Hermes - a new cooldown addon

[Alge]

Above I have made a mockup of how I imagine a pulled out spell might look. You can use the same format as cooldown timers do with the text, appending "m" for minutes and a plain number indicating seconds, to save a little space. I would also abbreviate names but I do this already and am used to it. You would probably want to add some ability to select how the text was anchored to the button, particularly if you didn't limit the number of displayed cooldowns to some small number. Being able to make pulled-out buttons larger might also be useful.

I imagine this functionality would be most useful for a raid leader who needs to manage (or at least monitor) resources during a long, multi-phase boss fight. Most of my boss fights don't last long enough to warrant this.

[Paperplate]

I see an immediate use for the drag and drop functionality in mirroring the key layout of my G13, but for my slaves. Of course this wouldn't work as simply for a mixed-class group.

Another use for the drag-and-drop might be to allow custom ordering of the spells being monitored.

A few things.

1) I'm an investigating the ability to create more "frames" that hold the buttons. You would drag and drop the buttons between frames. This would solve your desire to mimic the G13 key layout, you'd create a frame for each row and only throw the buttons in there you wanted.

2) Drag and drop to set custom button orders seems like a great idea to me. I'll think about what it might mean to accomplish. I suspect it could be considerable effort and would require an "auto sort vs. manual sort" option. This would solve your secondary desire. I acknowledge that I currently have no sorting options and it's just sorted by spell name and anchor point. I've knew I'd have to tackle this eventually. Since implementing drag and drop, it opens up some options to for setting a custom order without some nasty config dialog.

3) Hermes lacks precise layout control, I hope to avoid it. But I see the need, especially for the button containers and especially when looking at your screenshots.

Edit: Thanks for the additional mockup. Here are my thoughts at the moment. Keep in mind, I'm interesting in something useful to all users, not specifically dual boxing:

1) Multiple button containers.
2) Buttons can live in a container or be free floating.
3) Free floating buttons can (optionally) show additional data (like your mockup)
4) Non free floating buttons might also optionally show additional data (like your mockup), but still reside inside a frame with other buttons.
5) The optional data would be expanded/collapsed by clicking on the button.
6) I concur with the need for options to customize the behavior.
7) How's Shadow Labs treating you? :P

I am trying to look at the big picture and start where the most value is. I have not decided what of the above I will actually do. But I wanted to share my current thought process.

One more note, I have added ability to track item cooldowns now (but still testing and not released). So Soulstones should work and other things like trinkets, Saronite Bombs, you get the idea. Support was more complex than I thought so I'm concerned about bugs. And I'm not done.

[Paperplate]

Is a party proc warning something in your plans for this addon?

Could someone please explain what a party proc warning is? I'm not sure I have the right thing in mind. I was thinking you're asking about some proc that a player in the party has active, a.k.a, an aura.

If so, that is beyond the scope of Hermes current message protocol. Which would mean something in the future, if at all. As you know, requiring people to use addons is bad enough. A constantly changing protocol forcing upgrades needs to be avoided at all costs.

It's possible to be done though. I would start to get worried about the amount of messages sent between players at that point.

[Alge]

A few things.

1) I'm an investigating the ability to create more "frames" that hold the buttons. You would drag and drop the buttons between frames. This would solve your desire to mimic the G13 key layout, you'd create a frame for each row and only throw the buttons in there you wanted.

2) Drag and drop to set custom button orders seems like a great idea to me. I'll think about what it might mean to accomplish. I suspect it could be considerable effort and would require an "auto sort vs. manual sort" option. This would solve your secondary desire. I acknowledge that I currently have no sorting options and it's just sorted by spell name and anchor point. I've knew I'd have to tackle this eventually. Since implementing drag and drop, it opens up some options to for setting a custom order without some nasty config dialog.

3) Hermes lacks precise layout control, I hope to avoid it. But I see the need, especially for the button containers and especially when looking at your screenshots.

As it stands, Hermes is so much easier to use and nicer to look at than the other options we have for tracking cooldowns that I would continue to use it without any further changes. I'm also anal enough to manually align as many buttons as needed. Having said that, if you don't ask... Setting custom button order through drag-and-drop sounds like the way to go if you can manage to sort on some sort of button index.

It's also important to make your addon as easy to use as possible, so anything you can do to avoid complicated configuration dialogs will likely result in more users.

Edit: Thanks for the additional mockup. Here are my thoughts at the moment. Keep in mind, I'm interesting in something useful to all users, not specifically dual boxing:

1) Multiple button containers.
2) Buttons can live in a container or be free floating.
3) Free floating buttons can (optionally) show additional data (like your mockup)
4) Non free floating buttons might also optionally show additional data (like your mockup), but still reside inside a frame with other buttons.
5) The optional data would be expanded/collapsed by clicking on the button.
6) I concur with the need for options to customize the behavior.
7) How's Shadow Labs treating you? :P

I am trying to look at the big picture and start where the most value is. I have not decided what of the above I will actually do. But I wanted to share my current thought process.

One more note, I have added ability to track item cooldowns now (but still testing and not released). So Soulstones should work and other things like trinkets, Saronite Bombs, you get the idea. Support was more complex than I thought so I'm concerned about bugs. And I'm not done.

I completely understand your desire to make a widely-useful addon. All of the above sounds useful, particularly the item cooldowns. I'm already imagining where I'll put my trinket cooldown tracking bar.

However, I imagine the most useful to the widest audience would be to be able to pull out single spells and track their cooldowns with some sort of permanent tooltip-like info (which is the thinking behind the mockup). If I start mentioning particular spells though I'll just show my ignorance of WoW's raiding environment.

And since you asked, I'm enjoying going back and doing the BC content again. It's pretty easy with my current party and I love being able to AFK for 10 minutes in the middle of an instance if I need to without putting others out or to just stare at the dungeon dressing for a while.

[seastar]

I go through the code and found hermes is implemented by teammembers send the cooldown related information to you.

I found in the WOW, there is a event call: UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEESSED, in the event, the unit and the spellname are all provided.

So is it possible to use this event to monitor the cooldown of your teammembers? Is there any bad performance with this solution, like impact the game performace, etc?

I write a small addon to do it and it look ok. But because of my poor programming, I only can write the simple addons for my specific char and also the specific spell i want to monitor.

[Noids]

Is there any way to apply this tool to work with procs and holy light/lightning shield charges?

[Alge]

To those asking about procs...

If the proc is aura-based then this information is already exposed by the WoW API (using UnitAura) without going to all the trouble of message passing that Hermes has to go to to provide cooldown information. Hermes has to pass messages because GetSpellCooldown does not accept a unitID as an argument. Non-aura based procs or similar information like Combo points, Holy Power or Soul Shards are also exposed by the API for anything with a unitID and so message passing is again overkill.

In the below screenshot of my party frames you can see that I am showing the Maelstrom Weapon aura (which is a proc) from my shaman slaves as well as the number of stacks. This is done using a custom LuaText in Pitbull but there are other ways of doing this for different unit frames I imagine. I will post the exact code I used when the servers are up in case anyone wants to replicate this functionality. It may also be worth keeping an eye on the addon unitDoodles which is currently in Alpha testing and may be easier to set up.



Alge

[Paperplate]

I go through the code and found hermes is implemented by teammembers send the cooldown related information to you.

I found in the WOW, there is a event call: UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEESSED, in the event, the unit and the spellname are all provided.

So is it possible to use this event to monitor the cooldown of your teammembers? Is there any bad performance with this solution, like impact the game performace, etc?

I write a small addon to do it and it look ok. But because of my poor programming, I only can write the simple addons for my specific char and also the specific spell i want to monitor.

That is a perfectly acceptable approach, and will work. However, it has some technical issues (then again, so does the approach Hermes takes).

1. There are a LOT of items in the game where the cooldown changes based on spec, glyphs, other procs, etc. For example, Guardian Spirit used to act such that if it triggered the cooldown would be 3 minutes, otherwise 1. This causes any addon that monitors the spell to create custom code to handle specifically that spell. The approach Hermes takes requires no custom coding. Which means it's more resilient over time such as when new patches are released.
2. In order to know who a spell is cast on, you have to track the casters target and/or utilize the combat log.
3. The more complicated scenarios require monitoring what's known as the COMBAT_EVENT_LOG. This is the biggest performance sync in all of wow. Many addons utilize the combat log. If your computer is old, it's a noticeable impact on frame rate.

Not sure if you've ever looked at the CPU usage of Hermes, but it's extremely light compared to similar addons. And it's because I don't monitor combat log events, or UNIT_AURA events. In a raid environment, these events are sent hundreds to thousands of times per minute.

Again, the approach you're talking about will work, and it's easy for spells that are conisidered "static" in that their cooldowns are always the same no matter what. But when making a general addon for all classes and spells it can get complex quickly.

[Paperplate]

Is there any way to apply this tool to work with procs and holy light/lightning shield charges?

No, not today. And that's not within the scope of what I want Hermes to do. Hermes only looks at cooldowns of spells or items. It doesn't look at auras (buffs and debuffs) on players.

[Paperplate]

To those asking about procs...

If the proc is aura-based then this information is already exposed by the WoW API (using UnitAura) without going to all the trouble of message passing that Hermes has to go to to provide cooldown information. Hermes has to pass messages because GetSpellCooldown does not accept a unitID as an argument. Non-aura based procs or similar information like Combo points, Holy Power or Soul Shards are also exposed by the API for anything with a unitID and so message passing is again overkill.

In the below screenshot of my party frames you can see that I am showing the Maelstrom Weapon aura (which is a proc) from my shaman slaves as well as the number of stacks. This is done using a custom LuaText in Pitbull but there are other ways of doing this for different unit frames I imagine. I will post the exact code I used when the servers are up in case anyone wants to replicate this functionality. It may also be worth keeping an eye on the addon unitDoodles which is currently in Alpha testing and may be easier to set up.



Alge

Thanks, looks like I understood it correctly then. Please see my above two replies. Hermes focus is on knowing who has what spells available. I don't plan to support anything that monitors auras.

I also have an addon called FulllThrottle that monitors these things (but not in a way that's useful to you). So I'm familiar with the necessary events and API techniques.