The MacroPolicebox: Second Regeneration (D&D 4E Framework)

Framework(s) for D&D 4e, including Veggiesama's.

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wolph42
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Re: The MacroPolicebox: Second Regeneration (D&D 4E Framework)

Post by wolph42 »

good to hear it worked so well. Interestingly enough a GM in one of my groups codes himself as well and to my surprise he introduced both overlay and sound effects in his campaign file (rain overlay and sound with thunder and a booming voice of the monster) was huge fun.

Anyhoot, its good to hear that it works. I've had bad experiences in the past, but this might help getting stuff back to work.

Thanks for the update!

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StarMan
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436/437

Post by StarMan »

Ever since reading your post I have been wondering what overlays are and have finally just gotten around to trying the code at http://lmwcs.com/rptools/wiki/Category:Overlay_Function . Very cool! I might follow in your GM's footsteps but I don't have a thunder effect yet. I do have a monster death moan effect and you can add your own now (see below). The main advantage to displaying messages on the map is I can now put the more important ones there instead of telling my players to "look at the Chat quick before it scrolls up too much!" or at a frame. I am scared to go beyond static text (because I hear too much HTML can have a performance impact) but may dip my toe in that pool later.

SLs 436 and 437 have been released with improved sound support. The big news is you can now use FL->Add Skill Track to add menu items to the Cedric's Jam feature. This is explained at the bottom of http://starman.advancedfreeweb.ga/index.php/pg . Another new cool feature was requested my group. There is a new effect duration called ReactionAttack. An effect with this duration will end just after the token's defence property is hit or missed.

A few minor import bug fixes round out the releases. Enjoy ...
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StarMan
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What are the odds of this timing?!?!

Post by StarMan »

wolph42 wrote:
Wed Jun 17, 2020 3:15 am
has it been so long already....

Congratz!
Believe it or not, I got a coincidental birthday present a couple days ago in the form of this e-mail from my hosting provider:
Hosting Warning wrote:Hello Valued Customer,

This mail is to inform you that your site with the username adga_25076263 has utilised over 50% of its daily resource limits.

This limit is reset every day.

The resources that your site has used over 50% on is :

ep warning


You can log into your cpanel with the username adga_25076263 and in here click on 'Account Statistics' in here there are graphs that show your daily resource usage.

The free plan is a great place to get your site online and making profit, however it does have limited resources available to it, you would need to optimize your script(s) to reduce usage, OR upgrade to a premium plan.

Premium plans have a MUCH higher resource allocation, along with the cPanel panel unlimited disk space, and much much more. For more information please visit https://ifastnet.com/portal/

Once the premium hosting account has been purchased please create a support ticket asking for your free hosting account to be migrated to the premium hosting account and we will do the rest.

Regards
I scratched my head for a second or two wondering what it meant. It then dawned on me that they are upset that my http://starman.advancedfreeweb.ga is getting too much traffic!!! How cool is that? Yes, there has been an influx of new users due to the pandemic and my download page is getting more hits ... but I didn't think it was THIS popular! If I keep getting new users the MPB might get up to 10% as famous as your "Bag of Tricks" ... if I'm lucky! :lol:
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StarMan
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438/439/Memory issue

Post by StarMan »

Actually Wolph my Thursday group (6 guys including myself) are having memory problems with 1.7. My brother allocated a 3Gb heap and maxed that out in the first hour eventually crashing about an hour or later. When he came back I told him to regularly double-click the green bar in the lower right corner. He was still angry and blamed the increased usage on the MPB's new sound and overlay features. Other players were filling up too but none crashed AFAIK.

Has your group had any such issues? My framework runs fine but we don't dare go lower than a 12Mb stack size. Only a few macros need it to be that big as most run fine with 8Mb. One of my players was on the MT Discord server and they told him it is not uncommon to use 16Mb ... which sounds very excessive to me. I know you did some articles on stack size so thought I would ask. If you want me to move this question to the Macros forum then that's fine by me. Just thought I would ask you first since your group is using sound too.

I have always strived to make my code as lean and mean as possible. I do have a local option to turn off sound but I read a post from Azhrei many years ago saying "Don't turn things off. Let us know what's wrong so we can fix it.". I don't declare variables if their values will only be used once and I try to use many smaller macros in place of one big one to avoid overflowing the stack.

The new SL pair goes a long way to firming up the afore-mentioned sound (complete with welcome message and TARDIS droning sound when opening the campaign!) and overlay support. The new Define Sound Effect feature in Frankenstein's Lab replaces Add Skill Track for this purpose and lets you set effects for triggers. Just say OK to the Lib and macro prompts. It doesn't matter which ones you select as these will be ignored. I think a better way to go would be to roll the Define Sound Effect code into the Trigger Definitions feature so I can eliminate those prompts from that branch of the workflow. Sound is now distributed to ALL players and I am working on doing the same for overlays. Enjoy!
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440-442/New site!

Post by StarMan »

Greetings fellow MPBers! It is time once again to go to a new site. The explanation can be found here: http://macropolicebox.ihostfull.com/ind ... r-recovery . Kindly register there and download SL 442. BTW I did try doing some searches on this site for others with 1.7 memory issues but found nothing definitive. I guess we will just need to bite the bullet and raise our heap size to 5G or something even more ridiculous as circumstances dictate.

SL 440 makes a few sound enhancements and introduces a more efficient (and hopefully just as effective as the outgoing Clean CN macro) way of clearing dead effects. 441 does a bit more with overlays and makes sound effect management a little smoother. 442 continues that theme but also offers more enhancements. dnd4e to Notes now prompts for including feats and traits, Shift will now accept an A={limit} parm as max square limit and Restore Frames now displays the last run macro in a separate frame. Enjoy ...
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DragonFlo
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Re: The MacroPolicebox: Second Regeneration (D&D 4E Framework)

Post by DragonFlo »

Hi,
I'm fairly new to rptools and macros, but am trying to set it all up to run some campaigns with my kids as part of lockdown fun.
I've come across the MPB site and have registered, keen to download and install the awesome tools developed - but there seem to be some site issues...browser says the site can't provide a secure connection, I have tried with Brave and Firefox.
I came across some posts indicating difficulties setting up a new CMS there...is this why? And in the interim, is there another way to access the code for download and install?

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StarMan
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443/444

Post by StarMan »

Congrats on being the very first registrant on my new site, DragonFlo! I hope to see more in August and beyond. My profuse apologies to those who have not been able to do so until now. I only realized yesterday that the new version of Joomla web software I use requires this option to be explicitly set whereas the last one did not. As of today us Torontonians may once again sit down in restaurants but I too hope this pandemic business will end soon. Until then I hope the MPB helps pass the time enjoyably.

Yes I too noticed the security notice atop Safari which is the browser of choice for us OS X users. I just ignore this and logon at the top right which is the new location of that form. I have also activated your account on the assumption you never got the confirmation e-mail to do so. Did you check your spam folder in your e-mail account? That happens sometimes. Please read the Players' Guide and watch the training videos while I transfer the rest of the documentation to the new site. No, I don't have a timeline for this as it will be a HUGE job. Try downloading SL 444 using the "The Code" link on the left-hand side and don't hesitate to post here if you have any other questions.

SL 443 continues to streamline the new overlay and sound-handling features by introducing the Toggle Media Unsubscribe facility which allows you to opt out of these features. At the same time, I noticed not all players were getting some of the handouts so this has been mostly fixed AFAIK. The Polymorph macro will now give you the option to change names assuming no effects are registered on the token in question. With respect to effect removals, a few bugs have been fixed. SL 444 was released this morning expanding upon and solidifying many of these same concepts. Enjoy!
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wolph42
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Re: 438/439/Memory issue

Post by wolph42 »

StarMan wrote:
Sat Jul 04, 2020 11:15 am
Actually Wolph my Thursday group (6 guys including myself) are having memory problems with 1.7. My brother allocated a 3Gb heap and maxed that out in the first hour eventually crashing about an hour or later. When he came back I told him to regularly double-click the green bar in the lower right corner. He was still angry and blamed the increased usage on the MPB's new sound and overlay features. Other players were filling up too but none crashed AFAIK.

Has your group had any such issues? My framework runs fine but we don't dare go lower than a 12Mb stack size. Only a few macros need it to be that big as most run fine with 8Mb. One of my players was on the MT Discord server and they told him it is not uncommon to use 16Mb ... which sounds very excessive to me. I know you did some articles on stack size so thought I would ask. If you want me to move this question to the Macros forum then that's fine by me. Just thought I would ask you first since your group is using sound too.
my group recently didnt play cause some of them got X instead of images, we've been troubleshooting for 2 hours and then gave up. Unfortunately we've not played since (as this was the last game before the holidays). We usually don't have crashes and this was the first actual mishap in the group. it mainly had to do with too many too heavy assets (images).

The other dm in our group has recently started experimenting with weather overlay and sounds, that was a fun session and nothing 'crashy' happened.

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StarMan
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Re: 438/439/Memory issue

Post by StarMan »

Thanks for getting back to me, Wolph. I don't think anybody crashed last night as we have all raised our heap and stack sizes. As such, memory isn't a big issue as we are remembering to click the green usage bar as I described. Unfortunately performance is still a big problem as things are running very slowly. We were averaging one round per hour which is crazy even though our party is at 19th level. Sure the MPB tracks a lot of properties and states but I don't remember this much trouble with MT 1.5.x.
wolph42 wrote:
Fri Jul 31, 2020 10:04 am
my group recently didnt play cause some of them got X instead of images, we've been troubleshooting for 2 hours and then gave up.
We had that happen too. Did you use the Import Map feature? It sometimes happens when you do that. Maybe not all assets are being included in the exported map? A far more common cause is the use of PNGs. PNGs are evil. Don't use them! :cry: Using JPEGs for tokens has worked 100% of the time for us with nary a red X to be seen.
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Login troubles

Post by StarMan »

It was brought to my attention that the new site was giving a "ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR" error during login attempts. I deleted and re-added the Login Form module in Joomla and got the following confirmation from a user:
Xelciu wrote:Now it works! Thanks for fixing it on such a short notice and of course big thanks for all the dedicated work on the framework over the years (used it about 5 years ago and you're still running, impressive).
This time I'm gonna use it to display information on a big screen tv during live sessions, hopefully you can add some kind of chess grid references in map tools.

Keep up the good work and best of luck!

PS: I've tested on Opera/Chrome and Firefox
Thanks Xelciu! I don't have Opera installed so good to know it works there too. I don't know what you mean by "chess grid references" but will say you should have the ONE_ONE_ONE movement metric set and use the "Adjust Grid" (use "Show Grid" if you still want to see the lines) features of MapTool. Also please post here with your group's details if you have performance problems like the ones described in my posts above. Happy 4e-ing to you! :)

I believe I have fixed the e-mail issues so henceforth new registrants should now get the verification e-mail to activate their accounts. Even of they don't, I will continue doing it manually on the back end.

I will finish with the good news that only the Programmer's Reference needs to now be transferred over from the old site. The rest of the documentation is complete except for the Release Notes of the first 400 SLs. Of course, that is a low priority as even I don't look at those anymore.
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wolph42
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Re: The MacroPolicebox: Second Regeneration (D&D 4E Framework)

Post by wolph42 »

it was indeed an imported map (and also other non imported maps) and the map did contain pngs, but then EVERY (player) token is a png so... we haven't really narrowed it down however to the actual cause, but there were other causes not helping, e.g had the repository setup wrong (which I fixed during those 2 hours), assets were too heavy, player had crappy internet, but then still with some simple test maps he still got X's so something was really screwed...

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StarMan
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Re: The MacroPolicebox: Second Regeneration (D&D 4E Framework)

Post by StarMan »

For us, my brother created his cmpgn and (of course) everything looked fine to him locally. He then started his server and we all connected like usual. For us clients, we all told him ONE map had the red Xs (the imported one) but the rest were fine. I believe he used PNGs ONLY (because he likes the fact the background can be made transparent). I told him to load his PNGs for that one map into a graphics program and save them as JPGs. He then dragged these onto that map and ran the MPB's Polymorph macro to convert the X tokens to the dragged in equivalents. This worked. Doing the same with PNGs (our first experiment) did NOT work.

What do you mean by "assets were too heavy" and "crappy internet"? How big are the PNGs you are using? We try to keep ours under 100Kb each. What happened in the asset transfer window? It shouldn't matter if he is trying to load the cmpgn locally on his own machine. Even online, my own connection is 30Mbps down and 5 up according to speedtest.net which is kind of slow compared to other numbers I'm seeing around.

I think this is a bug in MapTool. Graphics file format should be transparent to the user. Are you using TokenTool? I personally don't because I just drag my JPEGs onto the Token layer from my desktop. What should happen is TokenTool reads your graphics file and then outputs a token that is guaranteed compatible with MT regardless of the original format (because it is converting the graphics data into native MY data) ... right?
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Re: The MacroPolicebox: Second Regeneration (D&D 4E Framework)

Post by wolph42 »

with crappy internet I mean just that, his connection was crap, but i wasnt there so cant give any specifics, IRC he was playing over wifi, not a good idea for me I've noticed, but for others that works fine.

the pngs were all kinds of sizes some pretty big, point was that *other* maps *also* gave this issue, which was really weird, but not as bad as the imported one. The other thing was that another player could see everything...go figure...

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Re: The MacroPolicebox: Second Regeneration (D&D 4E Framework)

Post by DragonFlo »

@StarMan
Thanks for all the work you have done.
I have tried to read through your instructions and also to watch your videos.
I am really struggling, though, to import monsters from the web compendium. I've been trying to get the goblin to register: http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=monster665
As the f4 function key does not work, I use the Write SPT function workaround, then paste the text into the notes.
I get rid of semi-colons, but it never seems to import correctly, and the goblin ends up without any attack functions or special powers. There seems to be no way to fix this as the macros don't permit rebuilding these powers.
I have lost hours (days) trying to figure this out, but am at a loss. :cry: Please help?

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