Unique Skills, Consolidated Skills, Bootstraps and Live Picks, oh my!

[ShadowChemosh]

This question is most likely for Aaron or Mathias but maybe Frumple or so may know. I will try my best to explain my issue without a wall of text.

I have a new component I created that needs to put Tags onto specific skills. To prevent the need of using a foreach loop I used a Linkage to select skills that will get set with the a Tag. Over all I found this worked great. But some of the community skills where not setup as "Unique" so I changed them to be unique. Everything seemed to work great with just about 0 CPU overhead.

The issue came up that now a gamer can no longer add the "Knowledge (Psionics)" or Autohypnosis skills to any characters. From research this seems to be related to having a "Consolidated Skill" called Psionics that bootstraps both Knowledge (Psionics) and Autohypnosis and these skills being set to "unique".

HERE is a link to the skills file for Ultimate Psionics. Encase seeing the XML makes what I am saying more clear.

My guess is that once they are bootstrapped and on the hero as Picks (caused by the consolidated skill) the Skill tab can't see them anymore. In addition this is only the case because they are Unique and not addonce?

If I change them to "addonce" then I can select them on the Skills tab again but I can't use the skill as a linkage because it's no longer unique. Seems like a catch 22...

My solution appears to be setting the skills to "addonce" and changing my component to use foreach loops instead of a linkage. Any other way to assign tags to specific skills that would be a very low cost CPU? Someway without actually having the ability to change the BaseSkill component?

Thanks

[Mathias]

While adding Pathfinder Unchained, we needed to find every unique skill in the game (other than the consolidated skills themselves) and make them all user once, so that consolidated skills could work.

Go with the foreach to add these tags.

Personally, I haven't created a linkage in the last few years - there are too many limits on how they work for them to be useful, and changing a linkage from one item to another is so much harder than changing tags - I use tags and findchild instead.

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by Mathias

Personally, I haven't created a linkage in the last few years - there are too many limits on how they work for them to be useful, and changing a linkage from one item to another is so much harder than changing tags - I use tags and findchild instead.

I am starting to see some of those limitations myself right now. I used a linkage before to link a specific class to a configurable. This allowed me to setup arrays to control a classes access to "maneuvers/stances" (think Psionic Powers array setup). For that it worked great as it was always going to be a 1 to 1 relationship.

For this thing with skills its not turning out as well. I was just trying to avoid having 15+ live picks that are each doing a foreach loop costing allot of CPU. Mostly because I have a really bad script in this one for Path of War addon that costs a ridicules amount of time/CPU. But fixing it requires breaking "every" single character made using the addon. Sigh...

I just wanted to check I was not missing something obvious....

Thanks!

[charlieluce]

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

I have a really bad script in this one for Path of War addon that costs a ridicules amount of time/CPU. But fixing it requires breaking "every" single character made using the addon. Sigh...

But once the initial pain is gone, it will be worthwhile in the long run.

[TobyFox2002]

I agree, once the initial pain is gone, it will be better for everyone. And, you could do a second file to "keep" the old version and rename it to something like: "ThingNAME - OBSOLETE" And the description could contain the instructions to add the new and correct thing. That way the user will be able to slowly correct the issue over a the next few whatever..

Now, I know something like that wont work for classes and such, but it could probably work for skills. And if you go that route it doesn't matter if you seperate all of the scripting from skills. And just leave the skills there as a "placeholder."

Now, granted I dont know your code or whats wrong, and my advice could be useless. But that is my view on it. I intend to do something similar to fix some of the Faerun and Ravenloft and Dragonlance feats that dont have the "FR", "DR" or "Rv" in front of them.

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by TobyFox2002

I agree, once the initial pain is gone, it will be better for everyone. And, you could do a second file to "keep" the old version and rename it to something like: "ThingNAME - OBSOLETE" And the description could contain the instructions to add the new and correct thing. That way the user will be able to slowly correct the issue over a the next few whatever..

This would be my "hope" but to really figure it out I need to build a Proof of Concept by itself and see if I can make some type of "merge" or move over process. "Could" work. So totally on the same page with yeah.

As charlieluce says the end result would be much better as my plan is to make a "whole" new Maneuvers tab UI section. Build it from the ground up to fully support Maneuvers/Stances and give all the ML & DC information, list amounts Known vs amounts allowed to Ready and have a better "ready" buttons/check boxes. More like you see for Spells and stuff LW did. Then could even do a In-Play (Maneuvers) section just for use when running combat. Again similar to what Spells have.

Doing the above would also mean I could cut the CPU usage down of my bad script to almost zero.

Let me give an example. My "bad" script costs in Task Performance Time a whooping 29,348. The next closest script in the list is for Attack/Damage tables and costs 1,195. Can we say that "really" needs to be fixed soon.

[TobyFox2002]

If you are going to do that, is there any way you could port it over to allow the maneuvers to interact with class customs? I mean, wouldnt it make things a whole... ton easier.

I mean there are after all primary, secondary, tertiary and quartinary abilities to add these two so its not like we dont have room. (or at least allow maneuvers and stances to be added to class customs.

I understand the two major issues/drawbacks would be... of course breaking everyone's games (but thats an issue no matter what from what I understand). And the other being it might be hard to have that interact with a new Maneuvers Tab in the editor. But the latter could be fixed by adding the values to the abValue - abValue5. Although, that might require the same thing with the linkages.. gah.

Then again I never understood why I couldnt add them to the class customs anyway. Almost anything can be added.. I've even added adjustments, skills feats and even a tracker once (i think I added the tracker), by accident.

Forgive if that question has been asked and answered.