I opted for the full rewrite because a) there's no better time than patches to do it, b) 2.4 necessitated a full parsing rewrite anyhow, and c) I wanted to move to Ace3 at some point, and if you're already doing half a rewrite, why not do the full thing rather than doing a bunch of rework later?
I know there are bugs, but they're being worked out.
In regards to the lockup issue, I've been tearing into this one and I can't find anything in Threat or Omen's code that would seem to be capable of causing it. Additionally, I've had a large number of reports (and even a blue) saying they are experiencing similar lockups without Omen installed. I'm really, really, really not convinced it's Omen at this point. I'm going to keep looking, of course.
The other modes are wonky right now. The vast, vast, vast majority of my development time has gone into single-target mode, since that's the mode that most people are familiar with, and most use. My goal is to provide views for all roles in the raid, and I will get there eventually.
I post snapshots on Curse and WoWI at regular intervals. Those may be treated as "stable snapshots", though at this point, the latest from Subversion is likely more stable.
I am sorry it's been an unpleasant experience (hey, I'm a raider too, I feel the pain from these issues!), but I'm working hard to resolve them. In the meantime, if you want to use KTM, I have no beef with that. Use what works best for you. I just hope to make Omen that product. :)
I've not had a lock up from Omen at all that I can trace - unless Omen is triggered when you click on the portal to Silvermoon that is there in the central room of Shatt. And I doubt that generates threat. :) But since 2.4 I have only made it through that portal twice without crashing my PC.
... And, how did I get through twice? I used Jwowupdater's "reinstall all addons" feature to delete every addon I had and redownload them all (without having to write out a long list) and then deleted my WTF folder (and spent hours redoing all my settings and lamenting the loss of some 4000+ hits on gatherer)...
I suggest people who are getting these lockups move their Addons and WTF folders to backups elsewhere, and go in fresh for a little bit, see if you lock up, and then put Addons back using newly downloaded copies. If like me you have a large database of something like gatherer you can always get together with a buddy and use the ingame share feature to send them your entire database, delete your WTF, and have them send it back where it will now be 'freshly recorded' (and hopefully lacking whatever variable 2.4 dislikes).
And it may just be that Blizzard introduced some bugs into the game's code that are causing lockups in certain places and some stealth hot-fix is the real reason I'm now getting through that portal (but then again, no one in my guild but me was crashing there).
On Omen:
I am glad the author(s) are here talking with us, but also very frustrated that something isn't working. In fact the newest copies seem to work even less than the older copies from a few days ago. My guildies have taken up some very anti-Omen attitudes and I'm now facing a push to switch us to KTM. But on going to curse and looking at what KTM does... it's a poor sister at best, I'm not even sure it has anything to do with actual threat, but is just pretty auto-sliding bars to distract people.
So please... get us a minimal something that works soon. :)
I'd generally agree with this until Blizz designed encounters with 10min hard enrage timers with threat meters in mind. Which really throws a crank into things, it can be done it's just much more difficult.
Yeah, but the point would be that DPSer is so easy to play compared ot Tank/Healer that having to internally calculate your Threat from your damage done versus the tank (and you should know your tank) is the only thing putting some brainpower in to the fight.
Rolling your head over the keyboard with half the keys bound to Attack #1 and the other half to Attack #2 is hardly something of a big feat.
Yeah, but the point would be that DPSer is so easy to play compared ot Tank/Healer that having to internally calculate your Threat from your damage done versus the tank (and you should know your tank) is the only thing putting some brainpower in to the fight.
Rolling your head over the keyboard with half the keys bound to Attack #1 and the other half to Attack #2 is hardly something of a big feat.
Pot. Kettle. Black. Which are you: Tank or Healer? It's easy to point the finger at the other side. Personally, I always blame wipes on the Healers. Then again, I guess it could be the Tanks. I'm DPS so I know it can't be us :)
Back to the real subject:
Someone else already posted this idea, but I think it deserves repeating.
Pick a relatively recent version of Omen, one posted 2-4 hours earlier that didn't have an immediate update, and post it or a link to it on your guilds website/forum and have everyone run that version. Not that version or newer or close to that version, but that version. Since we started doing this it's been a lot better for us. Yes, some people have to downgrade and some people have to upgrade and it has delayed the start of some of our raids. But, having everyone running the same version of Omen and Threat has pretty much eliminated our problems.
I've not had a lock up from Omen at all that I can trace - unless Omen is triggered when you click on the portal to Silvermoon that is there in the central room of Shatt. And I doubt that generates threat. :) But since 2.4 I have only made it through that portal twice without crashing my PC.
This issue is caused by the library called Astrolabe-0.4.
It is in use by Gatherer, Tomtom, Nauticus and HandyNotes and possibly a few others. The client hang (infinite loop in the code) occurs when you zone from a outlands zone to another outlands zone across continents, such as from Shattrath to Silvermoon, or Sunwell Isle to Shattrath.
This bug was fixed a week ago, and can be fixed by simply by updating the addons/libraries. Hope you have a Gatherer.lua backup in your WTF folder to restore.
Or switch to GatherMate + Routes, I guarantee a 50% reduction of memory and CPU used. :)
OMG!!!!! I HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO USE THIS ADDON IN AN ENTIRE WEEK!!!! I HATE THIS ADDON NOW AND I"M GOING TO USE KTM NOW. YOU SUCK. AND MY GUILD HATES YOU TOO.
If I see another message like this I'm going to puke. Spread the word that Omen is being redone. Have a little patience and in a week or two it'll be 10x better then the previous Omen was. Sometimes you may download a version that seems like a step back because of the errors you encounter, but it isn't. You are downloading a work-in-progress.
I've not had a lock up from Omen at all that I can trace - unless Omen is triggered when you click on the portal to Silvermoon that is there in the central room of Shatt. And I doubt that generates threat. :) But since 2.4 I have only made it through that portal twice without crashing my PC.
That's interesting. I'm having the same kind of lockups only when I portal from shat to silvermoon(or the new isle). Also locks up when I hearth out of the BE areas. Quite weird. Doesn't do it when I disable all my addons. Not a huge deal. I'm slowly working through my addons to see if I can find the culprit(knowing my luck it's one that I wrote lol).
I think that a lot of the frustration (for my guild at least), has been not so much with errors in the meter itself, but with very frequent releases of incompatible meters...having issues because some people updated their meters 3 hours before the raid and others 15 minutes before, then having further issues when the 3 hour people updated to yet another new version an hour into the raid. It'd be great if the updater had the option the garb either a "release" or a "development" version, where the release versionis updated no more than every couple of days....even if the release version had bugs at least everyone would be on the same page.
I realize that you guys already have plenty to do and I do appreciate and thank you for your work on the mod, just tossing out a suggestion that would likely eliminate a lot of pain for both raiders and you having to deal with feedback from the more irate raiders. Regardless, you're doing a great job and we'll manage in the meantime whatever happens.
That's interesting. I'm having the same kind of lockups only when I portal from shat to silvermoon(or the new isle). Also locks up when I hearth out of the BE areas. Quite weird. Doesn't do it when I disable all my addons. Not a huge deal. I'm slowly working through my addons to see if I can find the culprit(knowing my luck it's one that I wrote lol).
I think that a lot of the frustration (for my guild at least), has been not so much with errors in the meter itself, but with very frequent releases of incompatible meters...having issues because some people updated their meters 3 hours before the raid and others 15 minutes before, then having further issues when the 3 hour people updated to yet another new version an hour into the raid. It'd be great if the updater had the option the garb either a "release" or a "development" version, where the release versionis updated no more than every couple of days....even if the release version had bugs at least everyone would be on the same page.
I definitely do get this, but the reason I've broken backwards compatibility is because the "release version" had bugs so severe that they needed to be patched immediately - that release was worthless with those bugs in it.
I don't enjoy breaking backwards compat, and should hopefully be done with it for a while, though!
Yeah, but the point would be that DPSer is so easy to play compared ot Tank/Healer that having to internally calculate your Threat from your damage done versus the tank (and you should know your tank) is the only thing putting some brainpower in to the fight.
Rolling your head over the keyboard with half the keys bound to Attack #1 and the other half to Attack #2 is hardly something of a big feat.
Having done the healer and gone onto the dps roll that really depends, so don't worry I've been here before. Then again even tho I know my tank pretty well, and can roughly calculate how much threat I'm dealing with I'm sure there's piles of people not to mention everyone who's currently running that nice progression gauntlet right now.
Then again if you take a fight with 20 aggro wipes during the entire duration you're going to have issues especially while learning. Then again, maybe not everyone is as skilled as you think. Perhaps too not everyone started raiding before BWL, it's not like anything back then really required one.
Just to clear that up - I really appreciate your work Antiarc, and I was really looking forward to the new GUID system implemented in Omen2.
However, as many have stated, even Blizzard assumes we do have something like a working threat meter.
Try Bloodboil as a tank without it, or RoS - it's not like we can't play without it, it's just a major PITA.
I do understand that you want to use the opportunity to rewrite everything if the parser is broken. But I wasn't even questioning that. What I would love to see is a back-port for Threat-1.0 to parse the new combat log.
You already rewrote the parser, so maybe that would be a possibility to get a working non bleeding edge version while actual feature development could continue on Omen2?
On the lockup-thing:
22 of us had the most recent version of Omen2 with embedded libs, 22 of us had simultaneous lockups. Not lags, lockups. Like we could still talk on TS, but only some of us could even kill WoW without a hard reset.
This happened 5 times in a row in P1, until someone of those without lockups suggested disabling Omen - and the lockups stopped. That sure does seem like it was caused by Omen/Threat, right? =)
On the lockup-thing:
22 of us had the most recent version of Omen2 with embedded libs, 22 of us had simultaneous lockups. Not lags, lockups. Like we could still talk on TS, but only some of us could even kill WoW without a hard reset.
This happened 5 times in a row in P1, until someone of those without lockups suggested disabling Omen - and the lockups stopped. That sure does seem like it was caused by Omen/Threat, right? =)
That's really worrying, yeah. :/
I'll keep digging through the code for stuff that might cause that. Can you get me the revision number you were all using?
Sorry, don't have the revision anymore, but we updated right before our raid last tuesday - April 1st, around 18:30. Should have been something like ~67000 iirc.
We killed Illidan today again with no problems, most of us (~15 ppl) using an up-to-date version of Omen. We had nearly the same lineup as last time though.
How could such a lockup happen anyway? I mean, even a while(true) would still be killable..?
Now, when 2.4 hit, EVERYTHING on the right up there had to be rewritten, and plenty of code on the left up there had to be fixed because of changes in the API. So... Instead of doing this much work on Omen1 to make it compatible for 2.4
The only thing you omit is Effort versus Deadline (a big omission). Rarely should reducing amount of effort be the only reason a software development approach is chosen when end-user impact is likely to happen due to an impending (hard) deadline.
It is evident that the effort to do everything Antiarc wanted to do did not fit within the timeline for a realistic release versus when users would want it. In a real world situation, this would be a big issue, and would likely not happen as the deadline considerations would have been enforced versus effort.
The only real question is whether the deadline left enough time to even fix Omen1 in the first place. *IF* it did, then the wrong choice was made...if it didn't, then the right choice was to go ahead and do the pie-in-the-sky new version. I won't pretend to answer this as I don't know the code in question. What I do know is Software management/development is not about amount of effort in any realistic situation...its all about minimizing effort within a deadline window.
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Curse PremiumI know there are bugs, but they're being worked out.
In regards to the lockup issue, I've been tearing into this one and I can't find anything in Threat or Omen's code that would seem to be capable of causing it. Additionally, I've had a large number of reports (and even a blue) saying they are experiencing similar lockups without Omen installed. I'm really, really, really not convinced it's Omen at this point. I'm going to keep looking, of course.
The other modes are wonky right now. The vast, vast, vast majority of my development time has gone into single-target mode, since that's the mode that most people are familiar with, and most use. My goal is to provide views for all roles in the raid, and I will get there eventually.
I post snapshots on Curse and WoWI at regular intervals. Those may be treated as "stable snapshots", though at this point, the latest from Subversion is likely more stable.
I am sorry it's been an unpleasant experience (hey, I'm a raider too, I feel the pain from these issues!), but I'm working hard to resolve them. In the meantime, if you want to use KTM, I have no beef with that. Use what works best for you. I just hope to make Omen that product. :)
... And, how did I get through twice? I used Jwowupdater's "reinstall all addons" feature to delete every addon I had and redownload them all (without having to write out a long list) and then deleted my WTF folder (and spent hours redoing all my settings and lamenting the loss of some 4000+ hits on gatherer)...
I suggest people who are getting these lockups move their Addons and WTF folders to backups elsewhere, and go in fresh for a little bit, see if you lock up, and then put Addons back using newly downloaded copies. If like me you have a large database of something like gatherer you can always get together with a buddy and use the ingame share feature to send them your entire database, delete your WTF, and have them send it back where it will now be 'freshly recorded' (and hopefully lacking whatever variable 2.4 dislikes).
And it may just be that Blizzard introduced some bugs into the game's code that are causing lockups in certain places and some stealth hot-fix is the real reason I'm now getting through that portal (but then again, no one in my guild but me was crashing there).
On Omen:
I am glad the author(s) are here talking with us, but also very frustrated that something isn't working. In fact the newest copies seem to work even less than the older copies from a few days ago. My guildies have taken up some very anti-Omen attitudes and I'm now facing a push to switch us to KTM. But on going to curse and looking at what KTM does... it's a poor sister at best, I'm not even sure it has anything to do with actual threat, but is just pretty auto-sliding bars to distract people.
So please... get us a minimal something that works soon. :)
So chill out, relax, have a bud, and go watch the game ;)
Yeah, but the point would be that DPSer is so easy to play compared ot Tank/Healer that having to internally calculate your Threat from your damage done versus the tank (and you should know your tank) is the only thing putting some brainpower in to the fight.
Rolling your head over the keyboard with half the keys bound to Attack #1 and the other half to Attack #2 is hardly something of a big feat.
Pot. Kettle. Black. Which are you: Tank or Healer? It's easy to point the finger at the other side. Personally, I always blame wipes on the Healers. Then again, I guess it could be the Tanks. I'm DPS so I know it can't be us :)
Back to the real subject:
Someone else already posted this idea, but I think it deserves repeating.
Pick a relatively recent version of Omen, one posted 2-4 hours earlier that didn't have an immediate update, and post it or a link to it on your guilds website/forum and have everyone run that version. Not that version or newer or close to that version, but that version. Since we started doing this it's been a lot better for us. Yes, some people have to downgrade and some people have to upgrade and it has delayed the start of some of our raids. But, having everyone running the same version of Omen and Threat has pretty much eliminated our problems.
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Curse PremiumThis issue is caused by the library called Astrolabe-0.4.
It is in use by Gatherer, Tomtom, Nauticus and HandyNotes and possibly a few others. The client hang (infinite loop in the code) occurs when you zone from a outlands zone to another outlands zone across continents, such as from Shattrath to Silvermoon, or Sunwell Isle to Shattrath.
This bug was fixed a week ago, and can be fixed by simply by updating the addons/libraries. Hope you have a Gatherer.lua backup in your WTF folder to restore.
Or switch to GatherMate + Routes, I guarantee a 50% reduction of memory and CPU used. :)
If I see another message like this I'm going to puke. Spread the word that Omen is being redone. Have a little patience and in a week or two it'll be 10x better then the previous Omen was. Sometimes you may download a version that seems like a step back because of the errors you encounter, but it isn't. You are downloading a work-in-progress.
That's interesting. I'm having the same kind of lockups only when I portal from shat to silvermoon(or the new isle). Also locks up when I hearth out of the BE areas. Quite weird. Doesn't do it when I disable all my addons. Not a huge deal. I'm slowly working through my addons to see if I can find the culprit(knowing my luck it's one that I wrote lol).
I realize that you guys already have plenty to do and I do appreciate and thank you for your work on the mod, just tossing out a suggestion that would likely eliminate a lot of pain for both raiders and you having to deal with feedback from the more irate raiders. Regardless, you're doing a great job and we'll manage in the meantime whatever happens.
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Curse PremiumRead post 25 above.
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Curse PremiumI definitely do get this, but the reason I've broken backwards compatibility is because the "release version" had bugs so severe that they needed to be patched immediately - that release was worthless with those bugs in it.
I don't enjoy breaking backwards compat, and should hopefully be done with it for a while, though!
Having done the healer and gone onto the dps roll that really depends, so don't worry I've been here before. Then again even tho I know my tank pretty well, and can roughly calculate how much threat I'm dealing with I'm sure there's piles of people not to mention everyone who's currently running that nice progression gauntlet right now.
Then again if you take a fight with 20 aggro wipes during the entire duration you're going to have issues especially while learning. Then again, maybe not everyone is as skilled as you think. Perhaps too not everyone started raiding before BWL, it's not like anything back then really required one.
However, as many have stated, even Blizzard assumes we do have something like a working threat meter.
Try Bloodboil as a tank without it, or RoS - it's not like we can't play without it, it's just a major PITA.
I do understand that you want to use the opportunity to rewrite everything if the parser is broken. But I wasn't even questioning that. What I would love to see is a back-port for Threat-1.0 to parse the new combat log.
You already rewrote the parser, so maybe that would be a possibility to get a working non bleeding edge version while actual feature development could continue on Omen2?
On the lockup-thing:
22 of us had the most recent version of Omen2 with embedded libs, 22 of us had simultaneous lockups. Not lags, lockups. Like we could still talk on TS, but only some of us could even kill WoW without a hard reset.
This happened 5 times in a row in P1, until someone of those without lockups suggested disabling Omen - and the lockups stopped. That sure does seem like it was caused by Omen/Threat, right? =)
Our raids start @ 6PM, and we have everyone log out and back in with the most recent version. I post a comment in my link from files.wowace.com/Omen
Choose either Omen.zip or Omen-r****** at the bottom of the page. make sure everyone has the same version. Easy as Pie!
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Curse PremiumThat's really worrying, yeah. :/
I'll keep digging through the code for stuff that might cause that. Can you get me the revision number you were all using?
We killed Illidan today again with no problems, most of us (~15 ppl) using an up-to-date version of Omen. We had nearly the same lineup as last time though.
How could such a lockup happen anyway? I mean, even a while(true) would still be killable..?
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Curse Premiumwhile(true) do end is not killable, because the Lua state is single-threaded, and there's no way to give a command to break out of the while.
The other option is an infinitely recursing tail call. That's far harder to track down.
The only thing you omit is Effort versus Deadline (a big omission). Rarely should reducing amount of effort be the only reason a software development approach is chosen when end-user impact is likely to happen due to an impending (hard) deadline.
It is evident that the effort to do everything Antiarc wanted to do did not fit within the timeline for a realistic release versus when users would want it. In a real world situation, this would be a big issue, and would likely not happen as the deadline considerations would have been enforced versus effort.
The only real question is whether the deadline left enough time to even fix Omen1 in the first place. *IF* it did, then the wrong choice was made...if it didn't, then the right choice was to go ahead and do the pie-in-the-sky new version. I won't pretend to answer this as I don't know the code in question. What I do know is Software management/development is not about amount of effort in any realistic situation...its all about minimizing effort within a deadline window.
The deadline is running and I don't want to lose my bonus.