Addon Rematch

[Jerebear]

I never quite understood the Top Pet gets different rules sorting.

If you sell a lot of level 25 pets it is useful. For example, I needed some quick cash and I had a level 1 anub idol and a level 25 idol. I sold the level 25 so I could get the gold and then I needed to go quickly level the level 1 idol up. Well I didn't want to clear my queue of pets that I normally level for myself and my OCD doesn't like the unsorted queue, so I deselected full sort and made the level 1 anub idol the top pet and was able to level it without wiping my queue.

I do this sort of thing a lot.

That said, I could get used to using the unsorted queue instead.

[Buruan]

Yeah makes sense.
But if i understand correctly that would be covered by the second option where you can drag and drop pets into their positions.

Simply drag the Level 1 'nub to the top spot and level him up.

[Jerebear]

Yeah makes sense.
But if i understand correctly that would be covered by the second option where you can drag and drop pets into their positions.

Simply drag the Level 1 'nub to the top spot and level him up.

Indeed. I tend to use double click vs dragging, but I assume that will still work as well.

[Jerebear]

Gello,

Another possible reason to move to NPC ID based team selection vs name:
Erris the Collector (and Kura) has multiple NPC ID's each associated with a different team for that day:
http://www.wowhead.com/npc=91014/erris-the-collector#comments:id=2122420

Not that the teams are difficult to beat on the fly.

[Gello]

Yeah the benefit of indexing by NpcID makes me regret not doing it from the start. But it will definitely get done. After this update, and perhaps one other to deal with how caged pets are handled (may work on that for this update too), reworking how teams are stored is the next plan. Actually I've recently updated the "future plans" for the addon too:

Short term:

• Rework how caged pets are dealt with: wait for original to return instead of potentially subtituting a lesser copy.
• Rework how teams are organized internally. (Specifically: index either by npcID or by name, and change ordered list to unordered table)
• Prompt to save after a successful battle with a non-wild pet if a team is not saved for the npcID you just fought (like challenge posts)
• A method of tagging pets, owned or not, with custom tags.
• Mark a team tab to appear when minimap button right-clicked.

Mid term:

• Rework UI:
  • See about making the UI less "dense".
  • The small square buttons could afford to be bigger.
  • An alternate view of current pets that stacks them vertically.
• Update sharing teams:
  • Include notes and preferences in Import/Export/Send/Receive of teams.
  • Battle.net support for sharing teams.
  • Mass Export/Import of teams.
• A "favorite filters" system.
• Add right-click menus to the pets on the team cards.

Long term:

• Rework the pet card to get more information on the card, such as breeds owned.
• Rematch journal companion: maybe throw in the towel and integrate Rematch into the journal with a separate optional module.
• Understudy pet slot on the pet card for loading an alternate pet if that pet is dead or injured.
• Possibly some method of choosing alternate teams if the saved team has dead or injured pets.

[Jerebear]

For that last item on the long term list (and also the discussion based off of my previous post). If you take your name indexed list, and abstract it out as a list item itself in a list indexed by NPC IDs, then if a pet on the current team was missing or dead, you go to the NPC ID indexed list for your NPCID, and then go to the next element in the Name indexed list. Something like:

NPCID=0
=>Team Name 1
===>stuff
===>stuff
=>Team Name 2
===>stuff
===>Stuff
NPCID=1
=>Team Name 1
===>Stuff
===>Stuff
=>Team Name 2
===>Stuff
===>

That way, if you are fighting NPCID=0 and Team Name 1 is dead, you just move down the "sub list" to Team Name 2 and try that. You may or may not need to enforce Unique names depending on your implementation. If you needed to maintain team priority (like which team is always the first to load, 2nd to load, etc.) you could just prepend a numerical text string to the team name under the hood...something easy to split so you could pull the original name back out for Display purposes: "00000_<user specified team name 1>", "00001_<user specified team name 2>", etc. That way the priority team is always the first in the list. I don't know lua well enough to know how hard or easy it is.

Another thought...Maybe longterm. A lot of people are getting Rematch via word of mouth (I know I toss a blurb in there whenever I can). I am willing to bet not all of them go through the long page of features and notes like I do (I know what to scan through for). Maybe at some point, add in a help system or tutorial? Or make a video and have a tutorial button pop up a copiable link to it. Whatever is easier to manage once you have Rematch feature stable the way you like.

[Gello]

Absolutely. Thanks for bringing it up. It's definitely something to keep in mind as teams are organized, both internally and in the UI.

In the back of my mind I've been thinking that you could have two teams named the same when one of them is indexed by npcID, so Erris the Collector in white and Erris the Collector in gold. It could be made to check if the white team has any dead or injured pets, and if so to check if there's a gold team with the same name and load that instead. But a big problem there is a gold team named "Lorewalker Cho" will react to all 50+ copies of him in Pandaria. And it's not guaranteed that you'll have teams named after their targets (like the challenge posts). So sort of grouping like you mention will be better. I'm currently working to make teams draggable to help make sorting them within a tab easier. Perhaps later add the ability to drag a team onto another and prompt whether you want it as a backup team. The primary team will be indexed by npcID, the backup teams can be indexed by its name with an npcID still in the team for reaction purposes. In the UI they can list indented beneath their primary team and you can collapse/expand the view. That's been suggested before in this thread and I kinda said it was an incredible amount of UI work. But with draggable teams it becomes much more of a reality.

And I agree some form of help or tutorial system would be nice. Probably after the UI rework. I'll think on that too.

[Buruan]

Gello, cant thank you enough for this addon, and for being active in the community and sharing your plans.

A cool feature for me would be adding a minimum level for certain teams.
For example when I am leveling in Vale i can run a level 1 carry with my "Level Aquatics" team, but for the icespine leveling around garrison I need level 3-4 pets.
It would be great to not have to change my entire queue every time, but just tell the addon "When my Icespine team is loaded, cut every pet smaller than level 5 from the queue", now when I load the aquatic team, start at level 1 again.

[Jerebear]

Gello, cant thank you enough for this addon, and for being active in the community and sharing your plans.

A cool feature for me would be adding a minimum level for certain teams.
For example when I am leveling in Vale i can run a level 1 carry with my "Level Aquatics" team, but for the icespine leveling around garrison I need level 3-4 pets.
It would be great to not have to change my entire queue every time, but just tell the addon "When my Icespine team is loaded, cut every pet smaller than level 5 from the queue", now when I load the aquatic team, start at level 1 again.

The latest version has:
Minimum Health (actually better than min level)
Maximum Level

available as team settings. Right click a team and select "Levelling Preferences" for more info.

[Gello]

Yeah as Jerebear said, right-click a team and choose 'Leveling Preferences'.

You can even mark it now to expect a type of damage. So if you set 250 minimum health with beast damage expected, it will skip critters with less than 375 health (since they take +50% from beast attacks) and it will lower minimum health to 166 for flying pets (since they take -33% from beast attacks).

[Buruan]

Whadda ya know.
Way ahead of me it seems
Thanks again, this is exactly what I needed.

[Ril]

Maybe a kinda silly question but this bugs me.. Since garrisons display the favourite pets, I'd like to make different, themed and above all saveable sets of favourites. For instance, I'd like to swap quickly between a teldrassile theme, an undead theme, an elemental theme, dragonkin... you get it.
I've seen this idea floating around on the Warcraftpets forums now and then and think that it is an absolute necessity . Would it be possible to add this sort of functionality to Rematch?

[Rendigar]

Maybe a kinda silly question but this bugs me.. Since garrisons display the favourite pets, I'd like to make different, themed and above all saveable sets of favourites. For instance, I'd like to swap quickly between a teldrassile theme, an undead theme, an elemental theme, dragonkin... you get it.
I've seen this idea floating around on the Warcraftpets forums now and then and think that it is an absolute necessity . Would it be possible to add this sort of functionality to Rematch?

Not that I can speak for Gello, but a mass "favorites" changing function has pretty much nothing to do with what this add-on is for. That's really something that needs to be it's own add-on or a module for something like Altoholic. Don't get me wrong, I bet lots of people would LOVE it, but for my own self I'd much rather have Gello working on things to make the battle-teams components work with his list of "future changes".

[Gello]

It's not totally off the table. I would like to more rigidly define the scope. Right now it's roughly defined as a pet journal alternative to handle pets and teams. This would probably fall in the scope since it's journal-like enough.

One bullet in the future plans listed above is "A method of tagging pets, owned or not, with custom tags." I think the most flexible way to do this is be able to add notes for pets, just like you can for teams. In these notes you can add tags like #teldrassil #undead or whatever, and you can search for those tags. This would allow grouping pets into any arbitrary grouping a user wants by searching for them. (You can do this to teams now if you wanted. Team searches go through notes also.) It would have minimal impact on those who don't want the feature, it would use existing UI work already done, and someone who wants to come up with 80 categories and write backstories to all of their pets can have at it. Afterwards, favoriting them all would trivial enough a macro could do it. (Maybe--there are timing issues when you try to mass un/favorite a whole bunch of pets).

When I add the ability to tag/add notes pets, if you can't favorite the search results feel free to remind me about it. But I'll put it in my notes for consideration.

[Rendigar]

And this is why we <3 you, Gello. You are awesome at making everyone happy (as much as any person can) and you look good doing it. Keep on keeping on!

[Kendrah]

My gosh! Where has this addon been all my life? I love it. I just had to proclaim that.

[FuxieDK]

I can't decide where to put a notes button on the battle UI to show/hide notes for a team. So throwing this out there:



#1 would probably be missed entirely by 90% of users.
#2 looked really weird with a lone button there so I added a second that could toggle the main window.
#3 is obnoxious to me.
(#4 is default for comparison, no notes button there)

Any preferences? Or thoughts on another place?

Was this scrapped in th UI? It's hidden so well now, that I only found it by accident..
#3 is BY FAR my favorite

Also, can you increase the max length for notes, please? Some on my tactics are longer than permitted..

[Gello]

Yeah an alteration of the battle UI was scrapped for a couple reasons:
- I'd like to prevent this addon from getting involved in the battles themselves. Notes are very much a part of teams, and it's very useful to see them in battle, so I'm not totally opposed to adding a notes button, but tinkering with the battle UI feels like it crosses the line when the addon is not meant to be dealing with the battles.
- A big reason that relates to #3 the most, but once you start moving stuff around in any established default UI and adding your own stuff, like that big button, you are now and forever in perpetuity responsible for its interaction with all other addons that have been or will ever be. It's easy to say "Sorry, rematch is not compatable with <other addon that tinkers with battle UI>", but there needs to be a very compelling reason to kick other addons to the curb. And the typical way of making this more compelling is by feature creep. X addon adds Y to the battle UI but can't work with Rematch. Could you add it? Likely, but I'd rather remove the incompatability first. Since Rematch is unlikely to ever get involved in the battles themselves, I think it's more responsible to just stay out of the battle UI entirely so it never needs to worry about what other addons are doing to it.

The second point is also a major reason why the addon is standalone and not integrated into the journal. Do you use PetJournalEnhanced? You would not be able to if Rematch put its list of pets there. (Even the default list doesn't coexist with PJE. PJE hides the default and puts its own there. It just happens to look just like default with minor tweaks.) PetTracker which lots of people use, replaces the map tracking button with its own, so addons that modify that menu are kicked to the curb, including my Battle Pet Daily Tamer addon. I don't mind since PetTracker has 1000x the users Battle Pet Daily Tamer has, and I can totally sympathize with the desire to bypass the default's taint-prone drop-down menus.

But I really, really want to keep Rematch 100% compatable with all addons out there. It's friendlier to the addon ecosystem, it reduces feature creep (X addons adds Y to battle UI, can you add it? You can use X and I don't need to lift a finger!), it drastically reduces maintenance, and I don't need to support other addons or interaction with those other addons.

Sorry for rambling! All that said, I've thought of putting a little button docked to an edge of that panel, maybe along the top with the loaded team's name and the notes button. Maybe a button to the left to toggle the window too. It wouldn't shove stuff around the battle UI, but just be an attached addition.

For now there's a few ways to pull up notes once you're in battle:
- Have 'Show notes in battle' option to automatically summon them when you enter a battle.
- Bind a key to Toggle Notes.
- Pull up rematch via /rematch or key binding (or LDB if your bar remains during battle) and click the notes button in the titlebar beside the loaded teams' name.

And certainly I can increase the max limit of notes. It's 2k now, I'll bump it up to 4k for next update. Or does it need to be greater? WoW's editbox is not meant to handle extremely large amounts of text and you get some issues with 10k+.

[FuxieDK]

Spelled out like that, your reasons make perfect sense..

The note-limits I have reached, would probably be enough if it was raised by 500 (to 2500), but you never know when 3 or 4K might come in handy..

A small request for a future release...

A checkbox saying "Auto-add new pets to level-queue"..

Should be self-explanatory..

Shameless Self-bump here from my post a month ago, just to catch your attention..

[Gello]

A small request for a future release...

A checkbox saying "Auto-add new pets to level-queue"..

Should be self-explanatory..

Shameless Self-bump here from my post a month ago, just to catch your attention..

Oh yeah I meant to ask about that. Do you mean every pet? Wild pets captured when out doing the safari achievements, pets you cage and learn when you have 3+ of them, etc?