Idea - Building GUI for KA ini editing - Need your help with INIs

[Fujik]

Over the next month, I want to build a GUI for KA .INI editing. I know going through heavy text files, trying to find the right line and decipher what everything does can be a little overwhelming. I'm sure some users have been discouraged by this and gave up on KA for these reasons.

What I want to do is massively simplify building INIs. I want checkboxes, dropdown fields with predefined values, built-in information boxes that define what every field does, and many other things. Basically, A clean UI and a pleasant UX.

Maskoi suggested that it'd be nice if it had built-in templates and I can't help but agree with him. I will implement level 85 heroic and level 110 templates for all classes.

This is where I need your help. I am absolutely not EQ-savvy and what I'm hoping is that some of you could pitch in with your INIs and others could comment in hope to achieve the best possible templates.

Now I'm guessing certain INIs are better for certain things. Like I said, I'm clueless when it comes to EQ, but it would make sense if the templates reflected the most common use. I'm guessing for 85 heroics, this is group levelling, and for 110, it is group farming? If you want to pitch in on this, by all means, please do.

tl;dr : I need INIs for all classes for both LVL85 heroics and LVL110, all for the latest version of KA, and I'm sincerely hoping I can get the community to crowdsource these informations.

I will be posting updates in this thread. Also, if you have ideas that you think should be implemented, please let me know!

 

[Coinstop]

https://www.redguides.com/community/threads/29000-Compiled-INI-List
Basically every single level and class is filled out, can grab em there.

 

[Fujik]

Aye, thank you! I stumbled upon these already. There's still a lot of work to be done with them. Some heroics include items, some don't, changes are suggested in comments, they aren't following the latest INI template, etc.

To be honest, I was definitely hoping to crowdsource this by the forum users while I was working on the programming/UI design.

Either way, If no one else has started by the time I start implementing templates, I'll go ahead and generate a list of INIs in this thread. No big deal!

 

[ctaylor22]

An idea for this might be to have a macro that can be run on a character and build a file that includes everything on the character and all their spells/abilities/AA's and whatever else, so you can read this ini file from your GUI and match up everything and allow the user to just pick and choose things like items in their inventory and/or any AA/abilities they may want to incorporate into the various section of kissassists ini file.

 

[Fujik]

Aye. Well, I don't want to say too much but we're already thinking about listing all spells, ordered by level, for the class you're editing. All this as dropdown menus and relevant to the category you're editing. AA's, possibly. Items, most likely not. It's a lot of work gathering that data but Maskoi seems to be willing. I don't want to speak for him though.

We don't want to support items, afaik. The way you'll handle these is by manually entering their names within the editor. Although, what you're saying is not a bad idea. I wouldn't be doing it with spells/AAs given what I wrote above, but perhaps items?

I could implement such a feature. e.g. read all the items from a file and push them to the bottom of the dropdown menu when selecting abilities. I'm not going to get involved with anything in-game related though. I'm going to work exclusively on the program. So unless someone else wants to do the macro, it's not going to happen.

 

[FV_Remnant]

Just a thought but it might be nice to include scripting for the drop downs, or you enter character class / level and it will only show class & <= level spells.

 

[saar]

on cctaylor22's idea I have a dump macro that takes all clickies, spells, alt, and combat abilities into a txt file might make it easier

- - - Updated - - -

only thing with predefined spells is those that dont have all the spells or alt abilities or aa's. A list created for each toon at that moment would have its benifit

 

[Fujik]

FV_Remnant
Aye. The class thing is already part of the plan. Only spells relevant to the class you're editing the ini for will be displayed in the dropdown. As far as levels, perhaps I could add some form of filtering. Right now though, the idea was to list spells by level, with the level displayed to the left. I'm not sure how hard it will be to navigate and wether or not filtering will be needed. The way I see it, scrolling to the spell range that you want should only take about a second.

Additionally, there will be an info button to the right of the spell names. Clicking on it will open a contextual window displaying spell infos in a format similar to the one you'd see on allakhazam.

ctaylor22 & saar
As for cctaylor22's idea, I gave it more thought. I see better now how it could be helpful to provide such an option. I'll go ahead and add it to the roadmap. I'll implement it this way : I'll provide the user to ability to toggle between complete lists and owned lists, if such a file has been imported. If complete lists are enabled, i'll still provide visual feedback as to which spells/abilities are owned by making their respective background a little bit greenish, as in "enabled" kind of feel.

Beauty of the thing is that we have internal DBs for everything except items, so I can just check against these DBs to know what the string represents, and if no matches, I can just assume it's an item.

Can you show me an example of the output of your macro?

 

[ctaylor22]

I don't have one, but I can create one for you.

 

[Fujik]

I think saar has one.

 

[ctaylor22]

I think saar has one.

Cool.

 

[saar]

mine kinda works its kinda borked though but it will dump spells and alt abilities and discs for current level to 10 below

 

[Fujik]

Thank you!

 

[saar]

it should grab clickies as well, but in its current state needs some tlc, This is petesampras mac btw from 2013 from his bot plugin alpha and beta to get all the data he needed.

- - - Updated - - -

It was used to also make the shitsbuilder.exe to build custom holys/downs