CUEmu - Thread Posts

Frilans

Thu Nov 25, 2004 1:13 pm

This is from the Command List:

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/areatrack Gives the Ranger the ability to track area clues to determine what type of people or creatures have been in the area recently. The type of creatures that can be tracked depend upon what sub-abilities you have.

/areatrack Gives the Ranger the ability to track animals through the area track command.

/areatrack Gives the Ranger the ability to track the direction of the target using the /areatrack command.

/areatrack Gives the Ranger the ability to track non-player characters.

/areatrack Gives the ranger the ability to track the distance to the target.

/areatrack Gives the Ranger the ability to track players.

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I use to applaud great stuff, but seing that I'm not sure I'm in the moral need of thank the person who should correct and publish that list. So 5 stars for the intention and2 stars for the result.

Also, I agree with those who claim this is encouraging people to investigate macro building which, undoubtly will lead them to the recursive macroing heaven. But in my opinion AFK gaming is not killing this game much more than solo group or combat unbalance. And AFK amcroing permitt somekind of presence in player city cantinas (that would be desert otherwise) while Solo group and Combat exploits help this game in nothing.

So I'm not sure recursive macros should be removed from this game... I'm just no that smart to figure it out!

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I'm tired of signatures

IG85

Thu Nov 25, 2004 7:17 pm

#41

whats the command to clear the combat queu ?

Cyte
Sith warrior of the Empire

Karquile

Fri Nov 26, 2004 8:42 am

#42

IG85 wrote:

whats the command to clear the combat queu ?

That command is

/ui action clearCombatQueue

So for example, a good Healing macro for use in combat would be

/ui action clearCombatQueue;/healdamage self

since it doesn't make you wait for specials to run before you heal yourself.

Karquile

Fri Nov 26, 2004 11:18 am

#43

Here is some additional information on Macros and Aliases.

Macros vs. Aliases

The Macro and Alias facilities are independent - you can use one or the other by itself, or both together for full power.

Macros can invoke aliases just like any other game commands. This is useful because you can have a macro that does slightly different things (notifies a different player when something is done, for example, or targets a different kind of mob) depending on how you (re-)define an alias that it calls. Conversely, aliases can invoke macros via the /macro command.

Macro and Alias Files

If you have multiple accounts and/or multiple PC's, remember that macros are stored separately for each account (in macros.txt) while aliases are stored once per SWG installation - across all accounts (in aliases.txt). You can load and save aliases to any text file using the /load_alias and /save_alias commands.

If you are installing SWG on a new PC, save those old alias and macro files and copy them to the matching directories on the new PC. The game will not transfer them for you when you log in, because the server side knows nothing about macros and aliases (see below).

If you have a second account it will automatically share aliases with the first account (as mentioned above). If you want it to have the same macros as well, exit the game and then copy macros.txt from the profiles\FirstAccount directory to the profiles\SecondAccount directory. You'll need to redo this if you make any changes to one account's macros.

The alias and macro files are plain text in the UNIX format, i.e., lines are separated just with linefeed (hex 0A) characters instead of the Windows/DOS carriage-return-line-feed format. If you have a robust text editor like UltraEdit32 you can easily view them. Modifying them, of course, would violate the EULA, so don't you dare.

Client vs. Server

The alias facility, the macro facility, and in fact the entire command parsing subsystem runs completely on the client side, i.e. inside the copy of SwgClient_r.exe running on your PC. That includes the in-game Macro editor. F-keys are processed locally. And so on.

The reason that this matters is that the server side - your Galaxy, your sector, your cluster, whatever - has absolutely no idea whether you, the SWG user, are running macros or aliases or hitting F-keys, or whether you're just sitting there typing everything in and staring at radial menus. All it sees are the elemental commands in coded form. What triggered them is not of interest. And it's a good thing this is true, because there is no way the servers would have enough processing power to do that job - it has to be farmed out to the client. (As a side note, even stuff like AFK is only "known" by the server and shown to others because the client tells it you're AFK.) Anyway, remembering this makes understanding the rest of how macros and aliases work a lot easier.

Commands

Let's talk about commands for a moment. The list included in the initial post was old, but it'll do for our purposes - there's a bunch of different commands. Each command has (at most) two parts that we care about: a local part and a world part.

The local part consists of changes and effects that take place immediately, on the client side, and that the server side knows nothing about. A pure example of the local part would be changing your target reticle, or displaying the Network Status Window, or (very important) pausing for a certain number of seconds. A good pure local command for testing is /echo .

The world part consists of action triggers and status changes that the client actually sends to the server, updating the shared world that all players inhabit. Tipping, speaking, attacking, healing, mounting, moving, sitting, emoting, you name it, there's a world part involved.

Some commands have both a local and a world part that are executed immediately. For example, when you cycle target outward using the TAB key, your HUD changes instantly to pull up the next target - that's local. But your toon also turns its head, which can be seen by other players (lag willing) - that's world.

Other commands just send off a world trigger of some kind and they're done - but the server then asynchronously comes back with some change to your toon after it's had time to work on it. A good example is /mount . If you target some distant chuba on the plains and type

/mount; /echo Yowzah!

you will see on your display

12:30:40 Yowzah!

12:30:41 Your target is too far away to Mount.

(Note the timestamping. This is super useful; turn it on in Options>Chat. Also pick Brief mode.) See how the /echo output appeared a full second before the Mount results? That's because the /mount command just sent off a request and "finished" instantly, allowing the command chain (see below) to move on and do the /echo - but then later, on its own schedule, the server side came in and said, Dude, you've got a mount result to hear.

I know this is kind of boring, but again, it's important for understanding the rest. Most World-effect commands execute instantly, and the results come through later, asynchronously, from the server.

Command Chains

If you've ever typed /dump to stop a set of running macros/aliases you have seen the phrase "command chains." What is a command chain? A command chain is a sequence of commands that the client side executes in order, one after the other. If I type

/echo start; /echo middle; /echo end

that is one command chain. (Note that we're not using aliases or macros at all yet - they're just shorthand ways to access the command line.) If you type this in 100 times, you will always see something like

12:53:10 start

12:53:10 middle

12:53:10 end

as the output - they will never change order. That's a chain. Now suppose that I say

/echo start; /pause 20; /echo middle; /pause 20; /echo end

and hit Enter. The same three echo lines will appear, but twenty seconds apart, i.e., the whole chain will take forty seconds to execute. But in the meantime I have the command line back and I can do other commands - or other command chains! And this is the key factoid to remember: SwgClient can and will run multiple command chains simultaneously, asynchronously to each other.

Each alias and each macro you launch is one command chain.

To be continued

I'm out of time, but if you think about this model for a while, you'll start to understand how these "uber macros" work and why they are structured the way they are. We still need to talk about arguments, redefines, length limits, and looping. Good luck out there.

Message Edited by Karquile on 11-26-2004 05:52 PM

DaraShaku

Fri Nov 26, 2004 5:44 pm

#44

Wow.

As a seventeen-month veteran Dancer, this is the final knife in the guts.

My subscription actually ends tomorrow, but I thought I'd log in, secretly hoping (I confess) to maybe stay in the game a while longer.

And then I see this.

I don't generally complain about the Devs, I think they've got a big, hard job to do.

But with this, they've made it very clear to me that they don't want me in their game.

Message Edited by DaraShaku on 11-26-2004 04:47 PM

Karquile

Fri Nov 26, 2004 10:53 pm

#45

DaraShaku wrote:

My subscription actually ends tomorrow, but I thought I'd log in, secretly hoping (I confess) to maybe stay in the game a while longer.

And then I see this.

I don't generally complain about the Devs, I think they've got a big, hard job to do.

But with this, they've made it very clear to me that they don't want me in their game.

All I can say is, you have got to be kidding.

This game has a macro facility! There, I said it.

Someone posts a year-old guide to using it, and you want to quit the game? You think you're better off if the game has this facility but nobody knows how to use it? Good grief!

I'm a fellow 17-monther who's spent 14 of them as a Master Dancer - that means I Mastered before holocrons were ever heard of, and I still have it today after they're a museum curiosity - but even so, I'll be honest with you: if I had to choose tomorrow between the elegant Macro Facility the devs designed into this game, versus the artificial stranglehold that Hun'nee Bun'nee type socializers want to clamp onto the rest of us, I would jettison the prancing Twi'leks in a heartbeat. Let them all go tweak their coiffures in There or SL. I'm serious. Can you imagine Luke trying to save Han or Leia and being gated by some purple skinned drama queen in a Scotch tape bondage rig? There has got to be some better way for chat freaks to enjoy the Star Wars universe besides this heavy handed Blue Bar Mafia deal. There's got to be.

Grrr, I was about to edit the next installment, but this frosts me.

DaraShaku

Fri Nov 26, 2004 11:22 pm

#46

Karquile, I can see you've got your opinions all ironed out, but you're not really describing me. Don't tell me how quickly you mastered Dancer, because that's irrelevant. After seventeen months, I haven't mastered Dancer, because I actually enjoy interaction with other players, and I don't hang around in cantinas if I'm not going to be present for that experience. AFK macroing is the antithesis of all that.

And anyway, if you read the post again, you'll see that I ended my subscription before this 'Game Guide' went up, so put that away. And no, I'm not a Twi'lek, and no, I don't wear the 'scotch tape' body wraps, and no, my name isn't 'Honey Bunny'. But that's not the point. At the heart of it all, I just wanted SOE (not you)to know that I'm gone. You see, I thought it might be useful for them to know that I wanted to find a reason to stay, but this 'feature' was the straw that broke the camel's back. Yes, I'm a Socializer, and my opinions probably don't count for anything. And yes, you can have my stuff, blah blah blah.... but at this point, I'm just glad to be out.

Message Edited by DaraShaku on 11-26-2004 10:59 PM

Karquile

Sat Nov 27, 2004 8:17 am

#47

DaraShaku wrote:

Karquile, I can see you've got your opinions all ironed out, but you're not really describing me. Don't tell me how quickly you mastered Dancer, because that's irrelevant. After seventeen months, I haven't mastered Dancer, because I actually enjoy interaction with other players, and I don't hang around in cantinas if I'm not going to be present for that experience. AFK macroing is the antithesis of all that.

Here's a question for you: Why is it irrelevant how fast I mastered Dancer (three months of hard work, by the way) - but relevant how fast you did or didn't master it? That doesn't make sense. If your Dancer career counts, then so does mine.

I also enjoy interacting with other players (especially helping out new folks), but that's actually true for all professions and all walks of SWG life. One of the systemic problems with Entertainer in this game is that it encourages the illusion that the healthy conversational community of players revolves around Ent's. Not so! Compare a chat log sometime between the Theed Cantina after school lets out, versus an Advanced camp of hunters somewhere in the wilds of Dathomir, or a Townshipmeeting on Rori when the tax rates are going up. Better yet don't, because trust me, it's embarrassing. And you know what the difference is? Those Entertainers are stuck there. They have nothing else useful to do in the game, unless they were smart enough to pick up another profession (I added Rifleman). That's not your fault or my fault, it's a flaw in the game design.

And anyway, if you read the post again, you'll see that I ended my subscription before this 'Game Guide' went up, so put that away. And no, I'm not a Twi'lek, and no, I don't wear the 'scotch tape' body wraps, and no, my name isn't 'Honey Bunny'. But that's not the point. At the heart of it all, I just wanted SOE (not you)to know that I'm gone. You see, I thought it might be useful for them to know that I wanted to find a reason to stay, but this 'feature' was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Yeah, I read the whole thing, I just see so many of these that it doesn't really matter whether the person says "I am going to let my subscription lapse and then I'm gone..." versus "My subscription lapsed but I was hoping to come back but nahhh, I'm gone...". It's the same result, and I would never second guess a decision like that (this game is flawed but addicting - a dangerous combo). I just boggle at the concept that someone would base their decision on somebody in the player-relations office allowing macros to be mentioned via an out-of-date guide. I mean jeez, what's the alternative? I was thinking of renewing, but only if you promise not to mention macros?

That's my problem with the whole Socializer take on the macro system. Macros were designed to enrich game play, and they do enrich game play, every day, for thousands and thousands of players. But there's this one tedious game mechanism that gates enjoyment of the rest of the product - no wonder people engineer around it.And will continue to engineer around it.

Anyway, back to the info in a bit.

RuytooBasgar

Sun Nov 28, 2004 9:01 am

#48

ARC_Casper wrote:

Not only is it contridicting that they don't like AFK play, they are posting something that was made by an AFK loot macro person from eclipse.JChase29 would camp the borgle caves with 3rd party macros to get skill tapes, way to support the exploiters /sigh.

LOL

I didn't even notice that at first. FYI to those that don't know him by his forum name, his ingame name was Rudd. One of the biggest if not the biggest Exploiters on Eclipse. When he wasn't 3rd party macroing the Borgle Cave, he was exploiting elsewhere, including double slicing that he never got in trouble for (these are facts not fiction, he had confessed he had done boths more than once). A real pillar of the community right up there with Patrick and Matchstick.

DEVS, maybe the next time you post a "guide", check some of the posters previous post and make sure they're not a complete **edit** like this guy. Might make the guide a little more valid. Oh and of course two other small things like:

-DON'T MAKE GUIDES OUT OF POSTS THAT ARE OVER 6 MONTHS OLD. MORE THAN LIKELY IT'S GONNA BE OUT OF DATE.

-DON'T MAKE GUIDES OF THINGS YOU HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT TAKING OUT OF THE GAME. THAT'S JUST COMMON SENSE TO ME.

I don't mean to flame but this "guide" and the way the Devs poorly chose it tick me off. Somebody with even half a brain might have though, "hmm, maybe we shouldn't post this guide, its has the potential to start trouble."

I am very disappointed in the Devs decision making on this one. I have stood by other poor decisions becuase I thought they might be doing it to help with future changes but this decision was just plain stupid.

u Ruytoo Basgar u The Bothan Love Machine u

a Suytoo Basgar a Death From Above a

zJuytoo Basgarz Play's that Mandoviol Just Like He's Ringing a Bell z

PoetDancer

Sun Nov 28, 2004 10:51 am

#49

Karquile wrote:

That's my problem with the whole Socializer take on the macro system. Macros were designed to enrich game play, and they do enrich game play, every day, for thousands and thousands of players. But there's this one tedious game mechanism that gates enjoyment of the rest of the product - no wonder people engineer around it.And will continue to engineer around it.

I'm just trying to play this thing. I'm just trying to be an entertainer. And I try hard to be entertaining. I keep on trying to find new and better ways to amuse the patrons, and I commit myself to finding those things thatmay appeal to everyone in the cantina. Because I know that the patrons who see me everyday have nothing better to do than let me do my work, be it music or dance. So perhaps--just perhaps--they might be able to see something from me that is funny, or thought provoking. Sometimes I accomplish this. Sometimes I do not. But what other game do you expect me to play other than this one? "Sit back and shut up?" The cantina is my crafting station. My vendor. My place in which to attempt to do what I do for the patrons. And I'm going to put on a show. Its the only criteria anymore that really means anything in terms of tips. Because I know the cantina can be tedious if the things in there are not interesting, or they are overy contrived.

But here's the thing I have learned from over a year in the cantinas, Elam. The time goes by a lot faster with less tedium if there are good things to see all around.

I'm not asking for a gratis handout, or special protections, or even a guaranteed interoculator. All I want or need is the opportunity to get you looking at my chat bubbles. And if you do, and are not amused, you don't need to tip me. But at least give me a chance. That's all I want or need. I hear so much talk on these boards telling us, "don't expectthe patronsto want to chat." All I have to say on that is to tell you patrons, "don't expect to not find somethingto chat aboutin the cantina." You'll never know what you'll find there. Its what I am there to do. I take pride in my work. And it can pay off for me as well in terms of credits.

Now some may not try to be entertaining, or if they try to be entertaining, they do it badly. I cannot be responsible for their gameplay any more than I can be responsible for my audience when I am not logged on. This is the group you seem not to admire. But then I ask you to do what comes naturally: don't tip them. Save your credits for someone who cares about giving you the mechanics in an amusing way. But don't write off these professions simplybecause a lot see it as a joke. A lot do, I don't deny it. We are trying to make them better performers, for their sake as well as all of yours.

But its very hard to do that when we get players who come in here and say that the effort to try and amuse is an exercise in futility, and champion the placement of unattended lot mules over dedicated and refined live play. Because I certainly don't think the 45,000 credits I received yesterday for 30 minutes underneath a buffbot's nose didn't come out of thin air. It came as a result of my faith in myself and in the premise of the cantina feature--that the effort to amuse and the performance in the cantina makes the difference.

I never wanted to be a revolutionary, or a member ofsome "Costa Nostra." If I wanted to do that, I'd become a doctor who is better able to manipulate the enjoyment of the server a lot better than I ever could. I am but a simple dancer that is trying to play this thing, and finding that there is a relative few, very organized, well funded, and uncompromising players who stop at nothing to tell me, SOE, the new entertainers, and thepatrons that we live entertainers are the source of all their ills--both real and perceived--and that the cantina feature is a waste of a player's time, concern, credits, and developer resources. They are a vocal minority that hope that through player efforts in defiance of the developer's vision and of good order are trying to make their opinion about the cantina feature into an active reality for everybody, whether anyone likes it or not. That I will not stand for.

Now as far as the guide is concerned, I would much rather have a guide such as this one here and free for all to see rather than on some $15 a month "pay to win" site. Its outdated and old, but buffbots are going to be created with or without the promulgation of this info.

But the creation of buffbots is one thing. Thecreation and promotion of a buffbot culture is another. We would hope that the players and the game would support and promote those individuals that are doing the sort of things you like to see in the cantina when you get your mechanics. I admit, there are few of the good ones left. And the bad ones have fewer teachers in order to make them better. If I have learned nothing else, it is that these professions have a steep learning curve and requirea different setof skills in order to do them properly.

They could have just as well left the cantina professions out of the game, but I would hope you feel that your game is richer for having them. We are asking you the audience to determine what you'd like to see: to be the critics and patrons of the arts in your virtual communities. You may not think this is appropriate to do in this sort of simulation, and all I can say is that the success or blame ultimately will rest on you the patrons for what sort of entertainment you have on your servers. A buffbot culture solves a lot of problems, but it will also create new ones as well. These problems are already starting, they will only become more pronounced in time, and will be much more difficult ones for the game to solve once the incentives to actively play these professions have been undermined.

Message Edited by PoetDancer on 11-28-2004 12:03 PM

Madame Sirii Ajaan
August 2003-September 15, 2005
"There is a difference between being /watched and being WATCHED."

Game Guides Archive

Thread: Game Guide: The Full Macro How-To and Full Command List