Request: More Information in the Equipment Window

among "other information" HP% would be awesome as many mobs have they behavior change depending on their HP%. Ally TP/MP is over-information, and you should probably let users choose to display it or not.

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Originally Posted by Camate

I followed up with the development team about the possibility of displaying information that is already available on the client-side and they mentioned that they will be proactively looking into ways to display party/alliance TP, MP, and other information to coincide with the UI revamp timing.

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This is really positive news. Are you able to tell us if there is any chance "distance from target" will be included in the information shown?

Ranged Attack

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Originally Posted by SpankWustler

This is really positive news. Are you able to tell us if there is any chance "distance from target" will be included in the information shown?

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Seconded. Either make it so you cannot lose TP when attempting a ranged WS because you are an indiscernible yalm farther away than you can be to use the WS, or display distances from the target. Really one of the silliest things not in the game.

Changes like this (link) would be very welcome :) I'm not sure if it was ever seen, since it was posted so long ago, and got little feedback in the early days of the forum.

Alrighty! Just got this fancy list to share with you showing what we can have displayed information-wise since it is already sent to the client. This way there is no need for guessing!

Circles denote information that is already displayed in some way shape or form on your client.

1. Party/Alliance Member Information
○ HP
○ MP
○ TP
○ HP %
○ MP %
× Mog House invitation flag
× Mog House area that you are invited to

2. Information that is only sent to yourself pt.1
○ Max HP
○ Max MP
○ Main job
○ Main job level
○ Support job
○ Support job level
○ Experience points
○ Experience points until the next level
○ STR
○ DEX
○ VIT
○ AGI
○ INT
○ MND
○ CHR
○ Main weapon attack power
○ Defense
○ Elemental resistances
○ Title
○ Mission rank
○ Rank points
○ Home point
○ Home nation

3. Information that is only sent to yourself pt.2
○ Ability recast time
○ Battle skills
○ Magic skills
○ Synthesis skills

4. Information that is only sent to yourself pt.3
○ Limit points
○ Merit points
× Assimilation
× Flags for having at least one level 75 job
○ Status of experience points (capped or not)
○ Mode selection (experience points/limit points)


For all of the above, without worrying about the display location or method, it is in fact possible to display this information. On the other hand, information besides what is listed here would be very difficult to display.

As stated in my last post, the development team will be looking into displaying information such as MP and TP for party/alliance members to coincide with the UI revamps.

If you have any other feedback regarding what you would like to see displayed, please refer to the above list when making suggestions.

Thanks for so much information!

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Originally Posted by Camate

○ Ability recast time

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Out of all the things mentioned as possible in that post, this is the one I'd most like to see displayed more prominently and more constantly.

Yeah, I know "more constantly" sounds weird. I can't think of any other way to express the thought. I'd like to see that information all the time without any need to bring up a menu or hit a recast macro.

To avoid clutter, the recast for abilities that are ready to be used could vanish.

A thousand times yes to ability recasts on the HUD.

I really believe that if you picked any ten Windower users at random and asked them which plugin they would pick if they could only choose one to use, at least seven of them would say Recast. The other three have not tried playing without Windower anytime recently.

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Originally Posted by SpankWustler

Thanks for so much information!



Out of all the things mentioned as possible in that post, this is the one I'd most like to see displayed more prominently and more constantly.

Yeah, I know "more constantly" sounds weird. I can't think of any other way to express the thought. I'd like to see that information all the time without any need to bring up a menu or hit a recast macro.

To avoid clutter, the recast for abilities that are ready to be used could vanish.

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I would much rather have this than the alliance tp/mp display, especially since nobody skillchains/runs out of mp nowadays.

That being said, I still really appreciate the fact that the dev team is working on more UI adjustments.

Yes to ability recast timers. They are in XIV and are great to have.

Don't care about the list. Display "ranged attack" if you are going to continue displaying "attack." No excuse other than being "jobist"--my new word.

Pet MP and Pet TP would be nice to see without having to type "petmp" and "pettp".

At least theses should not require constant information stream, only on trigger :
○ Main job
○ Mission rank
○ Rank points
○ Home point
○ Home nation
× Flags for having at least one level 75 job

This could easily be calculated client-side :
○ Experience points until the next level

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Originally Posted by Kavik

You can see everything but TP in a party situation if you are paying attention to the other people's bars. If you are speaking about an alliance you need to say alliance, and if you are talking about an alliance killing all of these things are moot points because all you're doing is zerging the thing at that point. Even tp can be checked on with a very simple macro /p <tpp>. Skillchains also follow this: /p Skillchain in 3 hold ws please! if they don't and they mess you up, get rid of them. This also allows the mages to prepare to mb. Back when i was lvl 56 in the tree before we had all this easy mode play, we used to sc with the BLM calling for the melees to ws so he could MB freeze. It's called communication. It's called paying attention and listening, also this thread got off topic.

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Originally Posted by Eric

I would much rather have this than the alliance tp/mp display, especially since nobody skillchains/runs out of mp nowadays.

That being said, I still really appreciate the fact that the dev team is working on more UI adjustments.

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This just begs to add something that makes skill chains and burst useful. Take for instance a critical weakness to detonation on a high HP VW mob drops it's HP by 1/2. Tell me again we'd be just zerging if that was a reality? Until skill chains and magic burst are vastly superior to straight up zerging no one cares. This doesn't account for the lack of seeing TP in the alliance/party. Let's put this into perspective, it doesn't hurt the game more then it'll help it.

Everything I've heard windower can do, SE can do. Level the playing field and do it better than windower. Why does this require extra discussion? People will use windower until then.

^ agree 100%

If you don't want people using 3rd party software, improve the game so we don't have to. It's the same argument with torrents, online streaming, and a ton of other things. Offer a better service, and people won't try and find backdoors.

Showing Ability recast timers and party/alliance member TP would be fantastic.

That is, on the screen, w/out having to enter a command.

As far as how to display it....
Recast timers for job abilities/spells has a great model in many games. Show either the name w/ a countdown timer somewhere, or an icon w/ a gray clock hand animation revolving around it. I prefer the name w/ timer, but both might be cool also.

TP should be indicated probably next to party/alliance hp/mp bars. w/ some indicator of where 100% is.

Both are very doable...already being done by one of those third party tools, found a screenshot:

http://lurish.org/anexia/wp-content/...8_15.51.31.png

Note the number next to the hp/mp bars...that's their actual TP values, not a bar, in the party list, and on the target the number is % of HP.

Your SS in an exemple of badly designed UI. Way to many information useless in there. Seing others TP as WHM is totally useless, you'd need an interactive way to allow/disable it. You'd want party member HP% as WHM, in the SSshot you don't clearly see what the appriate cure is required (III,IV,5,6 ?). The WHM is using q regen macro with /recast after it and has the recast on the screen. 4/6 status icon have timers that you don't care about (signet, bcnm status ...). You'd want them to appear when they are about to wear off. Also the timestamp is eating a way too large portion of the screen for something that is essentially useless.

So I'm asking SE not to copy this shit that "windower is" (only good for dualboxing) and have competent people design a UI. The UI must be interactively customizable and not be "stuff written on the screen". You can give infomation through blinking (like FFXIV) or pop up windows.

A lot of the extra-information windower plugins basically just make clutter for someone playing on low resolution settings like that. Everything is overlayed and always exists in the top layer (so the recasts would be on top of the magic menu if it was opened. If SE chose to implement it, they could do it a lot better and the integration could be much more smooth.

Most of the windower problems you outline could be solved by that player, though. Nothing forces them to use outdated xmls, no customization at all, and double up with /recast commands.

in case you guys didn't know, those are all seperate plugins and customizable to some degree--for instance, the recast trackers can be positioned anywhere on screen, and you can designate the font size as well. You can even turn off some things from being displayed with some plugins. More customization may be possible with further development.

The point of the SS is that it can and IS being done already. And by people who do this stuff in their free time, which seems to suggest it would not be rocket science to a paid staff of developers.....

[Edit]
you can also set tranparency of background for the overlays of most plugins (or not use a bg color at all). As for not being able to determine what cure is appropriate....then you just aren't paying attention. You can see the exact numeric value of someone's HP. So....you know what their HP is when full---just takes some simple math to know not to hit somone with a Cure6 when they only about 400 hp from full. Before you go tearing down the work these guys have thrown into these programs....perhaps you should read up on how they actually work, even if you have no intention of using them. If nothing else, do it out of respect for their dedication and so you actually know what you are criticizing.

I'm not here to respect any third party, you showed us a SS of a UI that clearly has poor design. Almost as if you tried to show SE what they should do when they shouldn't do this. Not willing to play a command line game tyvm. I can give hints for a usable UI :

replace ctrl J with a single key to check JA recasts (much quicker, same for macros), and make it so that 'J' displays a pop up window, pressing it once more disable it. Do a similar popup window for the 5 previously used spels.

Just some ideas that won't pollute your screen.

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

I'm not here to respect any third party, you showed us a SS of a UI that clearly has poor design. Almost as if you tried to show SE what they should do when they shouldn't do this. Not willing to play a command line game tyvm. I can give hints for a usable UI :

replace ctrl J with a single key to check JA recasts (much quicker, same for macros), and make it so that 'J' displays a pop up window, pressing it once more disable it. Do a similar popup window for the 5 previously used spels.

Just some ideas that won't pollute your screen.

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um... no... the SS was to show that a small group of people in their free time already figured out a way to display all that information on the screen, and with a somewhat customizable interface. If I were posting an example for SE to look at for ideas, I would have specifically addressed SE to that end (as I did in a thread a while back with the link to the D3 UI changes). Note that most things in that SS are customizable to some extent, that is just how that particular user chose to configure his/her plugins. Most of them could possibly be even more customizable and streamlined if more resources were made available to work on it. From what I recall reading about some of those plugins in the past, in many cases each was designed by ONE PERSON, not a whole freaking team of developers familiar with and having direct access to the game's source code.

And command line game?? What are you going on about there? I've used a PS2 controller on my PC for ages....don't use command-line.

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

Almost as if you tried to show SE what they should do when they shouldn't do this. Not willing to play a command line game tyvm. I can give hints for a usable UI :

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Your suggestions suck. I do not want a keyboard command to check Job Abilities I want it on the screen.
My opinion > your opinion
You comment on Windower plugins, yet show you have zero knowledge about any of it. Nearly 100% of what you said is wrong (like that even had to be said lol).

Also, cool story bro critisizing a low resolution screenshot of someone not using windower properly to begin with. Way to keep it golden

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Originally Posted by RAIST

Note that most things in that SS are customizable to some extent, that is just how that particular user chose to configure his/her plugins.

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Nah when you have to go deep in the source code to adapt to your own need, it means the UI sucks. The reason the guy let the plugins as is is because he loads the defaults one and doesn't configure further. User friendly UI, what is it ? You cannot expect much from people that don't have access to the game code. So stop explaining me I should not express criticism. All they did is display stuff on top of the game screen. We don't want that UI ty. Most people use windower for dual boxing and macros NOT for its poor UI ajustements.

LOL
Just because programming is hard for you, doesn't mean it is for us.

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

We don't want that UI ty.

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Speak for yourself, you are definately one of a kind lol

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Originally Posted by RAIST

-for instance, the recast trackers can be positioned anywhere on screen, and you can designate the font size as well.

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btw that's yarnball not recast

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

I'm not here to respect any third party, you showed us a SS of a UI that clearly has poor design. Almost as if you tried to show SE what they should do when they shouldn't do this. Not willing to play a command line game tyvm. I can give hints for a usable UI :

replace ctrl J with a single key to check JA recasts (much quicker, same for macros), and make it so that 'J' displays a pop up window, pressing it once more disable it. Do a similar popup window for the 5 previously used spels.

Just some ideas that won't pollute your screen.

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I don't want keyboard shortcut because i play with gamepad (how FFXI was designed to be played).
I agree windower plugins UI is far from perfect but IMO having stuff displayed without need of any input is nice

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

All they did is display stuff on top of the game screen. We don't want that UI ty. Most people use windower for dual boxing and macros NOT for its poor UI ajustements.

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YOU are not everybody!

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Originally Posted by Shadowsong

LOL
Just because programming is hard for you, doesn't mean it is for us.

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Guy 1 made a badly designed program and distributes it. Guy 2 has to go back into the program to make it work. Guyz 2 explains everyones else that they are idiots for not willing to redo the program and use it for their own needs. Yeah we totally don't need your ideas in here. It's not even elitism from your part because the final result is probably craptastic. Show us your customed UI please.

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

Guy 1 made a badly designed program and distributes it. Guy 2 has to go back into the program to make it work. Guyz 2 explains everyones else that they are idiots for not willing to redo the program and use it for their own needs. Yeah we totally don't need your ideas in here. It's not even elitism from your part because the final result is probably craptastic. Show us your customed UI please.

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go programm a better UI than windower or GTFO.

Windower white knights. Facepalm.

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

Windower white knights. Facepalm.

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Get a clue, will you. No one is saying they should replicate Windower. Unlike the Windower team they actually have the resources and base code to make it better. All we're saying is that it's possible. If the Windower team can do it SE should be able to do it too. They don't have to do it exactly like it, if they can do it better I don't think anyone would complain. Now go away troll somewhere else.

No that's not what you are saying. We already know what kind of info is available from the dev posts, so posting a pic of windower makes no sense at all. The only purpose was to advertise windower has an exemple of UI improvement which it is not.

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

Nah when you have to go deep in the source code to adapt to your own need, it means the UI sucks. The reason the guy let the plugins as is is because he loads the defaults one and doesn't configure further. User friendly UI, what is it ? You cannot expect much from people that don't have access to the game code. So stop explaining me I should not express criticism. All they did is display stuff on top of the game screen. We don't want that UI ty. Most people use windower for dual boxing and macros NOT for its poor UI ajustements.

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ummm....no. Users don't have to do anything to the source code. It's a bleeding config file. If I remember correctly, it was simple statements like X=300, Y=100, and Font Size=10, BGColor= 0 0 0 0 (each number represents an RGB value and an alpha value). Simple text files with .ini extension, some even had comments in them explaining how to configure them, or there was a ReadMe file or a web page that covers how to configure them.

Sounds like you've never even read up on the utilities, much less even used them.

Good catch on the yarnball vs recast hiko. I never got around to tinkering with that one--didn't know that it also put the recast list as well. All I ever looked at was Recast in the past, but that only listed the spell/abilites you've used and not the extra info like that one shows the user name in parenthesis in that screen shot.

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Originally Posted by Arcon

Get a clue, will you. No one is saying they should replicate Windower. Unlike the Windower team they actually have the resources and base code to make it better. All we're saying is that it's possible. If the Windower team can do it SE should be able to do it too. They don't have to do it exactly like it, if they can do it better I don't think anyone would complain. Now go away troll somewhere else.

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Bolded for emphasis.

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

No that's not what you are saying. We already know what kind of info is available from the dev posts, so posting a pic of windower makes no sense at all. The only purpose was to advertise windower has an exemple of UI improvement which it is not.

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No....it was not to advertise Windower at all. The name of the tool was never even mentioned in my post--I think YOU were the one that pointed out which tool was being used. I referenced it as ONE of the the third-party tools available.

The point was that users had already discovered ways to display the information a poster was requesting. The screenshot was just an example of one method used to that end. Go back and follow the actual conversation that was taking place, for heaven's sake:

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Originally Posted by Xilk

Showing Ability recast timers and party/alliance member TP would be fantastic.

That is, on the screen, w/out having to enter a command.

As far as how to display it....
Recast timers for job abilities/spells has a great model in many games. Show either the name w/ a countdown timer somewhere, or an icon w/ a gray clock hand animation revolving around it. I prefer the name w/ timer, but both might be cool also.

TP should be indicated probably next to party/alliance hp/mp bars. w/ some indicator of where 100% is.

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Originally Posted by RAIST

Both are very doable...already being done by one of those third party tools, found a screenshot:

(image link removed)

Note the number next to the hp/mp bars...that's their actual TP values, not a bar, in the party list, and on the target the number is % of HP.

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***Note that the screenshot covers nearly every aspect the poster mentioned, and that it displays the info in real time without the use of a command line or anything.***

Simply put, it has been proven to be possible, and SE should have better resources and tools to develop a more streamlined way of doing what others have managed to cobble together in their spare time.

SE could implement TP as a third colored bar below the name, with sub-bars colored black (no TP), blue (partial TP, 0-99.9) or green (100%,200%,300% TP)
████ ████ ████
████ ████ ████
████ ████ ████
████ ████ ████
████ ████ ████
████ ████ ████
████ ████ ████

(Just a crude ascii representation :cool:)
This should work for PS2s as well.

High-res version of the menu could then (optionally) support full HP/MP/TP numbers for PC/360.

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Originally Posted by Economizer

If it isn't too much to ask, was something like the Magian Specs or an NPC as a way to view extended stats as a temporary measure still unfeasible in terms of the limits of game data that can be sent?

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This is an absolutely fantastic suggestion and one that totally addresses the concerns outlined by Camate in his post. The hidden player stats don't need to be known in real time but having an ability to query those stats would be very useful.

I'd even welcome a clunky command line style interface to query stats one by one, such as:

/query "ranged attack"

yes yes yes and YES! something to get an idea of the hidden stats! I am so sick of being on COR and seeing like 100 attack because i have a staff equipped, and that's it, when what i really want to see in is my Ranged Attack! While i would like to be able to see acc Racc Ratk eva macc and the like with the same ease as i can atk and def, just having an npc would help tremendously when building for anything specific, like say slugshot, or enfeebles.

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Way to many information useless in there. Seing others TP as WHM is totally useless,

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It's not like you'd be forced to look at that information if you don't want to see it, not that I even agree with your notion. I want to know the state of the battle regardless of the job I'm on.

Distance, recast timers, and tp/targetHP%. (Ignore the FPS counter).
No clutter, nothing really looks extremely out of place, and still easily accessible. This sort of thing is completely do-able by SE.

And yes, while not pretty, the windower UI is an improvement from what we currently have, which is NONE of these things.

http://i.minus.com/jbnt64aiQ9C5Q7.bmp

The third party windower does not look very good and it does not fit visually with the rest of the game at all, but this is understandable and to be expected when you do not have access to the game's code. However, it is showing players the information they want/need to know exactly when and where they need to see it. The plugins all use information that is already in the client's local memory, and therefore the implementation of these features in the official user interface would not lead to increased bandwidth usage or server load.

These screenshots are not posted to show the developers an example of a well-designed user interface, but to show them what sort of information it is easy to implement in an official user interface without it affecting system load anywhere outside of the end user's client.

You are being ridiculous if you think any of the windower users actually think the plugins look visually pleasing, Markovchain.


Anyway, it would be really, really helpful to see some of the statistics that are not currently shown. I really would like to see accuracy, ranged accuracy, ranged attack and total evasion at the very least. Ideally, I'd also like to see total double/triple/quadruple attack rate, total magic defence/-MDT values, resistance to status effects, magic accuracy, magic attack bonus, and probably a lot of other statistics that i can't remember right now.

If it really could lead to a bandwidth or server load issue, you could perhaps put a limit on how often we could request this data from the server. This information could be displayed in a separate window that wouldn't normally be frequently displayed, and you could limit the client to update it at most once every 30 or 60 seconds, and only when you have the statistics window open. Heck, I personally wouldn't mind if the update frequency was limited to even several minutes as long as we actually got to see this information.

Alternatively, you could store all the statistics of every item client-side, and have the client calculate all the statistics of your current gear set without additional server communication at all!

After all, your current marksmanship skill value is known by the client (displayed in combat skill window), the amount of ranged attack and accuracy from equipment is stated on the items, the client knows if you are on the ranger-job and it knows your level, so it should also be able to figure out how much accuracy you get from the Accuracy Bonus trait. It also knows your current agility, and you could tell the client how much ranged accuracy each point of agility would add. Of course, all this information might not be stored in a way that makes it easy to make the client add the values together, but it is possible to show this data without polling a lot of extra data from the server.

It would likely require a decent chunk of additional programming on the client, and items would have to have easily interpretable values added to them (not necessary visible to the users) for the client to base the total values on. Point is, it wouldn't require additional server load/bandwidth.