Wurm Assistant - Enrich Your Wurm Experience

[Aldur 652]

Your settings are elsewhere and will keep working.

[Schwanke 32]

Nope. All gone. Didnt even have my toolbox settings. Triggers list is empty. Etc.

[Schwanke 32]

Old one still has em. But taking that zip you posted it. Extracting it.  And running the launcher downloads a file and then launches a version of WA2 that has no settings.  Granger/Triggers/Timers.. all reset back to default nothings.

[Schwanke 32]

Ive got 3 and half pages of triggers alone lol.  I just realized I guess I could screen capture them and that would be faster then back and forth but still a pain. Its not 100% serious. I mean if the new version is so much better and I know 3 will rock. Oh well. Life moves forward.

[Aldur 652]

Guess I've done it differently back then.

 

Here is the solution:

 

Copy everything from

%localappdata%\AldurCraft\WurmAssistantData\Stable

to

%localappdata%\AldurCraft\WurmAssistant2

[Schwanke 32]

Yours my hero!!!!  

 

             

[Aldur 652]

This week I've finished setting up everything necessary to dev, host and roll updates of WA3 (betas and releases), as well as designs for the features.

 

Of particular interest is the problem I've had with timers and triggers.

 

Right now, timers and triggers are separate features. They don't interact, even though they could. They share the same notifications of course, but that's it.

 

For a moment, I've thought about completely merging these features and creating a sort-of designer, where one could construct the kind of triggero-timero-something-whatever, exactly how he wants. Trigger this, starts timer, shows popup, then waits for another trigger, that resets timers, so on so on. 2 problems with this approach:

1. It's bloody hard to create and get right, especially when you'd like to save such complete "workflows", import and export them and what not.
   
2. I've had serious doubt these would be useful to average player using Assistant. I know, what I expect out of any software, when it promises to do something for me - it has to be trivial and intuitive to get exactly what I want. If I want a meditation timer, I don't want to construct some weird workflows, I want to click "meditation timer" and voila, it's doing magic for me. Whatever customization I'd like to have, it should be readily available and done with a single click or switch. Any kind of complex and super-powerful customization is secondary.
   

Because of that, I've decided to continue the road of WA2 and make timers, triggers, granger and what-not-to-come more intuitive, clean, robust, bug free and trivial to setup and have working for the gamer making his game experience richer. I want everyone, who tries this tool, to immediately enjoy it's features, without wondering what the heck it needs to tick.

 

That said, I'm not dropping any more powerful features already present in WA! Custom timers and triggers for example, will stay and I'll be working on improving them (scripting is still on the board). But these features will not be immediately visible to new folks, they will be hidden behind "advanced" modes and the goal of "simple" mode is to have a set of things, that just work and solve the problem in some universal way.

 

I'm not sure if this is, what everyone following this new version expected, so please, I'm open to discussion.

[Schwanke 32]

What came to my mind and your way may do the same is 'default simple' versions or templates, even importable/exportable so you could take contributions of common ones. Like enchated grass wasnt in your original list but anyone with the skill and trying to enchant large areas would use it. Same for sign/lamp posting off deed for like inter deed highways.

[Aldur 652]

Yes, that's one of the ideas circling inside my head. I thought that perhaps, there could be a web library, where such custom things could be submitted, easily browsed and downloaded.

[Nomadikhan 2,196]

I like the idea.  It's like opening the windows calculator and seeing just that, a basic calculator.  But you toggle the advanced mode on and suddenly you can do higher math functions such as hex conversions and even sgin, co, etc functions.

 

Your presenting the user with an "easy out of the box set and go" program.  At the same time, the advanced user can toggle the other features that they need.

 

I don't see a downside to this so far

[ogak 0]

Great work!

Edited August 9, 2014 by ogak

[Mynnah 15]

Aldur, I'm just going to go with the flow on this one   You're the designer, you know what can & can't be achieved. I'm just happy to see how it unfolds and offer feedback/requests based on that. 

Carry On my friend!!

[Schwanke 32]

54 new notifications from Trello ....

 

 

This always makes me laugh.  Someone's thinkin about programming....

[Aldur 652]

Okey Mynn, I'm looking forward to that.

 

I've in fact been doing just that, picking up all the ideas that spawned in last weeks, figuring which can actually be done in reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately some of the more crazy ideas got scrapped, because I could not figure how to find enough time for them without committing for years.

 

Here is the sum-up of the new Assistant v3.

 

 

Triggers and Timers

 

Triggers and timers stay of course, on the surface they will be very similar to how they work now. There will still be premade ones and even a few new ones, configurable with a few clicks. They will get some more polish, helpful tooltips in-app and links to help pages, so that getting to use them is as pleasant as possible.

 

However, under the hood these will be something entirely different, named currently "Helpers" (I can't figure a good name for this, any help?). Helper is something of an engine, that includes things like triggers, actions (play sound, show popup), timers. That engine defines, what they are supposed to do and how they are supposed to work together.

 

To show a good example: Meditation timer.

Creating a meditation timer creates a helper, that has these elements:

- a timer with some configuration suitable for meditation timing

- a trigger for wurm events, that start meditation timer

- a trigger for uptime resets

- a meditation tracking engine (the thing that counts them each day and such)

Triggers cause actions, which tell the engine what has happened. Engine, in turn, decides what actions to use against the timer - should the timer be 30 minutes or 3 hours, or maybe shouldn't start at all. Timer itself also has a bunch of actions attached to it's events, like "timer elapsed", these actions depend on the player choices for notifications.

 

Again, this is something that will never be visible in "simple" mode, but in advanced, there will be a helper designer, where creating things like this one, will be entirely possible from scratch (or by cloning an existing helper).

 

To construct actual helper, you need building blocks. There will be "libraries", one for timers, one for triggers, one for sounds and so on. These can also be created and cloned in helper designer. How far will this go exactly, I'm not yet sure, but for such an advanced feature, I'd definitely like to add custom scripting.

 

All building blocks and complete helpers can be exported into the cloud, of course. These can then be downloaded by other players, directly from WA.

 

 

Scrapping some ideas

 

I've decided not to pursue the co-op planner, trading system and project manager. All great ideas, but simply impossible with the time I've got available right now.

 

Keybinder is also most likely scrapped, because Wurm is getting it's own keybinding interface.

 

I'm not entirely sure about server mapping app. I've had many requests for this, especially from pvp folks, but even a simple one would take a lot of time. I'm going to leave the decision to community, if you are willing to invest into such app, please check this card: https://trello.com/c/di3xleE5

 

 

Other features

 

General:

• Sync all WA settings, granger herds, custom helpers etc. via cloud accounts.
  
• Sync Wurm log files across PC's (!)
  
• The HUD, no bigger changes compared to last post about it.
  

 

Granger - not much going to change here. Most notable additions will be:

• herd sync (merging a herd exported from a friend's WA, for example)
  
• better advisor (it will value pairs based on possible traits on offspring, not some arbitrary numbers and weights)
  
• cataloging any creature (for un-named creatures, it will require manually choosing, which creature to update - or examining signs with their names before scanning)
  
• granger will also use new helpers, which means it will be able to start custom timers, show custom popups or scan creatures in a custom way.
  

Log Scanner aka Log Searcher

• I'd like to give it much better UI and overall improve the search
  

Calendar:

• A proper calendar-like view
  
• Better editing of seasons
  
• Custom events, that can be put on the calendar and trigger some notification
  

And of course, the Skill Stats and Combat Assistant are still on the board.

 

Skill Stats:

• List of current skill levels
  
• Charts of skill gains
  
• Statistical skill gain per hour
  
• Skill to title lists
  
• Notifications for achieving titles
  

Combat Assistant:

• Widget showing all combat "actors"
  
• Who's hitting whom, how hard, hit/miss ratios
  
• Combined combat statistics
  

[Mynnah 15]

Aldur my weekend project & through last week was building an excel sheet for boat making, so if I had orders for a couple of boats I could put the number of boats in and it then tells me the number of pieces that I need.  I've been doing it in excel and i've hit a wall (mainly as I don't know enough advanced coding/formulas), I can't get my sub-components calculated with main (ie Crows nest components added to the core).

 

Could WAv2/3 be able to do this?  

 

Boat Order:
1 x Caravel

1 x Sailing Boat

1 x Row Boat

 

Result:

Parts needed are:
Planks = 12

Oars = 14

etc etc

 

Like house building, but for boats.  

 

Here's my sheet that is semi-working (needs an explanation) with the components in there:  https://db.tt/3AkBsTIn   is there a way to bring this to life in WA?  Is there even an interest for it??

 

 

 

 

 

Granger - not much going to change here. Most notable additions will be:
......
granger will also use new helpers, which means it will be able to start custom timers, show custom popups or scan creatures in a custom way.

Perhaps putting in DoB will calculate their first breed attempt?  (ie I have my spreadsheet @ 24 days) 

 

 

Those are just my 2 ideas this week :) 

 

Have a fab weekend.

[Aldur 652]

Sounds useful, have put this on the roadmap:

https://trello.com/c/b7DxalAZ

[McGarnicle 1,463]

This might be wishful thinking, but would there be any way to make WA3 compatible on a mac?

[Aldur 652]

Sorry McGarnicle. I can do my best to make most of the code compatible on Mac, but the GUI would have to be built from scratch and that's too much work for me at the moment, especially that there isn't any really good GUI toolkit for mono, for example you could forget about the HUD's, or even the current timers widget! And the rest would look rather ugly overall.

 

Either way, I'll have to first finish the current WA for windows and see just how much code really does work on Mac and Linux.

 

---------

 

I've shut down old WA2 update site, everything seems to work correctly with new launcher but if you spot any issues, let me know!

[McGarnicle 1,463]

Thanks for the reply. I sometimes get to play on my windows PC, and I find WA to be such a help. But mostly I'm on my mac book air. The worst part is that I know what I'm missing.

[Aldur 652]

I'm looking into changing, how "donations" work in WA3. I want to give some rewards to those, who sponsor the project!

 

WA3 will offer you to buy donator badges (bear 2-pacs? ), each for 7$. These will grant:

• A key to input into WA3 to remove all "donate" nags.
  
• A place on the donator ranking, with the amount of badges purchased.
  
• A link to unique picture, with the nickname and badges count, that can be put in, say, forum signatures.
  
• Anyone at 5+ badges will get one of my future sandbox games for free.
  

All previous donations are of course redeemable! I will email each of you with the steps on how to do it and with the WA3 keys!

 

If there come to be any premium features in WA3 (one such example is the wurm logs sync - huge amounts of data transfer), badges will cover them.

 

 

Do you think this is overall a good idea?

[Lovefall 148]

Sounds like a great idea.

 

I'm not much of a donor, and not being rich, I would probably never donate to a free product.

 

But being given some advantage/badge, I might consider doing it.

[Schwanke 32]

Sounds good to me.

[Nomadikhan 2,196]

I like it!  We love incentives lol, brings out the addiction in us all!

[Aldur 652]

Great!

 

And I've just rolled a final update for WA2, what I could fix, I've fixed, rest of them will be fixed in WA3.

[Aldur 652]

I have a good-bad kind of news, depending on how you view it. But I think it's overall a good one.

 

For a while now I was trying to decide, which direction my career should go. There is no point in going into more on this, suffice to say, after following the latest Unite 2014 and seeing all the amazing things happening around Unity engine, I've lost any doubt about going that route.

 

So what does that mean for WA? That's this good-bad sort of situation.

 

It's good, because I no longer need WA3 to be top notch, super duper polished, portfolio gem with a ton of great features. I can now work faster, much faster.

 

The bad is, that all of the more advanced features are now definitely scrapped.

The advanced editor for triggers/timers also joins this party unfortunately, I will instead create something less powerful but still going to cover the shortcomings of what's available in WA2.

The "HUD" is going to become slightly less customizable (for example automatic attaching them to wurm windows is unlikely to happen), but it's not getting an axe, I think it's a really nice and needed addition to WA.

 

I will go through the roadmap in the next few days and put it all in more detail. This will be the final roadmap shape. And since I don't want to make any more promise/planning posts, the next one will be when I have a working beta.

 

Thanks bout it for now.