WowAce

Hi,

I would really love to have this kind of indicator that allows multiple buffs to be tracked and their icons to be spawned. Mostly for tracking all the defensive cooldowns on tank. So if tank uses Shield Wall and he also gets two Hand of Sacrifices you could see all three of them. Setting max number of buffs to show, buffs per row and the direction which to spawn those buffs would be nice settings to have for it.

Sounds like a lot of work but would be a nice feature to have.

Thanks for making it michaelspain, tried it out just a moment ago and found out following things.

Creating indicator in a position other than BOTTOMLEFT, BOTTOMRIGHT, TOPLEFT or TOPRIGHT gives you an error and the indicator won't show up in the list before reloading. Changing location from indicator's layout page fixed this. Frame Level was set to 1 by default, not sure if this is meant. Creating indicator to same position as one that can be selected from the layout page's list won't give you errors and the indicator is created correctly.

I didn't yet find a way to get multiple icons to spawn though, no matter how I tried to slide those bars. One is created to the spot but others didn't show up next to it, they spawned to the same spot which could be noticed when the top buff ran out.

@Tseh: Go

The statuses list is a priority list, this is standard for all indicators, only the top most active status is displayed. You must link a multiicon status, only two statuses spawn multiple icons: group of buffs and group of debuffs. Create a buff group, add several buffs to the status, and link the status to the icons indicator.

Uff, maybe it was not a good idea to implement this stuff ... it does not fit well with the general addon design, there is no way to implement the configuration options in a intuitive way

@michaelspain: Go

Got it working with that buff group. Seems to be working at the moment without problems.

Of course if it makes code looking messy and can't be implemented any other way it's just better to get rid of it. I hesitated to ask for it in the first place, because it sounded like the system hadn't been designed to have grid inside the grid. Anyways, really like how it works at the moment, hopefully you come up with some idea.

@Tseh: Go

It's not a code problem, its more about interface design. It's not difficult to change the indicator to display all statuses in the statuses list (multibar indicator already works in this way).

The problem is: the status list configuration having different meaning for different indicators.

Really it makes sense to display all listed statuses in a multi icons indicator. But this is not the normal behavior for other indicators. What do users expect ? What do i expect ? i really dont know XD On the other hand, i could think some scenarios where a status priority list could be useful for this indicator.

Maybe i am just overthinking this. Any thoughts ?

Maybe a swtich option to change the behavior of the indicator ? but this maybe is even more confusing from the user perspective ...

@michaelspain: Go

Okay, to be honest you're right, it might get confusing if too many different kind of indicators are added. I've used Grid2 for so many years that it really didn't come to my mind to even try using a buff group, I just figured the "normal" way of adding statuses to an indicator would work.

Is it possible to add statuses to priority list and still have them spawn in different order, if I got it right this is what you meant with your last paragraph. For some personal cooldown addons, buffs can be sorted like following in their options: "Order statuses by priority (default)", "Order statuses by time left" and "Order statuses by time of creation". This should give some insight to a user of how it works. I would personally probably use the one that orders them by creation time.

I think another thing that might confuse some users is finding out what's the difference between "icon" and "icons" indicators, when they are creating a new indicator. I suppose this is what you refered with not being sure how to expect things to work? Maybe renaming latter to icon-bar, icon-grid or something a bit more descriptive would help, couldn't come up any better right now, those two might be confusing aswell. Or maybe renaming them with longer names like "Single-point icon" and "Multiple icons in a grid".

I'm not asking you to sacrifice the nice flow addon has in its settings right now, just for this indicator to be in the addon. After all, I'm just one guy who likes information and I'm sure most of the users can live without this feature. I believe the problems meantioned could be resolved though, I will sleep on it and see if something else comes to my mind.

@Tseh: Go

Finally i decided to change the indicator behaviour. it will display all statuses in the statuses list. Additionally Im going to refactor the group of buffs and group of debuffs statuses adding more filtering options, a blacklist and a whitelist.

@michaelspain: Go

If you ask me, now it feels lined up with rest of the addon, pretty much how I imagined it would look like when I first asked for this feature.

Do you think there could be difference in performance between assigning buff group to the indicator and assigning buffs separately? I've been running with buff group that has pretty much every defensive cooldown in the game, seems like my fps is lower in 20+ man raid, can't say for sure though.

Thanks again for making it, already proved useful on last night's raid.

@Tseh: Go

It's hard to say. When the statuses are non visible, the buffs detection method is the same, so no difference. The difference is in the drawing part, and probably with a lot of buffs configured, the buff group will be faster.

For example, configuring 50 single buff statuses, the drawing code must iterate over 50 statuses, so more single buffs configured -> more slow.

But using a group of buffs, the performance does not depend of the number of configured buffs, because the drawing code iterates over all player active buffs (not the configured buffs).

You could install http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/addon-usage enable realtime updates, reset the info before a combat, and check de Grid2 cpu usage, i think in normal circunstances (not trillion of buffs configured) , the cpu usage must be similar.

@michaelspain: Go

Thanks for clarifying how it works. Tried the addon and Grid2 was around 10-12% of total use all the time. Doesn't sound too much, Recount and Bartender were much higher all the time so I don't believe the new indicator did anything to my fps.

Keep up the good work, I'm really grateful that you did this and that you have updated Grid2 other ways as well. Being almost 100% healer, seeing an update for Grid2 in Curse Client gets me excited, every time.