Rematch 4.0

[Gello]

Safari Hat will change to a toy in 6.2.2. expected Sep 1st ... Rematch 4.0 won't release before the change, maybe you have to change something for that button?

Yeah a small change has to happen. An update of the live version was posted this morning (3.5.12) to support the toybox safari hat when 6.2.2 patch happens. I should have support for the toybox safari hat in the next beta update too.

[Gráinne]

Nothing new to report. I have settled into my way of using it: I open the Pet Journal, rather than the separate screen, and I tick Rematch off when I want to see the pet card. I'm happy with that.

Thanks for the details. It appears dead pets are not loading properly (they should be loading). I'll get this fixed this weekend.

I confirm I see it fixed in Beta-10.

The most recent version posted this morning has the stats of all breeds when you mouseover Possible Breeds.

I see this. Thank you.

Is it the inability to check all and then unselect something? You can Shift+Click an item and it will check everything except what you clicked. You can also Alt+Click an item and it will uncheck everything except what you check. There needs to be a better way to communicate this, or something.

I'm less sure about this now. I have just finished levelling all my pets, and I don't need to pull subsets in filters, so I'm not sure I can get the same sense of it. Best that other people comment.

The NEW breed is a breed that has no data from the breed addon you use (Battle Pet Breed ID or PetTracker).

Thanks for the explanation.

[Flohsakk]

I can move the notes window even when it should be locked.

And I still would love to see that minimzed window showing up when prompt loading (or an option for it)

[Gello]

I can move the notes window even when it should be locked.

And I still would love to see that minimzed window showing up when prompt loading (or an option for it)

I totally forgot about the notes lock button oops. It does nothing right now. Thanks for pointing it out!

I'll see about an option to make the minimized window appear instead of a prompt (at the bottom of the minimized window with a target it has a "This target has a saved team" with a load button so the prompt dialog wouldn't be necessary). With the caveat that the minimized window won't disappear on its own after the team loads and those who prefer to keep the window maximized will have to maximize it again themselves.

edit: the above two are in beta-11 posted on wowinterface (may take a bit for them to approve at this time of day) along with some other changes.

[Gello]

For those waiting for pet notes, what are your thoughts on the life expectancy for these notes? Specifically:

• If a pet gets caged, is it okay if notes are lost? Or should they return when the pet is relearned?
• If you add a note to a pet you never owned (one of the greyed out pets at bottom of list), and you later learn the pet, should the note move to the one you just learned?

There are some weird wrinkles too. Like if you have only one Pandaren Water Spirit and it has notes, and you cage it, it would make sense for the notes to move to the greyed out unowned version of the pet. But if you have 3x Pandaren Water Spirits and you cage one with notes, there's no greyed out version of the pet.

I'd love to make notes "species-wide" so there's one note for all three versions of the Pandaren Water Spirit. It would take 1/100th the code and effort. But that'd probably limit its use as a tagging system.

[Kayhos]

If a pet gets caged, is it okay if notes are lost? Or should they return when the pet is relearned?

I'd prefer if the notes returned simply moved to the grey pet and returned when the pet was relearned, but I could live with loosing the notes when you cage the pet.

If you add a note to a pet you never owned (one of the greyed out pets at bottom of list), and you later learn the pet, should the note move to the one you just learned?

Yes, but I don't think people will instinctively add notes to greyed pets.

I'd love to make notes "species-wide" so there's one note for all three versions of the Pandaren Water Spirit. It would take 1/100th the code and effort. But that'd probably limit its use as a tagging system.

I may not see farther than my current use, but I could live with a species wide note system, especially since it would give you time to work on other features.

I'd love it if you brought back the feature that allowed the minimized window to reopen if it was left open in a previous session on the same toon or another toon.

Thanks for the awesome work man and letting us pitch in.

[Gello]

If a pet gets caged, is it okay if notes are lost? Or should they return when the pet is relearned?

I'd prefer if the notes returned simply moved to the grey pet and returned when the pet was relearned, but I could live with loosing the notes when you cage the pet.

That was my initial thought, but things get icky if you have more than one of the pet you caged. For instance if you have P/P, P/S and S/S Zandalari Kneebiters. If you have notes on the P/P version and cage it, there's no greyed out pet. It could hang onto the notes for when a P/P Kneebiter gets learned back (in case it was caged and sent to a friend for a loan instead of permanently). But what if you have two P/P Kneebiters? Shift the notes to the second P/P when the first is caged? What if the second P/P already had notes? It could hold onto the notes until a P/P without notes appears. But it'd only need to happen for new pets and the pet API is really awful at telling addons what's actually being learned. If you learn a new P/P and level it after the second P/P notes are deleted, the first P/P would inherit the notes once it reaches the level of the original first P/P Kneebiter.

And all of that is complicated by the server reassigning whole new petIDs to a player now and then. It's occured to me there is no guaranteed way for pet notes to stay attached to precisely the same pet in this event, for cases where two pets have the same stats. For teams it's not a big deal since a level 25 rare P/P Kneebiter is just as good as another 25 rare P/P Kneebiter. For attaching anything to a specific petID (this goes for notes or any tagging system) it would never be reliable. One P/P is the same as another by itself, but if one P/P is in a team and the other not, it becomes important to distinguish them.

If we don't bother tracking notes when a petID changes, it could mean someone logs in one day and all their pet notes are gone because the server picked them for a petID reassignment. So attaching notes to petIDs means handling the above or knowing that notes can disappear at any time without warning.

There's also an issue of orphaned notes accumulating over time creating junk data creep. If someone uses the note system for pets they intend to AH (like putting a price or just the fact that they want it to go to the AH), those notes would never get removed. For teams this is not a dire issue since used petIDs remain in a team even if missing, and when a user replaces the pet on the team (or deletes the team) that invalid petID is released from the sanctuary that stores all invalid petIDs and their stats. The junk would accumulate in the tables for the AH'ed pets and also in the sanctuary with all the stats.

Aside: the "sanctuary" system is how Rematch handles server total petID reassignments or players caging pets and later learning them back so they insert back into their original slot in a team. It stores the petID and stats for all pets used in a team or the leveling queue. When a petID reassignment happens or pets get caged and re-learned it looks up the stats in the sanctuary to find an identical replacement for the lost pet. This all happens behind the scenes and a user is generally never aware of these. In the beta the framework for all this was implemented very early but it's not fully fleshed-out/tested because I knew notes for petIDs would depend on this and wanted to see what infrastructure pet notes would require. Unfortunately it's proving trickier than expected.

Someone on curse recommended attaching notes to a breed instead of a specific petID or a speciesID. This has an appeal, except it'd only work if a breed addon is enabled or Rematch gets into the business of calculating breeds itself (shudder).

After all that I'm inclined to go with putting notes on a speciesID instead of a specific petID (until Blizzard can promise they'll stop doing server petID reassignments grr). It means pets can't be individually tagged, but it means notes will stay forever without risk of loss.

TL;DR: A solid/reliable system is better than an inherently buggy one, even if the solid one is not as useful as the inherently buggy one. I'll likely go with notes at the species level (a note for a Zandalari Kneebiter will appear for all Zandalari Kneebiters) instead of the petID level.

[Kayhos]

Wow, I wasn't expecting an elaborate response like this. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate on your thinking proccess.

Imo, the best return on investment will be with the speciesID-attached notes. The fact that the note system will be less powerful but more robust will end up generating less support tickets. Also a petID-attached note would be wonky at best with all the different use cases, if blizzard promises to keep the petIDs, I'm pretty sure it would be worth it to revisit that issue.

If someone wants to add notes for multiple pets, they can always give them names and and put all the notes with the names in the breed note.

[Gello]

Update just posted has pet notes at the species level. I'll revisit it later perhaps. A disproportionate amount of time is spent on this one feature and it's time to move on to more important things.

If any are curious, the current itinerary is:
- Add an option to have notes/preferences carry over with a Save As (and Edit Team when it's made to overwrite an existing team).
- Hook up/test the remaining parts of the sanctuary system to recognize returning pets.
- Custom team sort within a tab.
- Post beta version on curse.
- Team sharing.
- Go through minor features of old version and add to new version if they apply.
- Finishing touches, more thorough savedvar testing.

So it looks like beta will be a few more weeks still. I had banked too much on getting a lot done during my week off last week.

[Khorah]

Just wanted to say a quick Thanks to you Gello for all the hard work!!

[Skylol]

First of all, thank you for this amazing addon - i really appreciate the hard work you've put into this

Are you planing on adding the option to make teams with less then 3 pets like in PetBattleTeams?

[Jerebear]

First of all, thank you for this amazing addon - i really appreciate the hard work you've put into this

Are you planing on adding the option to make teams with less then 3 pets like in PetBattleTeams?

The blizzard API won't allow you to empty a slot anymore, so the only thing you can do is specify a levelling slot in lieu of a regular pet slot, but it still has to load a pet into the empty slot. Even PBT is restricted to filling all the slots.

What function are you looking for out of a less than 3 pet team outside of levelling other pets?

[Gello]

I could be wrong but I think he means in PBT you can go through the motions of emptying a slot and that team will cease to try loading anything into the slot, thus someone who has carry pets all in the first slot can swap in leveling pets manually and team swaps will keep the manually-loaded pet there.

You can achieve the same effect by dragging a pet into the leveling queue, and putting the leveling pet in the slot you want to be "empty". If the queue runs out of pets, that slot will behave the same when the team is loaded: it will just leave whatever was there.

However, you may as well throw a bunch of pets you want to level into the queue. They'll all load into the leveling slot automatically. You can manually drag different leveling pets too. Or you can set preferences to have the addon more intelligently pick a leveling pet.

Unrelated:
- I've had a report of today's build (beta-12) inadvertently copying notes to other teams. I'll look into this tonight/tomorrow but in the meantime you may want to backup your WTF just in case!
- Also search for pet notes is not working (It was a major reason for notes and I forgot to add the ability lol) but it will next build.

[Skylol]

The blizzard API won't allow you to empty a slot anymore, so the only thing you can do is specify a levelling slot in lieu of a regular pet slot, but it still has to load a pet into the empty slot. Even PBT is restricted to filling all the slots.

What function are you looking for out of a less than 3 pet team outside of levelling other pets?

I just want to create teams with less than 3 pets so i know i can level a pet on X trainer but if thats not gonna happen, im completely fine without it.
Just wanted to ask since i really like that feature from PBT

[Gello]

I just want to create teams with less than 3 pets so i know i can level a pet on X trainer but if thats not gonna happen, im completely fine without it.
Just wanted to ask since i really like that feature from PBT

When you save a team with a leveling pet, the team now has less than 3 pets by that definition.

Rematch doesn't "empty" slots for carry pets, it saves "leveling slots" for carry pets.

[Jerebear]

The blizzard API won't allow you to empty a slot anymore, so the only thing you can do is specify a levelling slot in lieu of a regular pet slot, but it still has to load a pet into the empty slot. Even PBT is restricted to filling all the slots.

What function are you looking for out of a less than 3 pet team outside of levelling other pets?

I just want to create teams with less than 3 pets so i know i can level a pet on X trainer but if thats not gonna happen, im completely fine without it.
Just wanted to ask since i really like that feature from PBT

Gello covered this, but just wanted to chime in as well. Rematch definitely has the feature to do levelling pets. It's actually had that feature for a long time. It's just a different mentality than PBT. Here is a screen capture from the Beta version of rematch. If you need instructions for the non beta version, let us know:



I just right clicked in the pet slot there where the pop up menu is. If you turn it into a levelling slot, it will get a gold border around the pet like the image shows for the 2nd pet slot.

The team you see featured in my image is:

Nexus Whelpling
<levelling pet>
Jademist dancer

Rematch will auto fill the levelling pet slot with a pet from the queue. The one you see pictured was my top most pet in the queue.

Hope that helps!


EDIT: If you look a teams you create with levellling slots they will look like this (sorry if the image gets chopped off). See the blue arrows in the teams? Those are the levelling slots:

[Aurae]

I just want to create teams with less than 3 pets so i know i can level a pet on X trainer but if thats not gonna happen, im completely fine without it.
Just wanted to ask since i really like that feature from PBT

I also enjoyed that feature from PBT, made it easier for me to see which slot I used for my leveling pet. When I figured out I could not do that with Rematch after adjusting a few teams (once I got the correct pet/pet breed), I went into the .lua and edited the leveling slot pet out of the team. So, that is something you could consider.

In my case, it was somewhat needed because I have shared my .lua with friends/guildies. Makes it much easier for them to see where a leveling pet goes when they are not wholly familiar with Rematch. Also makes the explanations easier when they have my notes to reference.

[Gello]

I just want to create teams with less than 3 pets so i know i can level a pet on X trainer but if thats not gonna happen, im completely fine without it.
Just wanted to ask since i really like that feature from PBT

I also enjoyed that feature from PBT, made it easier for me to see which slot I used for my leveling pet. When I figured out I could not do that with Rematch after adjusting a few teams (once I got the correct pet/pet breed), I went into the .lua and edited the leveling slot pet out of the team. So, that is something you could consider.

In my case, it was somewhat needed because I have shared my .lua with friends/guildies. Makes it much easier for them to see where a leveling pet goes when they are not wholly familiar with Rematch. Also makes the explanations easier when they have my notes to reference.

If you don't mind taking the time can you explain more how you use Rematch to level pets? I'm especially curious about what you do when going from one tamer to another, especially if the carry slot is in a different position for one team than it is another. I assume you don't use the queue at all, or do you?

Or is the "easier for me to see which slot" about the blue leveling icon being harder to see than the red question mark?

Perhaps some tweaks can be made to make it easier. Or some ways to make the system easier to understand. Or some insight to what's confusing.

[Aurae]

When I initially started using Rematch (when PBT broke after a patch and you offered a fix to those users), I imported my teams from PBT. I was not familiar with the "leveling pet" slot designation then. For the time, it was more of what I was used to seeing.

As far as the leveling queue, I will generally pop X amount of my level 20+ pets in there and run around the Frostfire Ridge area for a little while until those pets are leveled out. Kind of like an incentive to clear the queue - I get to stop battling. Lol.
For tamer battles, I drag and drop pets, since I swap them out at each tamer. It is just habit more than anything now, due to having used PBT for as long as I did.

I do not think there is anything wrong with your system at all. The leveling icon looks fine, and certainly stands out in the teams. It is definitely "prettier" than the red question mark.

[Aranesh]

Hey! I don't want to interrupt the conversation but just wanted to express a huge thanks to you Gello, not just for the amazing addon (that of course, too), but that you are here answering every question and providing in-depth details about the way rematch works and the logic you put behind, that's amazing.
I'll head on to testing as well and will post again if I find anything other worth mentioning. For now just: Thanks!!