Group battle, my eyes can't keep up

Darkenstar

So I am still new, and am only level 60 and still learning BM (my first and only class).  so I can't offer much in the way of PKing, but I do like going along on Mhaldorian raids, and shrine defilements, etc.  In these settings, I'm following along, ready to battle any resistance that enters the room, anticipating, waiting, ready..... and then boom, an enemy enters, and the text on my screen goes, "WHOOOOSH" because of all the action going on.  I helpless hit "drawslash, drawslash!!" not knowing if I'm hitting someone, nothing, or even a citymate, until finally "you have been slain".  
I am using the Nexus client (I use a computer at work that doesn't allow downloads of programs/applications so I have to use the IRE supplied internet client).   Is this what everyone experiences?  I really don't think theres any human being that can keep up with the text flying by.   Yet somehow you all are reacting and killing each other, while I just see jumbles of words flying by.   As you can imagine, this is not so enjoyable.  Am I doing something wrong? 

Atalkez

Highlighters all over the place.

Delete lines that aren’t useful.

Tunnel vision in Vision (Survival? Idr).

Mainly it’s getting used to seeing the spammy stuff, and recognizing certain blocks of texts instead of trying to see everything.

Sobriquet

Highlights, that and using the client scripting ability to remove lines you don't need. I don't use the Nexus client, but having chat in a different window helps a lot for party calls.

15yrs I've been playing this and I still get lost in group combat spam, but with highlights you will learn what you need to pick out and what you need to ignore

Vadimuses

Lots of triggers to delete useless lines, lots of triggers to rewrite lines into something simpler, and a fast client like Mudlet to handle it all.

Solnir

90% of my lines in group are deleted and replaced with a simple highlight. I don't see any attacks or party calls from teammates, just highlights like "Target hit with <affliction>" in bright colours. It helps the spam, but large groups are still gunna be spammy... you get more used to it over time.

Darkenstar

Is there a good resource or can anyone direct me on how to delete stuff?  and how to change highliter settings?  I have some highlighter action already, like tells, denizens speaking, but thats about it.

Solnir

http://nexus.ironrealms.com/Main_Page
That should help!

Aralaya

Again not a Nexus user, but I can't stress enough how important highlights are.

When your entire strategy hinges on seeing one line while they're zooming buy at 20 miles an hour, you're gonna want a highlight. 

Make the line a crazy color or what I do is echo a box (thanks svo) like:

*********************
IMPORTANT THING|
*********************

Helps a ton

Tysandr

The most important tip here is deletion of unimportant lines.

Another handy tip:

Make a toggle for your own version of BATTLEFOCUS

When active,

 any line with your active target gets highlighted in maroon/red
 any line with 'you' or 'your' gets highlighted in brown/gold
 // here's the important bit
 every line gets dimmed to a darker grey, excepting the highlighting of player names

What you end up with is 3 bands of colors:
 RED for what you are doing to your enemy
 GOLD for what is happening to you
 NAMES highlighted so you can still see interactions between individual players if you really want to, and more importantly, you can still approximate the number of interactions on any one player (hopefully)

Many other tricks, but for visibility, those are probably the biggest bang for your buck.

Aralaya

Hey uh, that's actually a pretty good idea, can someone tell me how to do that

Antonius

@Aralaya Here's one way to do it. Start off with a perl regex trigger that just has "^" (without the double quotes) as the pattern; that will match the beginning of a line, so it will match every single line of output from the game. Then inside the code, you need to check a few things to figure out what colour it should be:

selectCurrentLine() -- select the current line so we can change its colour
if string.find(line, target) then
    fg("colour for things happening to your target") -- or setFgColor(red, green, blue) if you want to define a colour using RGB values rather than using a standard Mudlet colour
elseif string.find(line, "you") then
    fg("colour for things happening to you") -- or setFgColor(red, green, blue) if you want to define a colour using RGB values rather than using a standard Mudlet colour
else
    fg("colour for everything else") -- or setFgColor(red, green, blue) if you want to define a colour using RGB values rather than using a standard Mudlet colour
end
resetFormat()
moveCursorEnd()

Aralaya

@Antonius sorry for super late reply, been dealing with tiny humans (cousins, for those who might be concerned) + terrible internet but thanks!

Torinn

I'm curious what sorts of lines people gag.  What are some that you all delete and why?

Armali

I GAG NOTHING.

(jk, I gag SETALIAS, but that's it)

Kythra

Your queues are already empty.
You have no amnesia.
You are not fallen or kneeling.
[System]:
There are no venoms on that item at present.
You are paralysed and unable to do that.
Your state of paralysis prevents you from doing that.
Frustratingly, your body won't respond to your call to action.
You hold no "gold".
I see no "gold" to take.
You hold no "sovereigns". 
You are paralysed and cannot do that.
Paralysed as you are, your body is not able to pick up anything.
I see no "body" to take.
You are too stunned to be able to do anything.
You are too tangled up to do that.
You cannot do that because both of your arms must be whole and unbound.
You have not yet recovered from your last invocation, wyrm.
You carefully wipe the venoms from your claws.
You must regain balance first.

Solnir

I gag ^\(.*\): Torinn.*$

Frederich

You're gagging on something from Torinn.

Kriemhilde

What I've taken to doing is looking at the final parts of certain affliction, skills, actions, attacks, defenses, etc. so I can quickly just skim over the right side of the mass of flying text and pick out key events but that isn't as good as highlighting. Highlights are your friend for this sort of stuff, I don't think something else will work quite as well at picking out what's happening when there's that much text flying that fast.  

Kiet

CONFIG UNIVERSALAFFLICTIONMESSAGES ON lets you gag a whole lot of attacks if you need.

This is especially important with the recent tendency in having like 5+ line attacks.

Torinn

Interesting, what does that config do, exactly?

Nazihk

Torinn said:

Interesting, what does that config do, exactly?

Gives you messages like this when you get afflictions:

Issam lets the grace of his voice shine forth with a Scarlattan cantata at you.
Lightning-quick, Issam jabs you with a simple silver rapier.
<b>You have been afflicted with paralysis.</b>
A prickly stinging overcomes your body, fading away into numbness.
The songblessing unleashes a strident note.

You eat a bloodroot leaf.
Your muscles unlock; you are no longer paralysed.
<b>You have cured the paralysis affliction.</b>

Makes it a lot easier to trigger affliction shit because two lines will match every affliction in the game.

Tysandr

Except god-damned 'this toxin confuses you'

Prythe

Antonius said:

@Aralaya Here's one way to do it. Start off with a perl regex trigger that just has "^" (without the double quotes) as the pattern; that will match the beginning of a line, so it will match every single line of output from the game. Then inside the code, you need to check a few things to figure out what colour it should be:

selectCurrentLine() -- select the current line so we can change its colour
if string.find(line, target) then
    fg("colour for things happening to your target") -- or setFgColor(red, green, blue) if you want to define a colour using RGB values rather than using a standard Mudlet colour
elseif string.find(line, "you") then
    fg("colour for things happening to you") -- or setFgColor(red, green, blue) if you want to define a colour using RGB values rather than using a standard Mudlet colour
else
    fg("colour for everything else") -- or setFgColor(red, green, blue) if you want to define a colour using RGB values rather than using a standard Mudlet colour
end
resetFormat()
moveCursorEnd()

So this? 

selectCurrentLine() -- select the current line so we can change its colour

if string.find(line, target) then

    setFgColor(green)

elseif string.find(line, "you") then

    setFgColor(red)

else

    setFgColor(blue)

end

resetFormat()

moveCursorEnd()

Antonius

Not quite. A colour can be defined using individual values (between 0 and 255) that say how much red, green and blue make up the colour. That's when you'd use setFgColor(), and you'd need to specify all three values so it knows what colour you want. If you just want the default red, it's 255 red (the maximum amount of red), and 0 green and blue (no green or blue mixed in), so it would be setFgColor(255, 0, 0). The default green would be setFgColor(0, 255, 0) and default blue would be setFgColor(0, 0, 255). You can use an online colour picker to choose colours. Personally I use http://colorpicker.net/

If you're just going to specify a standard colour (like red, green or blue) then it's easier to use the fg function, and pass the name as a string (e.g. fg("red"), fg("green"), fg("blue")).

Prythe

Antonius said:

If you're just going to specify a standard colour (like red, green or blue) then it's easier to use the fg function, and pass the name as a string (e.g. fg("red"), fg("green"), fg("blue")).

Thank you!

I want to get it working first, then I'll tweak the color scheme!

Torinn

I'm just curious what people consider "unimportant lines".  Like wielding/unwielding messages?

Kogan

Torinn said:

I'm just curious what people consider "unimportant lines".  Like wielding/unwielding messages?

Yeah I gag the you are already wielding bit since I wield every eqbal unless in ret. I also gag me wielding weapons I use commonly as my class. You'll get a line if you can't wield due to arms or whatever so it's never caused me any problems.

Nylian

I don't gag much in the way of group combat, but I only highlight things like herb eats and salves and such for my current target.  Then I get this huge flash when my target dies so I know to change my target.

Some people trigger changing their target based on party calls, which you might consider doing while you're learning.

Except for Armali (:P) nobody actually READS what's going on during the big fights.