sc2kmayor

Some bats flying around in my head today...stuck below world with my 51st level main and the synapsis are firing like mad.....

So here's a concept:

Thangor did this really tight ticker spell bar that has a 6 second flasher at the top....

Want to expand on this.
* Define a pet gauge that has two lines. The bottom line is a typically normal base-white health-of-pet guage. The other is a solid color timer bar based on animation time (so there would be at a minimum 8 of these for the 8 minutes that a charmed pet lasts). (other mods could redefine this for higher levels)

* When the pet is charmed, the combination guage opens in the pet window and displays 2 life bars one above the other. After one minute, the animation graphic updates with a full size health bar below and a shortened bar above indicating time running out. Each minute that passes, the top bar shortens at 30 seconds it begins to flash warning you that you need to be ready to recast charm....

Admittedly, some pets drop charm before the max time, but the theory to me sounds doable.

Kuvasie/Remelio/Thangor you all have the expereince making these little animated guages and such, think this would be possible to pull off?

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Arista

This might not be exactly what you are asking for, but if you are looking for custom-duration timers, you may want to check out the slider timers at my UI Timer page. This is a web-based XML generator: just select how many timers you want, the names/durations for each timer, and various other options, and the tool will dynamically generate the UI mod XML file for you.

One thing to note, from your request above, is that animations cannot be controlled in the UI. Once the EQ UI loads up, all animations begin cycling through their frames - you can't pause them or force them to start from a particular frame at a particular time. That's what the sliders in my timer mod are for - by moving the slider to the current position of the bar, you can begin timing at any point during the animation's cycle. As the bar approaches the slider's position again, you'll know it's time to refresh your spell.

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Arista
Former Enchanter of The Seventh Hammer
TimerMod - Timer Utility for EverQuest UI

sc2kmayor

Your point is Exactly why Im suggesting the pet timer.

See with Spells/Buffs, there is nothing that opens an animations and says hey this lasts for 1.5 hours so start a time with that as the animation. You have done this with your timers and it is awesome...

However, with a pet, the guage and animation is reset everytime you get a pet. So an 8 minute timer seems like it could be done if the Guage call starts at the beginning of the animation.

The G2 Tking Bubble is a great example of an animation tied to a guage. What I want to do is "untie the animation' have a guage that updates like it should, but it replaced after one minute with the same guage graphic that still updates but has another visual aspect which has changed.'

This said, the effect of casting a pet would cause a looping 8 minute timer on the pet window and a charmed pet would not loop cuz the charm would break and the graphic disappear and be reset the next time you cast charm....

Arista

Would the animation actually reset the next time charm is cast, or would it simply re-appear, but be on whatever frame it would be on as if it's been running continuously since the UI was loaded? I'm not completely sure about this, but based on what testing I've done with animations, it appears to be the latter.

Someone else on this board has done a similar thing by tying an animation to the depressed-state graphic of a button, hoping that the animation would reset each time the button was pressed. However, it turns out that each time the animation re-appeared, it didn't re-start from the first frame but in fact just looked like it's been running continuously since the UI load.

Of course if anyone has successfully forced an animation to restart without reloading the UI, I would certainly be interested in hearing about the details. This discussion has certainly gotten me interested in playing around with gauge-based animations, to explore the possibilities.