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Question - TBM Automation (1 Viewer)

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ChatWithThisName

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Looking at possibly automating HA's for TBM. The request was made in Discord and am looking at getting this going. This is -not- a crowd funded effort. The idea is to see how many people not only want this, but would also be willing to support the developer (meh obviously). Please feel free to answer the poll to the best of your ability based on the options provided, and comment anything you would like to add to the thread.
 
If you've never done TBM missions before you might wanna run a few before thinking of making a macro! The same mission can have 10 different ways to complete it (different items to collect from different areas of the zone) and some of the missions go into the lower portion of Sul Vius where the nav mesh doesn't work unless you tweak it - then it won't work for the upper portion either so it's just a big cluster fuck.


Anyway, I'd be happy to pay for TBM instance macros but they'd be one of the more difficult macros you've made and would require dozens of hours of dev testing to perfect them. Unless you make a mac that runs ONLY the easiest missions (Sul Vius: Decay) then you'd be able to finish the mac without much effort on your part. Crypt of Decay is easy as pie too ... Id highly recommend avoiding Sul Vius: Life (lots of parts take place in the below ground part) and plane of health (LOTS of mechanics you'd have to code into the macro, it would take days of effort -- maybe weeks).


I can give you plenty of non coding insights to the macros, I've ran each of the missions there well over a hundred times while gearing out my entire team. I know the best spots to stop/start your characters for LoS Pulling or Nav pulling and know just about all there is to know about those HAs.
 
If you've never done TBM missions before you might wanna run a few before thinking of making a macro! The same mission can have 10 different ways to complete it (different items to collect from different areas of the zone) and some of the missions go into the lower portion of Sul Vius where the nav mesh doesn't work unless you tweak it - then it won't work for the upper portion either so it's just a big cluster fuck.


Anyway, I'd be happy to pay for TBM instance macros but they'd be one of the more difficult macros you've made and would require dozens of hours of dev testing to perfect them. Unless you make a mac that runs ONLY the easiest missions (Sul Vius: Decay) then you'd be able to finish the mac without much effort on your part. Crypt of Decay is easy as pie too ... Id highly recommend avoiding Sul Vius: Life (lots of parts take place in the below ground part) and plane of health (LOTS of mechanics you'd have to code into the macro, it would take days of effort -- maybe weeks).


I can give you plenty of non coding insights to the macros, I've ran each of the missions there well over a hundred times while gearing out my entire team. I know the best spots to stop/start your characters for LoS Pulling or Nav pulling and know just about all there is to know about those HAs.

TBM heroics have 7 different versions of the same heroic. Also the quest giver is never the zone in so you have to nav or path to the npc some of them move around and are not always in the same spot. Only part that takes long is getting the path down so it will actually achieve all the objectives. You can't really use mq2nav in TBM zones much either so it all has to be done using mq2advpath

I have tbm macros but they're just for XP and not actually completing the mission.

https://www.redguides.com/community/threads/45779-TBM-Instance-XP-Macros
 
I'm sure yours are great and all but blocked by a pay wall.
I'm pretty sure Chat is looking to set something up that's a donate if you can sort of thing and having them be public.
 
I had not attempted to do any HA's previously due to complications that others have mentioned. I do not expect it to be any simple task. I have experienced much the same issues mentioned from previous tasks and have managed to handle all of those issues in my previous works. I look forward to the challenge.

For issues of moving targets I expect that where nav is available simply using a nav by ID should suffice and where not available I can map the zone by 3d coordinates and determine a path to take using mq2advpath.

While it would be nice to receive compensation by every user of one of my macros, that was never the reason I came here. Though the extra dough doesn't hurt. I'm not looking for money up front, this isn't a crowdfunding effort and I make no promises to the effectiveness of the end result. But I was asked for by name to give this a go and it is my intention to do so assuming enough people find it useful. 4 people are not likely to push me to go much in depth with any code into HAs due to the aforementioned complications of writing such a macro. However, I may do one or two on a trial basis and go from there based on community response.
 
I'm sure yours are great and all but blocked by a pay wall.
I'm pretty sure Chat is looking to set something up that's a donate if you can sort of thing and having them be public.

Its behind a pay wall for a very good reason. When I released the dead hills ones publicly they nerfed the COTF heroics to crap.

I had not attempted to do any HA's previously due to complications that others have mentioned. I do not expect it to be any simple task. I have experienced much the same issues mentioned from previous tasks and have managed to handle all of those issues in my previous works. I look forward to the challenge.

For issues of moving targets I expect that where nav is available simply using a nav by ID should suffice and where not available I can map the zone by 3d coordinates and determine a path to take using mq2advpath.

While it would be nice to receive compensation by every user of one of my macros, that was never the reason I came here. Though the extra dough doesn't hurt. I'm not looking for money up front, this isn't a crowdfunding effort and I make no promises to the effectiveness of the end result. But I was asked for by name to give this a go and it is my intention to do so assuming enough people find it useful. 4 people are not likely to push me to go much in depth with any code into HAs due to the aforementioned complications of writing such a macro. However, I may do one or two on a trial basis and go from there based on community response.

I would start with one of the simple ones then. Maybe one of the Plane of Health ones because that is a more open zone. You can forget about using mq2nav its not reliable in Decay/life. What i did was look for the NPCs location using spawn then called the path that brought me to that spot I had to create a few paths based on where the NPC moves to.
 
Developers deserve money, but I think it should be a donation versus a lot of loot. I paid for William's TDS macros and ended up never using them lol.... it was an expensive oversight on my part.
 
Developers deserve money, but I think it should be a donation versus a lot of loot. I paid for William's TDS macros and ended up never using them lol.... it was an expensive oversight on my part.

I added you to the EOK ones go check droga out if you have a full group with EOK.

Ask eqmule how it works out with donations. 9/10 people who use it will never donate for it because they don't have to. When I released Dead Hills macros i dont think one person donated.
 
Well it has been asked that I do RoS content as well. I figure the TBM content to some extent has been done before and is hopefully old enough to limit the amount of attention drawn to such things. I may even pave the path to RoS macros that would be released but behind a pay wall for the same reasons mentioned by William. This type of content is not an easy task to automate. If you've seen the code for my recently released Fish Eyes in the Dark 19th anniversary task to get The Bone Rod you would see the exceptional amount of code required to complete even the simplest tasks. I mean....how many lines of code could it really take to go to a few zones and fish until you've got some items and then return to do a turn-in while reacting to combat and handling edge case pathing issues? Just over 1700 lines of code to be specific, and due to the limited number of users and the limited amount of time it was usable there likely are bugs in the code that I wasn't able to handle because either there wasn't time or someone didn't bump into them.

The question isn't can I make the macro so much as it's more can I make the macro, make it work for everyone, and handle all edge cases that allows the macro to work in a fashion that doesn't result in people's toons being killed.

The idea is to start with one that is perceived as "easier", being as I've yet to do a TBM task it should be all the more fun to code lol. I've created quite the library of code for myself. However, for the most part, it relies on MQ2Nav quite heavily for navigation. With all the issues surrounding MQ2Nav I don't expect that this shall be done with much ease.
 
TBM heroics have 7 different versions of the same heroic. Also the quest giver is never the zone in so you have to nav or path to the npc some of them move around and are not always in the same spot. Only part that takes long is getting the path down so it will actually achieve all the objectives. You can't really use mq2nav in TBM zones much either so it all has to be done using mq2advpath

I have tbm macros but they're just for XP and not actually completing the mission.

https://www.redguides.com/community/threads/45779-TBM-Instance-XP-Macros

If I were to pay for TBM macros (which I totally would) they'd have to be macros that were designed to farm the instances for Remnants rather than EXP. I prefer to grind EXP out in the open world zones and do instances for items/gear. I've considered donating for your macros in the past though (or asking if I could) since having to pay to access macros doesn't bother me one bit. The only thing that's stopped me is I have found a pretty easy way to do the TBM heroics that only takes ~5min of my time (meaning me with hands on keyboard/mouse) with group call of the hero and careful positioning. I'd like a macro that automated them, but only for Remnants and not EXP.


Also I still haven't learned EQBC and still havent really felt like doing so at this point and most of these sorts of macros use it =P
 
If I were to pay for TBM macros (which I totally would) they'd have to be macros that were designed to farm the instances for Remnants rather than EXP. I prefer to grind EXP out in the open world zones and do instances for items/gear. I've considered donating for your macros in the past though (or asking if I could) since having to pay to access macros doesn't bother me one bit. The only thing that's stopped me is I have found a pretty easy way to do the TBM heroics that only takes ~5min of my time (meaning me with hands on keyboard/mouse) with group call of the hero and careful positioning. I'd like a macro that automated them, but only for Remnants and not EXP.


Also I still haven't learned EQBC and still havent really felt like doing so at this point and most of these sorts of macros use it =P


There are 4 main heroics i farm in TBM for remnants i can do each in about 5-10m. The issue with automated them all is the moving around to get the task and zone in. Writing a macro to do the task is simple. Each one has 7 versions though. I wrote a path for 6 of the 7 in fate rewards the bold and all 7 in another one. They farm remnants. One of them even does them 2 and will grind XP doing a 3rd heroic until lockouts for the remnant ones are up.
 
There are 4 main heroics i farm in TBM for remnants i can do each in about 5-10m. The issue with automated them all is the moving around to get the task and zone in. Writing a macro to do the task is simple. Each one has 7 versions though. I wrote a path for 6 of the 7 in fate rewards the bold and all 7 in another one. They farm remnants. One of them even does them 2 and will grind XP doing a 3rd heroic until lockouts for the remnant ones are up.

Fate Rewards the Bold and Ruins of Lxanvom are the two I primarily farm/found easiest. Fate Reward the Bold has one minor hitch that I found, Dealer's Markers (some of the a dealers aren't able to be attacked until they start pathing around the zone, it's a pita). As for Ruins of Lxanvom I have found every single heroic that takes place on the first floor is easy as pie. I usually drop the task if they have me go down into the lower floors where it's basically a maze.

Sul Vius: Life similarly to Ruins of Lxanvom, any tasks that required me to go below the main floor I usually abandoned. Sometimes I did them, it depended a bit on my mood.

Plane of Health I almost entirely avoided doing any tasks in because one was bugged (https://tbm.eqresource.com/indefenseofhealth.php) Summoning the defenders never "worked" for me. It did sometimes but was freakishly unreliable. PoH has a few extremely easy tasks though, like destroy the warmachines/defeat the commanders/collect the war reports. Most of the time if I was running PoHealth missions I abandoned the mission if I got one I didn't like, in particular "In Defense of Health" that required me to summon nephalem adds to fight the plagued beasts I abandoned every time.
 
I added you to the EOK ones go check droga out if you have a full group with EOK.

Ask eqmule how it works out with donations. 9/10 people who use it will never donate for it because they don't have to. When I released Dead Hills macros i dont think one person donated.

Thank you! I'll check it out. I have two full EoK groups and 1.5 RoS groups (well, more like 1.25). I'm counting the RoS toons also in my EoK totals. I never even tried to do the missions in EoK because I never bothered with any progression... I thought all those group missions were locked behind progression requirements.
 
There are those here that say that want the macros and are willing to compensate a developer. The issue most have voiced to me on the paywall for your macros is the high cost associated with the package. Before I try to venture forward it might be beneficial to speak with william12 regarding the cost associated with the macros. While the 7 (as of this post) people who voted yes and yes isn't exactly flooding the market, it's possible the content is dated, and while there would be some use in it, perhaps it doesn't equate to existing price and a deal can be struck in private or public. The poll results are public as to whom voted for what. Perhaps my services aren't needed as a coder, but rather a negotiator? I've never been one to step on another coders work when it pertains to income, not looking forward to starting now. This poll was started because I was requested specifically for this by quite a few. William's macros were brought up and the only concern that existed was the paywall. I don't like the idea of creating something that rivals another's existing work because of cost, because I too would like to be compensated for my work, especially one as complicated as this.

With that said, it's unlikely I'll tackle this challenge unless the response is overwhelming yes and yes and compensation doesn't reside in transactions that would prove trivial in comparison to my time and effort applied. Until then I encourage those interested to try striking a deal with william12

~Chat
 
There are those here that say that want the macros and are willing to compensate a developer. The issue most have voiced to me on the paywall for your macros is the high cost associated with the package. Before I try to venture forward it might be beneficial to speak with william12 regarding the cost associated with the macros. While the 7 (as of this post) people who voted yes and yes isn't exactly flooding the market, it's possible the content is dated, and while there would be some use in it, perhaps it doesn't equate to existing price and a deal can be struck in private or public. The poll results are public as to whom voted for what. Perhaps my services aren't needed as a coder, but rather a negotiator? I've never been one to step on another coders work when it pertains to income, not looking forward to starting now. This poll was started because I was requested specifically for this by quite a few. William's macros were brought up and the only concern that existed was the paywall. I don't like the idea of creating something that rivals another's existing work because of cost, because I too would like to be compensated for my work, especially one as complicated as this.

With that said, it's unlikely I'll tackle this challenge unless the response is overwhelming yes and yes and compensation doesn't reside in transactions that would prove trivial in comparison to my time and effort applied. Until then I encourage those interested to try striking a deal with william12

~Chat

Chat, I have an alternative proposal. Could you build a shell that basically navigates on a path based on zone and kills along the way. I came across this post while trying to get ideas.

https://www.redguides.com/community/threads/26612-Simple-farm-bot

It has a macro included to record a path, then the base macro runs along that path and kills. It's old and doesn't work, but the record path macro works fine. The end idea being that everyone could record their own paths and use the macro. I.e. I could zone in on a rogue, run around on a path, then start main macro and it would move along the path and kill. Other options would be modifiable includes to get missions and re-zone in and start over. Again, coded in mind that it would be somewhat easily modified by users.

I've looked at William12's CoTF ones and they are so far beyond my knowledge I was just going to attempt my own, though I have a novice at this. I'm still going to work on mine slowly, but figured it might be an idea to reach the masses (and take some of the work off coding all the individual instances and other problems mentioned.

I may not be explaining my idea very well and am rambling at the moment so just going to post as is.
 
This "general purpose" mission runner is underway as we speak and has been on the books of things to do for some time, it's a joint effort and no ETA is available. I'm familiar with dev's bots. At the time of the link's posting Dev's bots were behind a paywall, as most coders tend to do. I had some of that working, previously but alas decided to put that task to rest as I didn't feel the effort was worth it in the end. I found myself more useful creating my own work and assisting with existing work.

Even still, coding individual missions will still be a thing. It's going to either be work for the coder or work for the user, just a matter of how it is applied in the end. There will always be edge cases to be accounted for, such as zones with moving quest NPCs that are also in a zone that doesn't allow the use of MQ2Nav. Not to mention code dedicated to a specific task will almost always be better in the end. I mean, you could always just run Farm.mac in HA's and as long as all you have to do is kill stuff and you won't be gone for long it'll eventually do the task assuming you don't get murdered trying.....as an example. The longer MQ2 is around the better tools fall into our laps. Just a matter of how long we have to wait for those tools that are usually born of necessity.
 
This "general purpose" mission runner is underway as we speak and has been on the books of things to do for some time, it's a joint effort and no ETA is available. I'm familiar with dev's bots. At the time of the link's posting Dev's bots were behind a paywall, as most coders tend to do. I had some of that working, previously but alas decided to put that task to rest as I didn't feel the effort was worth it in the end. I found myself more useful creating my own work and assisting with existing work.

Even still, coding individual missions will still be a thing. It's going to either be work for the coder or work for the user, just a matter of how it is applied in the end. There will always be edge cases to be accounted for, such as zones with moving quest NPCs that are also in a zone that doesn't allow the use of MQ2Nav. Not to mention code dedicated to a specific task will almost always be better in the end. I mean, you could always just run Farm.mac in HA's and as long as all you have to do is kill stuff and you won't be gone for long it'll eventually do the task assuming you don't get murdered trying.....as an example. The longer MQ2 is around the better tools fall into our laps. Just a matter of how long we have to wait for those tools that are usually born of necessity.

Thats basically what my heroic macros are. The main part is just a tank macro the rest gets task/zones in and follows a path.
 
I did this about 8 months ago. Multiple TBM macros, ones for currency and not, as well as several EoK ones for exp. I agree the RoS ones are pointless. There was very little interest in my little project, but perhaps your name carries more weight than mine. I ended up putting it up in the creator's area, but took it down as no one was interested there either. Supported all three tanks, configurable spell ability inis, generic checkpointing system for task completion, easy mq2nav waypoint navigation, and corpse recovery/restart. I still have the code if anyone is interested they can message me I suppose.

What ever happened with the large LDoN macro intiative?
 
Question - TBM Automation
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