I will have a go at it, but loads of functionality will be up to the community to supply in plugins/replacements. Just havn't had the time to write anything yet, although I have looked at the CTRA core and identified several channel-commands etc.
I looked at the code for the channel stuff, and I think it could be optimized by grabbing the part before the first space, and sending that off to a function in a table, rather than doing all of those ifs.. i know it's not *that* much of an improvement, but it should be better than what they're doing :p
Rowne's Alpha would be a good thing to integrate if possible... The ability for the raid leader to put messages in bold lettering on the screen for the various groups would be handy I'd think. Or perhaps, modularize and let people keep/toss the modules they want. It seems most raid addons give everything to everybody, not allowing for class needs/personal preferences.
I will have a go at it, but loads of functionality will be up to the community to supply in plugins/replacements. Just havn't had the time to write anything yet, although I have looked at the CTRA core and identified several channel-commands etc.
While CTRA was necessary in wow beta and pre 1.5, as the blizzard ui/api was missing lots of functions (e.g. checking raid buffs, raid unit frames,...), CTRA now has developed to a huge pile of tools, out of which some raids require some, and some players use some. I doubt there's anyone who is using all of CTRA though.
So in case someone really starts coding a AceRaidAssist, I'd suggest the following:
1) identify the tools CTRA offers, and see if there are any ace'd tools that can be used instead. Publish that list.
2) identify what the hidden chat channel is used for (afaik: list of MTs, resist/durability/item queries, ready/vote, squelch (ouch, this hooks the blizzard ChatFrame_onEvent), version check).
3) program a core module which isn't more than a kind of addon manager for ctra-like addons. It might contain some core features, such as chat channel joining, parsing, the notification frame in the middle of the screen for /rs (also used by ct bossmod).
4) release an api to this core.
5) let the community develop plugins, e.g.:
- resistance/durability/item/... check
- raready/ravote
- MT windows with target of target
- aggro alert
- recast raid buffs
- rainvite/rakeyword (for guild invitations)
- resurrection monitor
- /razone
6) keep compatibility to CTRA for the chat channel stuff and queries
7) use Ace ;)
PS: tools CTRA offers which can be replaced by the usage of other addons might be:
- raid frames + buff filtering + debuff coloring (MiniGroup2 should offer this soon)
- healing spell cancellation (lots of healing mods have this)
- debuffing (decursive? well, we might need a better replacement ;)
- emergency monitor (think there is at least one addon)
fun to go on raid and hear the healer complain that they cant see the MT's health, because they are using different versions of CTRA..
Uhm.. Blizzard raid frames show health, dont need a . addon to spam the chat channel with information about it.
They really need to do some optimization work there.. I guess its just evolving and evolving into a huge beast, with no work done on the original code... Hope i'm mistaken though, but my impression of ctra are not good.
@maia: Yeah, that was (in general) pretty much my plan, the core might not even have the /rs command in order for people to choose the plugin which has the layout/functionality that fits that persons UI best.
Handling the CTRA channel seems to be a real piece o cake, however CTRA also has a message queueing system, which I havn't really had a chance to look closer at. What I wonder is if this is really needed if the plugins are written decently. Shouldn't a throttler for parsing channel data be of more interest? Is there some spam protection built in to WoW doing evil things with people running addons without message queueing?
CTRA compability will largely be up to the plugins to provide, there has been some "RaidAssist" addons that have tried to be better than CTRA, the problem as I see it is converting a whole guild to it since everyone would have to switch. If the structure is more open a guild can more slowly "convert", or at least the user himself could hopefully use compitable plugins while not having to use the entire package. Which is obviously at least the first goal.
As instant said people get a ton of information of the CTRA channel, the question is how to maintain compability with CTRA while not having to actually send all that crap load of data over the channel.
I have actually already begun thinking of a name... but I want to hear if there are any good suggestions here first :P
It won't in any case be "AceRaidAssist", as much as I like the ACE way of doing things I like "different" names that we also have quite a lot of here.
Is there some spam protection built in to WoW doing evil things with people running addons without message queueing?
I'm pretty sure there is (or at least used to be - can't see why they would've changed it though), but I can't remember what the timer is set to. I think Sky has some kind of queuer made for this, not sure though.
As far as I can remember back in beta or early wow release patches wow had a problem with too much channel traffic. And as CTRA sent tons of info via that channel at that time, the queuing system was necessary. If you now watch the channel manually you'll see that not much info is handled via that channel anymore. So I guess this could wait a bit, at least until we see that is's really necessary.
Had a look in the CTRA channel during a raid tonight, and it was actually less spammy than I expected, the single biggest actor in the channel was the buffing communication, thus I think the queueing system can be left to the author of the buff handler :twisted:
But I'll wrap something together and I'll see if it works.
Was about to post this suggestion and thought I'd search first, and then found this thread! Woot!
Errrrrr.... it's already been done. (If you're talking about aceing CTRA)
Just look in the AddOn section for oRA and XRaid - they're what you want.
Yeah, I'm going to test out XRaid for our raid later today. But it doesn't have all the features that CTRaid does (yet?). Anyway, I don't foresee CTRaid's current monopoly on the raid mod market being diminished any time soon. It would be nice if the original mod was ACE'd
Was about to post this suggestion and thought I'd search first, and then found this thread! Woot!
Errrrrr.... it's already been done. (If you're talking about aceing CTRA)
Just look in the AddOn section for oRA and XRaid - they're what you want.
Yeah, I'm going to test out XRaid for our raid later today. But it doesn't have all the features that CTRaid does (yet?). Anyway, I don't foresee CTRaid's current monopoly on the raid mod market being diminished any time soon. It would be nice if the original mod was ACE'd
Thalinon is right, it's already done.
I ditched CTRA a long time ago. My guild requires CTRA, they get mad if people don't have it. They don't even notice I'm not using CTRA but the Ace alternatives.
oRA is the Ace'd eqivelant of CTRA. It's fully modularized and compatable with CTRA. Supports Durrability reports, Item reports, reisitances, Ready checks/votes, main tank lists, ... I might be missing something. The only thing it leaves out id decursive, which really doesn't belong in a raid management addon anyways, it should be seperate. Use decursive, or bug someone to make an ace'd decursing mod, or learn how to decurse manually ;-).
Go check out the forum post on oRA. http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,1158.0.html
Xraid is the pair to oRA. All XRaid does is provide unit frames for raids. That's it. It hooks into oRA to give you similar features as CTRA's unit frames, but oRA is not reqired to use Xraid, and Xraid is not required to use oRA.
XRaid is here: http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,38.0.html
Other unit frames can be used too. I use MG2 ace'd, and I anxiously await the MG2 MT frames because besides the fact that I don't see MTs, everything else in MG2 is gorgeous. http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,745.0.html
Please go check out oRA. It's awesome. But on another note, perhaps someone should create a oRA gui. That's the main difference. Everyone who uses CTRA is used to menus to change all their settings, oRA only has the slash command. I love that personally, no need to have config dialogs if you can do it with slash commands so it saves me a bit of memory. But it could be implemented as seperate oRA module to provide an options menu.
Was about to post this suggestion and thought I'd search first, and then found this thread! Woot!
Errrrrr.... it's already been done. (If you're talking about aceing CTRA)
Just look in the AddOn section for oRA and XRaid - they're what you want.
Yeah, I'm going to test out XRaid for our raid later today. But it doesn't have all the features that CTRaid does (yet?). Anyway, I don't foresee CTRaid's current monopoly on the raid mod market being diminished any time soon. It would be nice if the original mod was ACE'd
Thalinon is right, it's already done.
I ditched CTRA a long time ago. My guild requires CTRA, they get mad if people don't have it. They don't even notice I'm not using CTRA but the Ace alternatives.
oRA is the Ace'd eqivelant of CTRA. It's fully modularized and compatable with CTRA. Supports Durrability reports, Item reports, reisitances, Ready checks/votes, main tank lists, ... I might be missing something. The only thing it leaves out id decursive, which really doesn't belong in a raid management addon anyways, it should be seperate. Use decursive, or bug someone to make an ace'd decursing mod, or learn how to decurse manually ;-).
Go check out the forum post on oRA. http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,1158.0.html
Xraid is the pair to oRA. All XRaid does is provide unit frames for raids. That's it. It hooks into oRA to give you similar features as CTRA's unit frames, but oRA is not reqired to use Xraid, and Xraid is not required to use oRA.
XRaid is here: http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,38.0.html
Other unit frames can be used too. I use MG2 ace'd, and I anxiously await the MG2 MT frames because besides the fact that I don't see MTs, everything else in MG2 is gorgeous. http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,745.0.html
Please go check out oRA. It's awesome. But on another note, perhaps someone should create a oRA gui. That's the main difference. Everyone who uses CTRA is used to menus to change all their settings, oRA only has the slash command. I love that personally, no need to have config dialogs if you can do it with slash commands so it saves me a bit of memory. But it could be implemented as seperate oRA module to provide an options menu.
Well here's the thing. CTRaid by itself takes around 2700 kb memory usage. I'm not a fan of Blizzard's default raid frames, or Minigroup. That leaves me with XRaid or Clad's PerfectRaid.
PerfectRaid is great; it uses about 300 or less kb. Downright amazing. But... the mod is in beta and crashes your game... So that option goes out the window.
So now there's XRaid. The thing about this mod is that it takes around 1700 kb usage. Combined with oRA and modules, and I'm back up to CTRaid levels. So...... what?... The MAIN benefit that I was personally looking for (memory usage) I'm not even going to get.
Well here's the thing. CTRaid by itself takes around 2700 kb memory usage. I'm not a fan of Blizzard's default raid frames, or Minigroup. That leaves me with XRaid or Clad's PerfectRaid.
PerfectRaid is great; it uses about 300 or less kb. Downright amazing. But... the mod is in beta and crashes your game... So that option goes out the window.
So now there's XRaid. The thing about this mod is that it takes around 1700 kb usage. Combined with oRA and modules, and I'm back up to CTRaid levels. So...... what?... The MAIN benefit that I was personally looking for (memory usage) I'm not even going to get.
... So I'm back to square one.
And THAT is why I was asking about Ace'd CTraid.
Thats the reason why I really need Perfect Raid.
XRaid looks quite nice but it uses far too much memory.
Perfect Raid would solve this problem for me because I'm a rogue and I really don't need bloated frames.
I only need a frame for every member of the raid with their hp and a quick way to see some basic info about their mana.
I really like EasyRaid for the visual stuff; the Blizzard default raid frames are perfect for me but hard to use without EasyRaid.
The only thing it's missing is MT target. Someone needs to make a MT target module for EasyRaid or a stand-alone MT target AddOn that works seamlessly with oRA.
The only thing it's missing is MT target. Someone needs to make a MT target module for EasyRaid or a stand-alone MT target AddOn that works seamlessly with oRA.
Agreed.
How about an 'oRA MT frames' module using the 'oRA MT code' module?
However I must comment on the CTRA memory usage... I have NEVER seen it use less than 5000KiB on startup, usually around 6-7000KiB. How on earth did you manage to scale it down to 2700?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
SoonTM :P
splendid, please report back with any progress.
So in case someone really starts coding a AceRaidAssist, I'd suggest the following:
1) identify the tools CTRA offers, and see if there are any ace'd tools that can be used instead. Publish that list.
2) identify what the hidden chat channel is used for (afaik: list of MTs, resist/durability/item queries, ready/vote, squelch (ouch, this hooks the blizzard ChatFrame_onEvent), version check).
3) program a core module which isn't more than a kind of addon manager for ctra-like addons. It might contain some core features, such as chat channel joining, parsing, the notification frame in the middle of the screen for /rs (also used by ct bossmod).
4) release an api to this core.
5) let the community develop plugins, e.g.:
- resistance/durability/item/... check
- raready/ravote
- MT windows with target of target
- aggro alert
- recast raid buffs
- rainvite/rakeyword (for guild invitations)
- resurrection monitor
- /razone
6) keep compatibility to CTRA for the chat channel stuff and queries
7) use Ace ;)
PS: tools CTRA offers which can be replaced by the usage of other addons might be:
- raid frames + buff filtering + debuff coloring (MiniGroup2 should offer this soon)
- healing spell cancellation (lots of healing mods have this)
- debuffing (decursive? well, we might need a better replacement ;)
- emergency monitor (think there is at least one addon)
Uhm.. Blizzard raid frames show health, dont need a . addon to spam the chat channel with information about it.
They really need to do some optimization work there.. I guess its just evolving and evolving into a huge beast, with no work done on the original code... Hope i'm mistaken though, but my impression of ctra are not good.
Handling the CTRA channel seems to be a real piece o cake, however CTRA also has a message queueing system, which I havn't really had a chance to look closer at. What I wonder is if this is really needed if the plugins are written decently. Shouldn't a throttler for parsing channel data be of more interest? Is there some spam protection built in to WoW doing evil things with people running addons without message queueing?
CTRA compability will largely be up to the plugins to provide, there has been some "RaidAssist" addons that have tried to be better than CTRA, the problem as I see it is converting a whole guild to it since everyone would have to switch. If the structure is more open a guild can more slowly "convert", or at least the user himself could hopefully use compitable plugins while not having to use the entire package. Which is obviously at least the first goal.
As instant said people get a ton of information of the CTRA channel, the question is how to maintain compability with CTRA while not having to actually send all that crap load of data over the channel.
I have actually already begun thinking of a name... but I want to hear if there are any good suggestions here first :P
It won't in any case be "AceRaidAssist", as much as I like the ACE way of doing things I like "different" names that we also have quite a lot of here.
I'm pretty sure there is (or at least used to be - can't see why they would've changed it though), but I can't remember what the timer is set to. I think Sky has some kind of queuer made for this, not sure though.
But I'll wrap something together and I'll see if it works.
Errrrrr.... it's already been done. (If you're talking about aceing CTRA)
Just look in the AddOn section for oRA and XRaid - they're what you want.
Yeah, I'm going to test out XRaid for our raid later today. But it doesn't have all the features that CTRaid does (yet?). Anyway, I don't foresee CTRaid's current monopoly on the raid mod market being diminished any time soon. It would be nice if the original mod was ACE'd
Thalinon is right, it's already done.
I ditched CTRA a long time ago. My guild requires CTRA, they get mad if people don't have it. They don't even notice I'm not using CTRA but the Ace alternatives.
oRA is the Ace'd eqivelant of CTRA. It's fully modularized and compatable with CTRA. Supports Durrability reports, Item reports, reisitances, Ready checks/votes, main tank lists, ... I might be missing something. The only thing it leaves out id decursive, which really doesn't belong in a raid management addon anyways, it should be seperate. Use decursive, or bug someone to make an ace'd decursing mod, or learn how to decurse manually ;-).
Go check out the forum post on oRA. http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,1158.0.html
Xraid is the pair to oRA. All XRaid does is provide unit frames for raids. That's it. It hooks into oRA to give you similar features as CTRA's unit frames, but oRA is not reqired to use Xraid, and Xraid is not required to use oRA.
XRaid is here: http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,38.0.html
Other unit frames can be used too. I use MG2 ace'd, and I anxiously await the MG2 MT frames because besides the fact that I don't see MTs, everything else in MG2 is gorgeous. http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php/topic,745.0.html
Please go check out oRA. It's awesome. But on another note, perhaps someone should create a oRA gui. That's the main difference. Everyone who uses CTRA is used to menus to change all their settings, oRA only has the slash command. I love that personally, no need to have config dialogs if you can do it with slash commands so it saves me a bit of memory. But it could be implemented as seperate oRA module to provide an options menu.
Well here's the thing. CTRaid by itself takes around 2700 kb memory usage. I'm not a fan of Blizzard's default raid frames, or Minigroup. That leaves me with XRaid or Clad's PerfectRaid.
PerfectRaid is great; it uses about 300 or less kb. Downright amazing. But... the mod is in beta and crashes your game... So that option goes out the window.
So now there's XRaid. The thing about this mod is that it takes around 1700 kb usage. Combined with oRA and modules, and I'm back up to CTRaid levels. So...... what?... The MAIN benefit that I was personally looking for (memory usage) I'm not even going to get.
... So I'm back to square one.
And THAT is why I was asking about Ace'd CTraid.
Thats the reason why I really need Perfect Raid.
XRaid looks quite nice but it uses far too much memory.
Perfect Raid would solve this problem for me because I'm a rogue and I really don't need bloated frames.
I only need a frame for every member of the raid with their hp and a quick way to see some basic info about their mana.
The only thing it's missing is MT target. Someone needs to make a MT target module for EasyRaid or a stand-alone MT target AddOn that works seamlessly with oRA.
Agreed.
How about an 'oRA MT frames' module using the 'oRA MT code' module?
However I must comment on the CTRA memory usage... I have NEVER seen it use less than 5000KiB on startup, usually around 6-7000KiB. How on earth did you manage to scale it down to 2700?