EverQuest targeting

Heya,

I'm working on a profile that allows me to play my group identically regardless of what client I am currently focused on, but I've run into a bit of an issue with targeting. I'll give an example of what I'm trying to achieve to illustrate the problem better:

I have 7 hotkeys intended to do the following:

1 - Heal Focus (the character I'm currently playing)
2 - Heal Group Member 02
3 - Heal Group Member 03
4 - Heal Group Member 04
5 - Heal Group Member 05
6 - Heal Group Member 06
7 - Heal Self (the healer, not the focused character)

The tricky part is I want the keys for healing each group member to work from the perspective of the focused character. So if I press 'Heal Group Member 02', it should heal Group Member 02 for the focused character, not the healer.
I know this can be achieved by using virtualized slash commands and ATGs at the character specific level, but after a lot of testing I can't get it to work reliably in one key press, and it often randomly fails due to latency (I'm Australian too, so I play with 350 - 500ms on average). This method also goes out the window if I have other people in my group besides my boxes.

I've found that if I can use the in-game targeting keys (F1 - F6 by default in EQ), then I can get it to work reliably in one key press every time. But this presents a new problem in that these targeting keys give different targets from each character's perspective. I need some way of translating the targeting keystroke into the correct one for each non-focused character so they all get the same target.

The only way I can really think of is constructing some sort of translation table in a mapped key (using set variable keystroke action) that can be called dynamically per group member.. but that really seems to be a lot of work, I'm sure I must be missing something easier than that?

[bob]

It sounds like you are after the Per Slot Targeting...
The order that you configure is normally from the perspective of the Character Set you are playing, and for each Character. Of course, this might not match the in game party order, but in reality that doesn't matter. It is more a case of you tell you healer to target Bob, and they target Bob, no matter who the current focus (active slot) is. If you tell them to target Steve, then they target Steve...... actually you tell them to target slot 2 and they target slot 2, but you can make yourself a menu/clickbar which has all the names on it, or you can setup some complicated menus to put some buttons in the right place for the party order (actually this is pretty hard and will normally require 36 clickbars, menus may have less but the combination of pieces will be about the same).

Target Self is a little more tricky unless you just hard code that, 1. by putting your healer in the same slot every time, or 2. using a separate ATG for it that your healers are in (this works if you only ever have 1 healer per group). Not that it really matters anyway, because unless you are running 7 characters per group, I imagine that the target self is actually covered by one of the others.

Thanks bob, per-slot is what I already use.. but I'm messing about with the party order menu setup you mentioned (this is actually what I was trying to achieve, so the healing keys dynamically match the party order for the active character).

Cheers for your help.

[bob]

Well.... it's damn tricky. It wont necessarily work for PUGS; well it can, but you wont get their names, and without redoing this menu in LavishScript, there is no way for you to type them in - that was my original intention but I was struggling with how to organise it - I now know how, but may leave that to some other keen player.

I've managed to make this work by using two levels of virtualisation. The first sets up the healer, and tells all the other characters what the Healer needs to press to target a specific slot. The second sets up each character and sets where their character positions are in relation to the Healers.

Because menus are a little restrictive in some places, this took 13 menus, 2 templates, and 15 buttons sets, 43 mapped keys, 12 timers, 1 ATG, and a heap of actions. It also took about 5 hours and a shitload of frustration in finding stupid errors and a few sheets of paper to make sure the mapping was correct.


To give you an idea....


The lower bar with the green boxes is from the healer (CharFour in my tests, but they are determined by being in the GroupHealer ATG). Basically you set the green line (click on the box, it provides a drop down) from the perspective of the healer, and the order of the party. It is assumed that Party Member 1 = F1, Party Member 2 = F2, Party Member 3 = F3, etc.
As the healer presses the target keys in the order we set, then the Healers party order is set by the same actions of setting the green items.
The upper bar is from the perspective of another character. In my case I happened to use CharOne, but it doesn't matter. In the table it shows that on this character, if I select Party Member 1, which happens to be CharSix, this is actually Party Member 4 for the healer, so the Healer should press F4.

And they do. It can be tested by hitting the Party Member [1] button at the top, and it will display what the healer will press to select the Party Member for the current character.

Essentially those buttons just run a Do Mapped Key action of Party Target [n] on self, and the virtualisation takes care of the rest.

Anyway, attached is the profile that makes all this work for your perusal.
http://pastebin.com/tvALcn9q


Currently you would need to set this each time you loaded your character set, although because it is using virtualisation, you could pre-configure it if you will always be using the same characters in this character set, and not PUGging. The hard part is doing the mapping for it in your head! (I used paper).
If it was really fancy, I'd be able to load and unload it, and have it pop up with all the details you entered previously. Experience tells me I'd need another 15+ mapped keys , and probably a bunch of ATG's to do this. If I scripted it, maybe 10 lines of code..... (although I am guessing there, it would probably take more).

[firescue17]

I know this can be achieved by using virtualized slash commands and ATGs at the character specific level, but after a lot of testing I can't get it to work reliably in one key press, and it often randomly fails due to latency (I'm Australian too, so I play with 350 - 500ms on average).

The trick to the single keypress is to put a leading /pause in your heal social.

Keypress Down: /target <name>
Keypress Up: Keybind for the Heal /social

Page8Button3Name=Heal
Page8Button3Color=0
Page8Button3Line1=/pause [X]
Page8Button3Line2=/stand
Page8Button3Line3=/pause 5, /cast #
Page8Button3Line4=/cast #

You'll have to adjust X for your particular latency but by the time Lines 1 and 2 of the social have executed "/target <name>" will also have registered the target switch.

[bob]

Or you could just do that....

<mutter> <mutter>......