Entertainer Archive

And really, it is crazy, I haven't counted lately but last time I did I had over 140, and while I can run my auto flourish macro (err, any one of about 5 anyway) for unattended play, none of the macro's are designed for unattended buffing and there is no built in spatial or group spam in them either.

Some background... A long time ago I got it in my head to become an exotic dancer, to do so I'd need exotic effects, and to adorn myself in rare and valuable accessories. Since pretty much all my points of my main are spent on entertainer save 26 points in medic, I aquired a second copy of the game and made an alt which became a CH/Riflewoman which I use to grind large amounts of money doing mokk/janta missions. So contrary to pretty much everybody else in the game who has combat mains with ent alts to buff them, I have an ent main with a combat alt to make me money. Long story short what my outfit required was a NS bicep piece, which was aquired long ago, and a NS energy lance. Interesting fact about the energy lances, when you equip them, they do their energy sparking for 10 seconds then stop, and do it again at random intervals, but its client side so everybody else sees it at a different time. If you unequip then re-equip the lance it will do the effect again for 10 seconds, but you will have a momentary time when the weapon unequips, which looks akward, solution, buy two lances and swap them every 10 seconds, seamless and constant energy swirl around the dancer. Please note this isn't a post about me bragging about what I have, just setting the stage for why all the crazyness in my macro's is necessary.

This brings us to the first macro, the lance swap one, simple enough, equip a lance, pause 10, equip the other, pause 10, repeat (note this is recursive macro #2 that runs at all times while dancing, apart from whichever dance macro I'm using (I have several macro's I run based on which dance I'm doing and if I'm speed buffing or not). However things (for me) can't be this simple, what if I need to dump the macro sometime in the first pause, when I start the macro over again I'll be dancing lanceless for the first 10 seconds as the macro would unequip the lance instead of equip the next one. This is very inelegant, and not to be tollerated, my solution, use an alias to remember which lance to equip next, then change the macro to:

the nextlance alias would call a macro which would equip the lance that wasn't equiped and then change the nextlance alias to refer to the macro to swap the other lance. Something like:

This leads to the problem of alias spam, every time you run or assign an alias it either displays what it's running or displays alias set, and its unnacceptable to chatting in spatial to have 2 lines of this happening every 10 seconds. So I create a seperate chat window called macrocrap (which for me is /ui action chatTab 80) and I modify the macros as follows:

Macro swaplance:

/ui action chatTab 80

/nextlance

/ui action chatTab 1

/pause 10

/macro swaplance

This causes the macro to shift to the macrocrap tab, do its dirty work of setting and running aliases, and switching back to spatial without me even seeing the swap, and I see no alias spam. Well now everything is good, I got my lances swaping with no visible interuption, and no longer have to worry about seeing all that yucky spam in spatial. Now to have some fun, lets do a SMOKE CHANGE!!! Do a smoke bomb, click on the new cloths a second later and, what? Why did it take so long to change? Ooooh, thats right, the devs added a delay for equipping ANYTHING for 3 seconds after a weapon or armor equip. So I need to wait say... 5 seconds after the lance equip to try to equip anything else (to account for any lag). So, write some macros to do my smoke changes, then instead of running them directly, make another macro for each that sets an alias that lanceswap uses to call the new requested outfit 5 seconds after the lance swap:

So now I can keep my lances goin and sparkin and still do cool smoke effects, but wait, now the effects are being controlled by macro instead of manually... but I like to wear my black gloves and sandals with my dark outfits and my white gloves and sandals with my light outfits, but now if I change from a dark outfit to a dark outfit or a light outfit to a light outfit, if the macro does the gloves and sandals too, it may unequip them at the wrong time. But if they don't handle the gloves and shoes then the outfit change won't be seemless... How about I just make my macro remember what gloves and shoes I'm wearing, and if I already have the required accessory on, then it can leave it alone, if not, it will change it... So I added more aliases, if an item is equipped, the alias to equip it is deleted, if its not equipped, the alias to equip it points to a macro that does the equipping (and also modifies any other aliases to update that they are no longer equipped). Also I definte aliases to remove clothing accessories should the need arise, my EBS (equip black sandals) macro looks something like this:

RWS/EWS = remove/equip white sandals R/EW/BB = remove/equip white/black boots

This sets up the shoe aliases to do nothing if ebs is run again, and to do nothing if any other shoes are attempted to be removed, and to remove black sandals if rbs is run and equip any other shoe if it is requested. So with this any outfit I setup in macro will always come out with the desired shoes and gloves. Note no /ui action chatTab command in this macro, its the responsibility of the calling macro to switch to the macrocrap tab and back to spatial after a short delay to ensure all macros finish (when you use the /macro command to start another macro, it doesn't wait till its done to go on, it just starts them all running in parallel). Similar macros are used to track the equipping and unequipping of my NS bicep, and could be extended to other accessories such as bracelets and necklaces if I so desired.

So once I fire my macros up (I do have a main macro responsible for starting up all associated dance macros) one simple push of a button causes the smoke changes at the appropriate time after the lance swap, I also have an effect alias that runs instead of the change macro to throw out a bit of a light show, but thats easy stuff compared to the rest.

Anyway, the point of all this was to show what you can do with the current macro system if you just put your mind to making it work for you

Ok I'm so tired I'm dizzy, I'll proofread this later

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