Spell gem 'fade in' timer
 

[crossposted to the Request forum, apologies from a new forum member]

I love the new UI, but I'm unhappy with the way the spell gems 'fade in' after you cast a spell. I find that I have to watch the gem icons carefully in order to determine when I'm able to cast another spell.

I'd prefer to eliminate the 'fade in' effect that is the default behavior of the spell gems. I'd like the spell gems to appear as available, or unavailable, with no fancy 'fade in' to possibly confuse me as to their state.

I'm not at all familiar with XML, but I have been able to successfully make some small modifications to my UI by reading the EverQuest\uifiles\default\AboutSIDL file, and by some extensive playing around with the values in my EverQuest\uifiles\default files.
But I have been unable to find anything that looked to me as though it controlled this 'fade in' behavior.

I'd appreciate any pointers as to where to look.

If you ever find an answer I'd be appreciative if you could let us all know. Meanwhile I'll start start looking at getting an answer for this one also.

Was playing last night and the only thing I'm not happy about is not knowing exactly when I can cast again. I've noticed I can cast before the spells actually show as full due to the long delay on the fade in. And when soloing I have a short time to cast several spells and don't have time to spare. Another thing that makes it harder is that they used to fade to a grey gem now they just fade to a darker version of themselves.

Although I haven't found the answer yet, I suspect the answer lies in the animations.xml file. It seems to hold all the information about how things cycle and fade and what not.

- Pahbi

Well I went through the animations.xml file and changed every single instance of <cycle>true</cycle> to <cycle>false</cycle>

In theory that should have turned off all the animations for stuff.

I loaded the game and some animations were off, but the spell gems were still the same. :(

Back to the drawing board.

- Pahbi

Aye, I also played quite a bit with the settings in this file, to no avail. The fade in effect _seems_ to be hard-coded, durnit.
Today I'll do a /feedback on this behavior, and I hope my feedback will be taken seriously by SOE. The fade-in is something that, in my opinion, every caster should like to see go away. This special effect has the potential to determine the diference between life and death of group members and entire groups. I'm reduced to mashing F1-F8 over and over in 'crunch' situations where a second or two delay in a healing spell might mean that the intended recipient is no longer alive to receive it...

Hmm yes that little fade effect is annoying to spell casters. a A percentage right on the spell icon would help immensely with percentage increasing until spell is ready to use again.

Argh I agree! With the old UI there was a fade, but it was still obvious when the fade was starting, so if you needed to cast that next spell asap, you could do it. I'm terribly afraid this fade is one of the things the client does directly, and we can't control it. But I'm definetly looking into this one !

Perhaps customization is not the answer. If all those who were concerned about this new fade-in effecting their casting ability were to do a /feedback, and/or a /bug, then we might see it either corrected (with the fade-in being made more abrupt or dratic), or moved into the realm of those things which are customizible. Either solution would suit me fine.

This probably won't help at all, but I'll give it a post just for the heck of it. ;)

I had a real issue with the fade in on the spells as well. Also, since I am stilling having trouble remembering all the new icons for my spells I was pulling my hair out. What I did was set the transparency of my spell bar to 100%. The spell bar itself does not fade in and out any more, and I find that this helps me out quite a bit. Though, again, it's a temporary solution to a bigger annoyance. I hope this helps someone.

Melosa Baenlyl
Pathfinder of Tunare
Bristlebane Server

It'll be a little bit like my /feedbacks about the "Unknown Spell" in text buffs. Well for over 3 weeks Verant didn't listen. but once those windows started to become popular that was it, it was gone. :) Yeh to pressure.

Not sure if it will do the trick, but I know I dont have to wait for mine anymore.. try turning down the fade timer in the display options; default is 2.0 i believe.. I have mine set at 0 so that as soon as I move my mouse off of something, it fades.:cool:

Agreed.
 

I agree completely. There is no such thing as a spell that is almost ready to cast. It's either ready or it's not. I made sure to let them know that with /feedback and I think everyone else that reads your post should They aren't going to pay a programmer to change something for one person. We ALL need to /feedback