Wednesday, May 21, 2008

I had a dream.

I was on a mission with two other people. We had to go to an indoor garden/nursery that was shaped like an enlarged version of my high school friends basement. It was like the indoors portion of a nursery, with shelves of plants. We had to kill three people that were in animal suits (not like mascot outfits, more like anthropomorphic suits) who worked in the garden/nursery and take their place. Then we had to kill three more people in animal suits, but they were obviously more deadly, thus the chicanery with killing the first group. At some point, we had either done a practice run of this or had done it successfully before because I remembered how it all was supposed to go down but this time the second group of animal suits came in as we were hiding the first groups bodies. We managed to at least partially hide the first groups bodies, and they didn't notice at first, but while we were trying to attach silencers to our guns they were alerted to our nefarious intentions. We were supposed to kill them with silencers on the guns but since they showed up early and surprised us we had to kill them without the silencers and I was afraid that would alert people to our presence. They managed to shoot one of the members of my group (not me). The wounded member of my team then shot the last member a whole bunch of times, and I shot them several times in the back of the neck (I specifically remember thinking it should definitely kill him) but the whole while they were just laughing at me as they died. The only person that had any blood from the gunshot wounds was my team member. I woke up as we were trying to figure out how to escape with our wounded member.

And now on with our show.

I have been working on some Windower macros for Izman's BST, and I think they are coming out quite well. I used to be one of those people that swore off any level of windower besides using it for being able to alt+tab, but after a while the fundamental usefulness of some plug-ins (recast, light luggage and yarnball come to mind) and especially being able to use more than 6 lines just seems to be something that should already exist in the game, just makes me think it has a good place in the game. Of course, I would never approve of the use of a windower, at all, ever, but if you are going to use it, which I would never do, then using it for those most fundamental purposes doesn't seem like a bad idea.

If you are going to make windower macros, which I never do, then I have some simple suggestions to fundamentally make their construction and replication much easier. Some quick fundamental rules:
1. If you are making an equipment swap macro you should include all potential equipment slots even weapons. The reason for this is that is makes it easy to just hit a macro and have everything equipped again if you are stripped of gear. With mobs and events now limiting equipment or removing equipment you simply have to hit a macro to have everything you could possibly need on again. This is especially helpful in Salvage.
2. Use an indicator for what the equipment swap is at the end of the swap. This makes it easier to indicate that you are on the correct macro palette if you use multiple ones for one job.
3. Don't be afraid to make entire macro palettes for small variations. I have two different macro sets for day and night on NIN. There are now a huge number of possible macro palettes, don't be afraid to use them!

I will have more pictures and items of interest soon, but I am still getting into the swing of things from vacation, and we have been pretty event packed for the last couple of days, so don't expect much until probably Friday.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

yes yes yes...thats all well and good, but what about blue mages that dont have windower *friendly reminder* ^^

Anonymous said...

I know Izman very well and he would never use windower for any of the Se people who are reading this.

p.s. Izman is awsome.

Anonymous said...

Windower just plain rocks for enabling the use of more then 6 lines.

<3 it

the plugins are a very nice bonus too ^^

~ crazy cat

Moe said...

Well now I know my Birthday is weird for other people as well.
I'm quite fine with the current FFXI macro limitations.