Play Better, Suck Less is a column dedicated to getting the most out of your FFXI experience in game and out. Whether Windower improvements, new game-play techniques, sweet strats or new tech, it will all be covered here! In our continuing saga, we take a look at what you can and can't do with Spellcast.
After last week, I think we know how to make a Spellcast macro set. You can make as many different macro sets you want by putting those sets in set tags and just adding them to the list. Make sure you give them individual names like "Standing" or "Idle" or "Elemental" or "Gekko" or whatever so that you can assign them to events in the rules portion of your macro document.
And now for the huge list of exceptions and problems and rules and things to remember so that you can understand what Spellcast can and can not do. Spellcast, as much as I wish it was, is not psychic. It can only react to things you do in the game, and it can not react to things in the game just because they are there. It doesn't look around and see if you need to use a WS to close a skillchain. It doesn't see them mob casting and tell you that you need to stun it. It doesn't know what you are trying to do except when you tell it what you are doing.
Before we get started today my first suggestion is to go ahead and get Spellcast 2.3. It is much easier to use than the old version and apparently lets you do a bunch of new things too. You can get the new version here.
The first thing to do when you are creating gear sets is make sure they have an event that they are responding to. This can be a spell, a type of spell, resting, engaging or doing a WS, but they all have to be something that you input into the game. This means that you can't really have swapped in gear sets for things like defense and non-full time elemental resist sets. Those you will still have to swap in manually.
Now one of the neat things about Windower is that you don't really have to remake every set of gear, you can "inherit" an older set of gear and then just change the set that you want. Basically, you are going to make a basic set of gear that you will stand around in. You will want to call it your "idle" or "standing" set of gear. Once you create that set you can create another set of gear for being engaged on a mob or some other condition, or you can just assign Spellcast to look at your base set (BaseSet) and then just swap in some different gear when you are engaged. A good example of why this is useful is the use of Dusk Gloves. You would not want to have Dusk Gloves on when you are just running around because they would slow you down, but you would want to have them when you are in combat. So you would not have the Dusk Gloves in your BaseSet, but you would want to have them in the set you would use to melee. So you would create a new set of gear, and call it "Fight" or "Engaged" or anything you want so long as you know what it is. Since the only thing that you are really going to want to change in this case is your Dusk Gloves you can and a tag after your new set name that just says BaseSet="Standing". It will "inherit" all of your gear from your Standing set except for the gear you tell it in this "Engaged" set.
Sounds complicated? It's not. And this is a programming idiot telling you this. Once you have set up all of your gear sets you can then tell Spellcast when you should use them. The first thing to do is look under the rules section and look at the first two lines there. One will say equip when=Idle and the second one will say equip when=Engaged. You will want to assign your "Standing" gear to the Idle set, and your "Fight" gear to your Engaged set. Once you have done that you have set up your initial gear sets and are ready for some more complicated rules.
And we will get to those rules next week! If you have any question, just leave a comment and I will be sure to cover them.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Play Better, Suck Less: Spellcast Part 3 - Sets You Need and Sets You Can't Have.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Play Better, Suck Less: Spellcast Part 2: Going Back to the Beginning.
Play Better, Suck Less is a column dedicated to getting the most out of your FFXI experience in game and out. Whether Windower improvements, new game-play techniques, sweet strats or new tech, it will all be covered here! After last weeks bitching, Ringthree gets down to business and tries to figure out how all of this works. The cake is a lie.
You might remember that last week I complained a lot about how Spellcast is for geeks and not nerds like me. Sure, the geeks get it, but man, trying to figure out code is about the moral equivalent to shoving white hot pokers into my ears for me. But for you guys, I am willing to do it (I will be forwarding the doctor's bills to you too). The most important part in all of this is that we find a place to start, and basically all I told you last week was to download Spellcast. So unless you are really lazy we can at least get that out of the way. Well, now that the update has come you will want to get the newest version of Spellcast (if it is even up yet) so that all the new gear will be entered into it (at least I think that is what needs to be fixed). Also while you are over at the Windower site you might want to pick up a few other helpful plug-ins like Cancel, Text and Autoexec. You don't really need to know why you are getting them right now, just know they make Spellcast run better right now.
Now to dive into all of that code, right? Well, not quite. I also mentioned that Aikar's BLM Spellcast XML is a great place to start for BLM last week. Spellcast was originally created to help BLM with the myriad of things that they need to do while casting that are nearly impossible to do by hand or in the archaic macro system. So BLM is probably the best job to start a discussion about Spellcast. Everyone else can stop freaking out though, because there are Spellcast XML files for nearly every job and even though most of this discussion is BLM related you can apply it to any job and role very easily.
Ok, so go download Aikar's BLM Spellcast XML file.
Go on.
Stop reading and go get it. I'll wait.
Did you get it?
Ok, great.
Now, lets take a look at all this. I know it looks intimidating, but Aikar did a great job of adding explanations to each area of the XML document. Now don't be intimidated by "XML" or anything like that. It's just a notepad file, and if you have made a windower macro before you have dealt with this kind of file before. Go ahead and open the file and look at it as we go through it.
The introduction is nice and soothing for those in fear about the whole operation. Once you move through that we go to the first line of explanation, which are the automatic sleep timer notifications. You can turn these on by leaving a 1 on that line and you can turn them off by selecting 0. The next three lines deal with optional BLM gear, and again use a 1 to indicate you have the gear and 0 to indicate that Spellcast shouldn't consider using the gear. After those you can set the HP level you need to activate your Sorcerer's Ring if you have one. If you selected 0 for Sorcerer's Ring already then you don't need to worry about this area.
Now we move into the gear options area. This is pretty easy to understand, but the important thing to remember is that these are "rules" that are set up to pick gear for certain situations. It doesn't mean that Spellcast will always use this gear, but if you tell it to use a certain type of gear it will check to see if you have this gear then use it. That may have sounded a bit complicated, but basically Spellcast just needs to know what you have so it can use it if you tell it to. The first set of gear are the Elemental Grips, and again this is just a 1 for yes, and a 0 for no. The second set of gear is a little more complicated but not much. Basically Spellcast is set up to call all of your staffs by one name for simplicity's sake. So "IceStaff" is used anytime you want to use an Ice Staff or an Aquilo's Staff. Just put in the name of the staff you are using and whenever Spellcast looks for the name of that kind of staff it will use the one that you picked. The next group of gear are the Elemental Obi's and like grips you just indicate if you have them or not.
Now we move onto the gear sets. The first gear set is called "Main" and it is your standing gear set. This set is going to use any gear you have with Refresh on it, and any Defensive gear you might use like an Earth Staff or an Umbra Cape, and any movement speed gear you might like having on. You are never really going to cast in this gear, just stand there or get your face beaten in. The next set is Fast Cast, which obviously is just your Fast Cast gear. Resting is next, and it should be relatively easy to figure out what you need to put into the list. Some of the slots might be missing but they can easily be added if you want to put something into them. Also, not every slot needs to be added for this to work, it will use something from another set. For example, if you are casting a Fast Cast spell it will use your normal casting gear and then place the Fast Cast gear in last. So there is no need to always reconstruct your list of gear if the right circumstances are in effect. If you don't know what those circumstances are then you might want to fill in all of your gear if you are concerned Spellcast won't know what to use.
The next set is Minus HP which is just for activating a Sorcerer's Ring latent effect, if you don't have one don't worry about this, if you do have one then you already know the gear you need to swap to make it work. Finally, you have your Full Damage set. This is what will be used when you want your biggest nukes with no real fear of resists. Don't worry if you are fighting mobs that could resist you because the next set, High Resist, will put on your Skill and Accuracy gear when you are cast on mobs that are in the High Resist list which we will get to later. The Mid Resist set is next, and you can back down some of your resistance gear here. After that there is the Light Resist set which you can adjust as you need. You will notice that it says that it will use Full Damage as your base set. This is were Spellcast will look first to pick gear, then it will go to the these sets to put on the gear you need for these specific Resist situations. The next sets of gear are Dark, Enfeebling, Healing, Divine and Enhancing. You can fill these in with the appropriate gear.
Once you have filled in all of your appropriate gear you are basically done. After that the gear sets are the rules that Spellcast uses for pretty much all situations. We will go over these next week, and we might even talk about how to how to make our own rules, but I am not promising anything.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Play Better, Suck Less: Spellcast Part 1 - Let's Get the Complaining Out of the Way.
Play Better, Suck Less is a column dedicated to getting the most out of your FFXI experience in game and out. Whether Windower improvements, new game-play techniques, sweet strats or new tech, it will all be covered here! Today, we try to decipher Spellcast and make it usable for those that aren't fluent in multiple programming languages.
I have always heard that Spellcast was great, that you can use it to do all sorts of magical mystical things, and that it was a boon to all players. It could also give out ice cream and free blow jobs, but unless you can figure out how to use it, it is basically worthless. And this is the major problem with Spellcast. A lot of people just don't know how to use it. Yes, all of the things it can do are wonderful, but the person that makes it and the people that use it all too often assume that everyone in FFXI does or should know how XML works, how it all should function, and worst of all, their instructions on how to make it work are esoteric and obtuse. I have heard that it is like a tree or a book or some other things that make no sense at all.
So, this is the beginning of a guide to help you figure out how to use Spellcast if you happen to not work in the programming industry.
I am learning as we go along too, so if I make a mistake then point it out to me, and we can fix it together. I really wish I didn't have to make a guide like this, because I believe it would be relatively easy for the maker of Spellcast or other people that use it to make an UI that would generate the XML you would need for making macros and equipment lists for whatever conditions. Spellcast as it exist is a half finished work, very powerful but also very user unfriendly and daunting to those that would like to use it but don't know XML. I think Spellcast is a perfect example of why software companies have different people to create the code and to create the instructions to use the program. Ok, wish me luck!
Getting start: The very first thing to do is download Spellcast from the Windower.net website. There are a lot of things that Spellcast does without even having to set up macros. They are almost exclusive for people that type out every command. So if you use a controller most of the time, then it probably isn't going to help you very much from just installing it.
At this point it is hard to even know where to start for those that have never done this before, but I will give it a try. Trying to figure out how to use Spellcast from the beginning is nearly impossible from the instructions provided if you don't already know XML. The best thing to start out with is the work that some other people have already done and making it work for you. You can find those here. Once you find one that you like, you will want to add it to your Spellcast file. Even though Aikar claims that his is the most complicated XML file, it is also the most straight forward, and includes explanations of what information goes into each area, and is preset to be used for BLM. I wish I could add it in here but the code would destroy this post. LOL
Take a look at Aikar's XML file and start thinking about how you can use it. Next week we will start looking at getting it to work with your gear or another job.
#1 ~ Monk
#2 ~ Samurai
#3 ~ Ninja
#4 ~ Dragoon
Chaotic Pellucidity
Teabags and KY Jelly
The Bloggaru!
