSource" and "TalentPointPlanner:flags", which other addons can bind to to add entries to the planner dialog for whatever sources of talents or talent trees or talent points that the addon makes available to the player. There shouldn't be any visible changes in functionality (knock on wood…).

If you're an addon developer and you want to get in on this, I've bundled extensive documentation in the addon .teaa detailing the infrastructure you'll be working with, and by the time I post this, you should also be able to look to Tinker Cave Blacksmith for an example to work from.

And as long as we're here, another couple tweaks:

• Y'know those boosted-talent-category markers we added in the last release? Well, turns out those can get clipped off and not shown if the category's name is too long. Easy enough to fix; I moved the marker to the front of the category name.
• The talent source for buying Steamtech/Physics and Steamtech/Chemistry in the tinker cave is redundant and pointless for tinker characters that already start with both, so we hide it.
• I've also got a Wanderer going that's growing into a psiblades build. When I got Pugilism, I thought, "Ooh, I can use Spinning Backhand as a gap closer." (For those like me who don't have all these requirements memorized, that talent only works if you're not wielding anything.) Well, I figured that sort of information would be useful in the planner, so I added it. Controlled by new game option "ZOmnibus | Verbose talent requirements", it basically shows the log message that would get if you tried and failed to use the talent, at the bottom of the talent's description in the levelup dialog or planner.

[Zizzo]

Yeah, I knew that massive overhaul would break somewhere… Pushing out v10j.2 with a fix; We Apologize for the Error.™

[liondriel]

Ahoy,

great addon, certainly the one I use most (which is to say, on every new char )

Question though: Is there a way to copy/paste planned builts from one char to the next somehow? Or maybe to make some kind of template to use whenever I make a new char with the same race / class combo? That would be ever so helpful to me.

[Zizzo]

Question though: Is there a way to copy/paste planned builts from one char to the next somehow? Or maybe to make some kind of template to use whenever I make a new char with the same race / class combo? That would be ever so helpful to me.

Well, if the old character has the same name, the "Load Plan from Previous Char' button does what you want. If you mean loading a plan from another character, that could get tricky, especially if the user tries to load a plan from a character with a different race or class. Let me play around with it for a bit, see if it looks too difficult.

[Zizzo]

Well, that turned out to be both harder and easier than I was fearing. I give you, then, v11, with the new point plan selector dialog. When you open the planner dialog for the first time with your character, you'll see that the "Load Plan from Previous Char" button has been replaced with two buttons, "Choose Saved Plan" and "Load Plan":

main-dialog.bottom.jpg (63.68 KiB) Viewed 43358 times

You also get a description of the current saved plan you have selected. If you have a plan for a previous character with the same name, that one will be pre-selected, just as it was before. If you want to load a plan from another character, the "Choose Saved Plan" button will take you to the plan selector dialog:

choose-dialog.jpg (143.7 KiB) Viewed 43358 times

By default, we only show plans from characters with the same race and class and from a compatible version, but as you can see, you can override those filters if you're willing to take the risk. Once you've selected a saved plan, you can load from the main dialog via "Load Plan". Or, of course, if you want to start from scratch, you can use "Create Points Plan", as before.

[Of course, Murphy's Law of coding says a change this big is guaranteed to break somehow; let's find out… ]

[liondriel]

Holy Mackerel, this was a quick delivery!

I'll give this one a swing as soon as I find that time. Thank you!

[Zizzo]

One of my early design decisions in the talent point planner was to record the number of stat points you spent in the initial planner, and then re-spend those points on the planner clone when you re-open the planner dialog later. Which, in retrospect, was maybe not the best plan, because in the late game, when you've actually spent those stat points on your real character, the planner clone will end up with something like -100 stat points and unrealistically high stats.

The better approach, since we've already recorded the stat requirements for the talent levels you've selected in the plan, is to spend just enough stat points to meet those levels. That's going out as v11a.

[Zizzo]

v11b adds a few features requested on the addon's Steam page:

• For players in the Infinite Dungeon, or people using a level-uncapping addon, we add a new "Planner clone level" field to the planner dialog, to make a plan for when you exceed level 50:

  

  clone-level.png (12.36 KiB) Viewed 42763 times

  This level defaults to 50, of course.
• Speaking of the Infinite Dungeon, we add new talent sources for the Antimagic Wyrm Bile Extract and Potion of Martial Prowess found therein. These will only be shown for characters in the Infinite Dungeon, and will only appear once the planner knows you know about said potions — which, alas, like OG Wyrm Bile, means not until you've found and used the potions after the upgrade. As with OG Wyrm Bile, though, you can short-circuit that via the "Mark as Seen" dialog, using activation codes "anti_wyrm_bile" and "martial_potion".
• And speaking of the "Mark as Seen" button, I cannot for the life of me fathom why I was going to sucn an effort to hide that button on the initial planner dialog during character creation, when you're first creating (or loading) a plan — especially for cases like the above, which is exactly when we'd want that button. So now it's back; We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™