Adding Cool Down Option to Custom Trigger

comet361

I am a FFXIV gamer and I depend a whole lot on ACT's custom trigger TTS to enjoy the game because there are too many visible information to digest in the combat contents.

One of them is boss' spell casting and this can be detected easily in ACT, however there are a lot of gimmicks that do not involve casting and in those cases, instead of logging a single 'Boss starts casting xxx', multiple specific messages are logged, each to the group member before the actual action occur. Using those messages as trigger will give you a noisy situation since multiple TTS will be ringing simultaneously.

So, how about adding a Cool Down option to each trigger? If cool down is set and it is triggered recently, the trigger would be in sleep mode until the cool down is over.  This can be useful in many other situations.

EQAditu

I'm having trouble understanding that second paragraph.  It makes me wonder if the trigger regex is too general purpose or something.

But anyways, a long time ago, a trick that I used to use was to attach a trigger to a timer.  The timer would handle all of the sound making and it would automatically ignore repeats until 6 seconds of silence, or so.  Additionally, if needed, the timer could be set to expire quicker to allow the restart more often, or it could be set to block any restarts while it had time left.

I hear there's some plugin called Triggernometry or something with FFXIV in mind that replaces the Custom Triggers, essentially... but I don't know a lot about it aside from the name.

comet361

Thank you for the response.

Let me explain the idea of my suggestion more specifially.

For example, when a specific boss attack is coming in without a casting, the game server may send specific preceding messages to inform the game client, all with the same skill name, but include slightly different detail for each line or player affected. If you have 8 players affected, you will receive at least 8 lines of these, and you may receive the same line again and again until it actually takes affect or/and when it takes effect.

So, the information available is:

(1) You have all these similar messages spamming for a specific period like 10 seconds before the real event.

(2) They all have the same common skill name stated, but you have no idea of what the rest mean

(3) After that, you will not see them for a while (like at least 60 seconds later), which is the preset cool down for that gimmick.

For such case, you can detect the beginning of these messages easily with a filter stating the name of the skill but hard to detect when it ends. 

So if there is an optional cool down timer that you can specify for each filter, you can set it to 40 seconds  or so for the above example and get it dealt with easily, because the filter only work for the first line of the spam. If the timer is 0 (default), simply no cool down.

BTW, I have googled FFXIV related Triggernometry and looks like the related site is closed and most of the posts I can find are 2 years ago. Can't even find the plug-in download page and no one in the Japanese ACT community is using it anymore.

EQAditu

What the trigger and text looks like is still pretty vague to me, so I guess I can't help you with that.

What I was talking about earlier is that the functionality is easy to recreate using Spell Timers and their various options.

Clipboard Import Snippet:

<Spell N="CTSpells" T="45" OM="F" R="F" A="T" WV="0" RD="T" M="F" Tt="" FC="-16776961" RV="0" C="CustomTriggers" RC="F" SS="tts ${attacker} casting" WS="none" />

Essentially the above makes a single spell timer that will use TTS to say that a spell is casting.  It will not accept restarts during its duration of 45s, so it will only play its sound once.  You can have any number of Custom Triggers feed into it and it will create one instance per spell name.

The trick is to pass the spell name that the Custom Trigger knows as a named capture group, "attacker".  The Spell Timers functionality will create additional instances of the spell timer if the "attacker"(spell name) is different.  Maybe you won't encounter the need for different instances for different spells, but it's there.

Sample regex with the named capture group, "attacker":

Mob begins casting (?<attacker>Special Skill Name|Big Spell Name)

We're re-using the "attacker" capture group for its special functionality rather than a logical name.  I made a list of two possible names using the |pipe| character, but you may opt to create multiple triggers.  Make sure to configure the Custom Trigger to use the Timer name of "CTSpells".

comet361

I see. I think I can work around with that now by using spell timer.

Actually I have already been using spell timer but only for proc and buff CT control.
Simply not realizing that I can use it for boss gimicks too. Good suggestion.

Again thank you for the advice.