The Vitalty Issues

[Jon]

Here's my observations on Vitalty over several play sessions. I've /bugged these in game.1. On logging in, all of my characters show correct vitality vials.2. Upon zoning, vitality is no refreshed and thus displays as 0%3. Gain experience and both vitality vials are refreshed.4. I'd like to see Vitality display available in both horizontal and vertial bars in the XML5. Personal Opinion: Vitality is likely to open a whole can of worms with the player base. It looks like 1% per hour gained, 1% per kill lost. 100 hours to refill your vitality vial assuming no play. While it works as a bonus to the casual player, it will appear as a penalty to the masses for not having a full vial. The very first UI edits will be to move the vitality display to the player window, thus emphasizing to the player how much vitality they don't have. In fact, that was the very first thing I did this morning, move my vitality bar to the player window.<p>Message Edited by Jon on <span class=date_text>01-28-2005</span> <span class=time_text>08:03 AM</span>

[gemic]

It was late last night when I tried baking, but this is what I noticed. I had no vitality when in Scale Yard. Logging into the crafting zone Vitality was 100% for both adventure and artisan. I made about 4-5 green recipes and lost about 3% vitality. While I ran to the bank to get something and returned to my station I regained 1-2%. (Note while running to the bank vitality was 0% again) Sorry numbers aren't exact, like I said it was late and I was tired. ~Gem

[Mi]

<DIV>Thanks for the feedback. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I discovered the bug that vitality was not being sent down to the client after login/zoning/death after the test server build last night.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Jon, I'm not sure how familiar you are with EQII dynamic data. Vitality has been added as two data points: Self.Vitality and Self.TradeskillVitality. You can mod the UI</DIV> <DIV>to display it as a progress bar (horizontal or vertical) or text. The current version of UIBuilder doesn't display vertical progress bars.  eq2interface.com is a good source for additional information.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>One of the UI changes we expect to make with the vitality presentation is to emphasis that you get the same bonus no matter how much vitality you have ( 0.1% vitality has the same reward as 100% vitality).</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Mirk</DIV>

[Agathorn]

<DIV>Very simple really to make them horizontal if you prefer.  Progress bars don't care -- they go either way.  Remember as stated above the dynamic data is just a number.  Do what you want with it.  Here is a screenshot of how I put the vitality into my own custom UIs experience bar.  I use a heavily modified version of tablets2.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><A href="http://www.eq2test.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album01&id=vitality_exp&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php" target=_blank>http://www.eq2test.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album01&id=vitality_exp&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php</A></DIV>

[Jon]

Mirk, To be honest, I opened up UI Builder two days ago for the first time and puzzled it out. I've not noticed how horizontal or vertical scrolling is specifed but then I've only given it a cursory glance so far. Thanks for pointing out the ability to use either.What I did notice though, was what appears to be a serious lack. No DTD. XML is pretty much a no brainer, but with no DTD available it ends up being a bit more work than it need be. If you have to deconstruct the DTD from the code then you end up wasting alot of time and missing functionality that may be available.Is there no DTD for the UI code?Jon

[Agathorn]

<DIV>If you open up the coumentation that comes with UIBuilder you'll learn most of the strucutre there.  The rest we've learned through experimentation.</DIV>

[Jon]

<blockquote><hr>Agathorn wrote:<DIV>If you open up the coumentation that comes with UIBuilder you'll learn most of the strucutre there. The rest we've learned through experimentation.</DIV><hr></blockquote>I'll probably read that documenttion this weekend, though it appears that it was last updated by Mirk in early November. I can appreciate what's been learned via experimentation, I do a lot of that myself. A DTD, though, by its very nature, is up-to-date documentation on all of the functionality available.Usually even if people are using well-formed xml, as is the case in the UI, there's often a DTD kept for reference and for running validity checks on code before publish. Even if the DTDs aren't live versions, a simple diff can show changes from publish to publish. Just making a stab in the dark because I've not actually investigated this, I'd bet the initial three characters in the documents are references to internal DTD versions used for validation.I'd sure like to get my mitts on the DTD here. Would make interface customization easier for everyone.And now that we've strayed way off topic....<img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /><p>Message Edited by Jon on <span class=date_text>01-28-2005</span> <span class=time_text>03:27 PM</span>

[Moorgard]

<DIV>* ducks away from talk of XML and DTD * :smileysurprised:</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Just wanted to let folks know that we plan to push another update tomorrow that will have new artwork for Vitality, as well as fix an issue that was making the pools smaller than they should be. We thought this might be going out tonight, but we're shooting for tomorrow instead.</DIV>

[Jon]

That's good to hear.It was interesting playing while watching my Vitality tonight. It didn't decay as fast as I expected. That's a good thing. I did run through 17% tonight though, taking me down to 0%.I suspect, however, that I have somewhere between 0 and 1% with rounding for display.I think we may need one of the two stage bars here like experiece where we have the full gauge and the sub-bubble gauge so that we can see those numbers in between percentages. I think everyone will want to see every little bit they can eek out of it.

[Agathorn]

<DIV>Aye I was thinking the same.  Would it be possible (Assuming the value is even there) to get some more dynamic data tags for the 10ths like we have on experience?</DIV>

[Jon]

It's good to see that vitality is now reported in tenths. Now I can see that I lose .2% every time I kill something. Not sure what I gain when I gain it or when I gain it. I did 75% of a level and never noticed any blib of vitality added to my pool.Emotional response: Now that I have vitality I can see that I'm going to spend my entire career mostly empty. This is distressing. Especially so now that I can tell when I run out and I can see the big difference it makes in my experience gain. It's depressing and adds to the feeling of a grind.

[Agathorn]

It seems that the dynamic data tag "/GameData.Self.TSVitality" is broken. It returns nothing, not even 0. It just returns a null string. It worked fine when it was /GameData.Self.TradeskillVitality but after the change in name it no longer works. I've triple checked my spelling between the gamedata xml file and my ui, and I defintly have it spelled properly.

[Agathorn]

Ok it seems that the tag isn't broken, just unintuitive <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> It appears if you have no vitality the tag returns nothing at all instead of 0. This being the case for both tradeskill vitality and adventure vitality. However in noticing this I noticed some oddities. It appears -- and this needs more testing -- that if you are under level 4 either in adventure or tradeskill then you will not accrue vitality, or at least not have any until you reach level 4. It may silently accrue.

[Moorgard]

<DIV>The bonus doesn't start applying until level 4. But since you're level 3 for so short a time, we don't consider it a big issue. :smileywink:</DIV>

[Agathorn]

The only possible issue I could think of with it is this: If I make a new character and don't touch the tradeskill side of things, I will be Artisan level 3. A month down the road I decide I want to play around with tradeskills. Logically I would have though i'd have a nice full TS vitality pool to work with, but in fact I won't. It would be nice if it had been accruing that whole time but since i'm 3 not 4 it didn't.