---

Q u o t e:
Then wait for someone who is smarter and more motivated than you to release a solution. Until then, shut your noise hole.

---

Thank God there's an ignore function in the new forums. If you'd seen all your effort over the last two years writing addons thrown out the window, you might be able to appreciate the frustration we're feeling. Every solution we've tried implementing on the PTR caused a game engine error, and the .lua files you refer to give nothing but an overview of the new functionality.

So yeah, unless you're willing to step up and show that this magical make-everything-work-again addon can be written, piss off.

[edit: congrats, rogue, I've given up and cancelled my account. you win. i'm going to go play something where the ui is designed to make the gameplay simpler, not harder.]

---

Q u o t e:
Request section -- Malreth or others

If Malreth's suggestion here is the only option that has any hope of being vaguely convenient for us, then does anyone have any idea how to begin constructing such an addon? I fear my experience with the WoW API is too limited to handle that myself.

---

I was planning on playing around with this later today. Someone else may get to it before I can, however. Not that I mind, but I enjoy the challenge. :)

---

Q u o t e:
Thank God there's an ignore function in the new forums. If you'd seen all your effort over the last two...

---

Huh? Sorry. I couldn't hear you over the sounds of phat epics dropping in Naxx. Could you repeat that, please?

---

Q u o t e:
Huh? Sorry. I couldn't hear you over the sounds of phat epics dropping in Naxx. Could you repeat that, please?

---

What's your point? We're currently on the 4H Club now. What does this have to do with removing scripting engine functionality?

---

Q u o t e:
This isn't technically a bug. The key binding system simply looks for something bound to all the modifiers or none of the modifiers. You can get around this by binding something like this to 1:
/cast [modifier:shift,modifier:alt,target=player] X; [modifier:shift] X; [modifier:alt,target=player] Y; Y

---

Thanks for the reply Slouken. Do you have any ideas on how one would be able to write an Add On to duplicate the old behavior of AltSelfCast, without setting up macros for each and every action button? Basically from what I understand, AltSelfCast prehooked UseAction to set target equal to player if alt was being held, and posthooked to restore target if needed. Obviously we can't do that anymore due to the lack of access to TargetUnit and changing button behavior in combat. I know someone said it's possible for buttons to modify their behavior based on what keys are held down when they are triggered... Is there any way we could add a behavior modifier to all action buttons when the game starts up?

Changing the modifier key reading mechanism back to how it was would be such a small difference, yet would make it SO much easier on us, trying to make self-casting on alt. We could set the attributes on all of the action buttons to target=self if alt is held, without trying to do anything fancy of packing all of the possible combinations into the main action bar. Heck, the built-in feature might even be sufficient, in that case! I just hope it wouldn't take a big effort on the part of WoW developers... and/or that they see fit to do so.

Here's a question that might solve this trivially...

is IsActionSelfCastKeyDown() secure? Can we hook it?

I hope everyone sees where I'm going with this...

Edit: Actually it wouldn't work... you can't modify the return values of a secure function with hooksecurefunc, and if you replaced the function with user code, the execution path would get tainted and suddenly your action bars would be broken. If only there were a way to change the return value of IsActionSelfCastKeyDown without that happening, this would be trivial...

---

Q u o t e:

The absolute easiest way is this:
/script MainMenuBarArtFrame:SetAttribute("shift-unit*", "player")

---

Slouken can you explain how this works?

---

Q u o t e:
This isn't technically a bug.

---

As a software professional I would say that technically it's a failure of the design to meet acceptance tests. To the layman there's not much which distinguishes failed acceptance tests and bugs.

The acceptance test in this case: don't break very common non-exploitive UI modification behaviors. If that's not in the spirit of some of your requirements I would be extremely dissapointed.

You've done a great job with the enemy cast bar and scrolling combat text of incorporating the most in-demand UI features into WoW. However easy self-casting is one where I've been dissapointed.


So here's a use case:

As a soloing priest I make full use of 36 buttons; 3 bars of bindings: 12345qerfzxc, shift + the same, ctrl + the same. I use alt to self-cast.
ctrl+alt+z - pwf myself (glowing hand)
ctrl+alt+f - rank 5 renew myself (glowing hand)
ctrl+alt+2 - fear ward myself (glowing hand)
shift+alt+f - max rank renew myself (TBC - broken, picks up a button)
alt+c - pws myself (works)
f - dispel target (works)
alt+f - dispel self (works)


I have found my TBC experience disjointed and filled with a few mistake casts because of the new system. Over the course of a week I've recovered most functionality but I often forget the discontinuity and end up picking up a button by pressing shift+alt or shift+ctrl.

I think my biggest question here is this:

If I have buttons bound to:
1
Shift-1

and I press
Shift-Alt-1

How come the Binding Dispatcher sends the event to the button bound to 1 instead of Shift-1? Do I have to have it bound to Shift-Alt-1 to make it receive the event? Would all my problems be solved by adding a second binding to all of my Shift bars? Or would that eat the Alt binding? From Slouken's description I believe it would eat the alt and thus negate the self cast.

Why is it not possible to get the state of modifiers when they are used to activate a binding? Do we have to have multiple alt buttons??

Like Basic, I use self-cast bound to Alt, and have a number of spells bound to Ctrl-something. Using 3 as an example, pressing Ctrl-Alt-3 attempts to cast the spell bound to 3 (Mind Blast).

The oddball is Dispel Magic, bound to -. Alt-- does nothing, not even a glowing hand. Alt-0 through Alt-9 and Alt-= all work correctly.

I tried the SetAttribute solution posted above, but it didn't appear to do anything. I also bound the following macro to Ctrl-3 and got the same exact behavior:
/cast [modifier:alt,target=player] Power Word: Shield; Power Word: Shield

The impression I'm getting is that the binding system strips ALL modifiers, not just the relevant ones, and then drops them before the self casting functionality gets called. That would be a bug, no? If people want to get fancy and make macros that do different things per button with different modifiers, let them write their own self-casting functionality. But since apparently some effort has been put in to put this functionality in the base UI, why not make it actually work?

<3

---

Q u o t e:
You're right. I just tested this in 1.12, and it does fall back to other modified key bindings. I'll take a look at why this changed and take care of it for 2.0.2 (Burning Crusade)

Edit: Ah, I see what happened. In 1.12, the binding code stripped off the first modifier, and the modifiers were always added in this order: alt, ctrl, shift. In 2.0 all bindings are stripped. Previously ctrl-shift-z would try ctrl-shift-z and then shift-z, now it tries ctrl-shift-z and then z.

I'll see what I can do.

Thanks!

---

Thanks for taking a look Slouken.

Since you are looking into it, do you think you can improve over how it worked in 1.12 a little? Perhaps pass all the modifiers in to the button instead of stripping them off so that the selfcast control works properly?

Huzzah! :D

You're certainly welcome for the information. Thanks so much for taking us seriously and posting. I eagerly await news.

---

Q u o t e:
Smarter key binding fallbacks for 2.0.2 ...

Holding down ctrl, alt, shift, x will check keybindings in the following order:
ALT-CTRL-SHIFT-X
CTRL-SHIFT-X
ALT-SHIFT-X
ALT-CTRL-X
SHIFT-X
CTRL-X
ALT-X
X

Any modifier which is not used in resolving the key binding is available to the scripting system during the key binding execution.

Thanks for the feedback everybody! :)

---

Awesome!

So does this mean that if I have an ActionBarButton bound to Shift-1, and my Selfcast modifier set to Alt, and I press Alt-Shift-1, (assuming I have nothing bound directly to alt-shift-1) it will resolve to Shift-1, dispatch the OnClick event to button Shift-1, and in that event's scope, IsModifierKeyDown and IsActionSelfCastKeyDown will return true? because that sounds very much like it fixes the problem! :D

As i interpret it, that is absolutely correct. Assuming everything goes well, i expect that with the built-in self-cast-on-ALT (or -on-CTRL) function, combined with the new modifier stripping order, i should have exactly what i want now in terms of self-casting. :) I guess we'll have to wait and see to be certain.

Slouken wins another award for being "totally fab".

Thanks so much! You just made my day.

---

Q u o t e:
Any modifier which is not used in resolving the key binding is available to the scripting system during the key binding execution.

---

I think I like this - it means that we'll be free to write macros as we see fit and not worry about our keybindings triggering unexpected modifiers.

possibly bad example, but here goes - UI author provides special channeling-safe macros where shift overrides and re-casts the channel. Users bind the macro to a shift+key binding - macro won't see the shift.