March 2022 Version Update

Should be, but we all know it rarely ever is

Yeah, it's real rough to find decent-modern files that don't have all the automation. Hell the only 2 files I have that I even begin to understand have been so heavily edited they wouldn't be recognizable from the original (well maybe Purgatory's smn file could be, that has minor changes). I don't really care if others are botting as long as they aren't negatively affecting other players. Hell a lot of the people I've played with the past several years use bots, some more blatant than others. Considering I multibox I'd likely get a lot more done and faster if I did as well I just have no interest in it. Most people don't give a ***if somebody sits off in the middle of a far off camp for days on end grinding out CP/EP, if they do then they need to get a hobby.

A lot of people only use gearswap because they used spellcast, and they only used spellcast because you needed several macros for every fuggin action to change 16 pieces of gear back in the day. There straight up wasn't enough macro space to accomplish that if you optimized more than a couple jobs at endgame, and we didn't get equipsets or extra macro space until it was more than a decade too late. A barebones spellcast was the only way to actually use the growing mountain of situational gear that SE intentionally created for us, and this hadn't changed by the time SC was deprecated in favor of gearswap. Not everyone is interested in the ~~extra special features~~ baked into the popular luas that get shared around.

Some people might get up to some shady ***with gearswap, but it's disingenuous to compare its basic function with some of these other tools listed above whose only purpose is to blatantly subvert game mechanics or allow characters to progress at an otherwise impossible pace — SE sees all y'all with your botted master levels and comes away thinking their game isn't grindy enough, which does actually affect everyone (beyond the more immediately apparent issue of congested camps). Nobody I play with uses these things, and it's pretty unfortunate that they've been normalized to such an extent ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This, it's a great tool to diagnose where people can get better and that is it's best use. That being said: AFAC and HELMs is more about timing than slight variations in sets than anything. As fun as it is to jab at your friends to "gitgud" it's more fun to see them improve. Also I don't care what anyone says: SMN cheese is fun.

a lot of cheese is fun. i do get annoyed when people play favorites with their particular favorite flavor of cheese and try to pretend like all the rest need to be nerfed/removed but theirs is "working as intended" though. like back when BST was roosting high atop the gobbie gorgonzola

You didn't need Spellcast, as Windower macros could pull off full set swaps in one macro as well.

That was also a thing, you’re right. I think space was still a limiting factor if you wanted to call them with vanilla macros instead of creating dozens of custom keybinds though, which was definitely not my jam at least lol

Pull the mob to someone who is either AFK or just not paying attention, SATA it on to them, Warp out... at least that's one of the things we used to be able to do back in the day.

Would have to [Invite to join party] first though, as TA is party only.

That wasn't always a thing, guy.

Neither was Spellcast.

irrelevant

I'm old enough to remember when a subset of the playerbase considered macroing any gear changes at all to be cheating.

If you guys can't solo Ongo veng 20 without changing gear then you're not on Allakhazam level yet. Git gud.

No? Windower macros existing when Spellcast did is my entire point, so it's not irrelevant.

i thought the most common ones are the kinematics luas since they are available for most if not every job and they appear on first page of the search engine.

the Selindrile ones seem rather intimidating for someone who just picked up gearswap. most probably only know of them cause of recommendations on FFXIAH or from respective LS mates.

i also think most ppl are too lazy to switch to a different gearswap template once they set one up and rather attempt to edit their current one.

Like I said it's people that I know, cant tell you about general population census on lua usage

I think the appeal of the kinematics files are their simplicity.

Spellcast wasn't so bad because it just equipped gear based on a skill or spell being selected, gearswap reacts to what is happening outside of that I believe?

I remember a hold team wiping on Tiamat because our pld forgot to equip his fire resist set or being one shot on Sandworm cause he forgot to put his earth res set on for some move. Human error because very often they were logging on after being woken up.

I think the reason they added -dmg tp sets was just because the advantage people had with gearswap was out of control. It's pretty ridiculous at this point honestly, if you have enough space you can practically negate anything from para landing to magic spells etc

Using a really ott gearswap lua is no different than using an auto parry on sekiro or auto roller / block on Elden Ring.

When I was actively playing there was an autows available, I recall setting it to fire off at 1,250 on the regular and just doing other ***on my other characters.



Maybe other revisions removed some automated function, this can be found in Sel-Selfcommands, I'm not gonna go bother looking around at what hes been doing with it since I last played, not really of my interest.

Yeah. Basically GS can do anything an addon can. If a GS file is customised to listen and react to specific packets or events, it can reasonably be classed as an automated bot. That's assuming you don't classify what GS is as automation already.

To put an even finer point on that, GearSwap really just got people to use the Windower Lua interface. When they write bots or automate things inside a GearSwap user file, very little or perhaps nothing their bot is doing actually depends on GearSwap and it could probably stand alone as its own addon.

GearSwap is really fairly bare bones. It has been a while since I wrote it, but I would say that the primary functionality is:

• It intercedes in your actions and creates pretarget, precast, midcast, and aftercast events. The rest of the events (e.g. status_change) are just thin wrappers around base windower events provided for simplicity / analogy to spellcast.

• It exposes an equip() function.

• It maintains some internal state to keep things like the player and party structures up to date for the user.

• It sandboxes the user environment (to the extent that is possible in Lua) and handles creation/destruction as you change jobs.

None of these things are actually very pro-bot. It doesn't tell you if something is casting on you. It doesn't expose a way for you to engage monsters. It doesn't give you a way to run around. It's just making sure that if you're using a spell or ability, you're using it with the gear that you intend.

The gearswap/beta_examples_and_information directory Luas are stale at this point, but those are more or less the complexity level of GearSwap file that I personally still use to this day. I think the fact that GearSwap got a lot of people to learn a programming language is a great thing and I have enjoyed seeing what people have done with it, but most of the cool functionality that people add to their GearSwap files (and bots) could really just be their own addons.

Was it you or Monten that added the TH function?

JUST the abilty to swap gear for actions without having to have multiple macros for one function was at least reasonable. The days of 4 macro Blade:Jins are not looked upon fondly.

But as all things, it's become something entirely different.

I just provided the base GearSwap addon and those few example files. All of the user file development (Motenten, Selindrile, etc.) has not involved me. Supporting the core functionality was enough work that I never wanted to branch out.

I am confident at this point that I use less complex gearswap user files than the average gearswap user. For instance, someone above described Motenten's files as "simple" and I assure you they are way more complicated than anything I've ever loaded.

I don't see how anybody could define Motenten's files "simple".
I found them so unbelievably and unnecessarily complex that it's the reason why I started developing my own files from zero.

Then again I quite clearly remember the one and only Motenten guy saying here on FFXIAH forums in multiple instances that his files were so verbose and appearently complex because he wanted to enable even people who couldn't code a single line of lua to use them.


Can't say I "see" this in the results of his effort, but I can at least recognize that was his goal, at least.

I remember you helping me to work through and develop the first SCH GS file I did, and was incredibly happy when you included it in your beta files. Your help got me on a path in learning some of the languages, and now I’m about to finish an Associates in IT/Coding. Thank you for your help and guidance

No problem and congrats. Glad to hear things are going well for you!

The thing with Moten's files is they work perfectly fine if people don't change a single thing and only put gear into it. The upside is that it's super easy to get working without any knowledge once so ever, the downside is it's painful to customize. People have come to me asking to "fix" something in their lua, I take one look, see it's based on Motens but someone screwed with it, and I replied "nope".

Gearswap is very simple, because lua itself is a very simple language. Static definitions, strings, integers, arrays and such at the start, then logic at the bottom. Whenever someone does an action it goes through the pretarget -> precast -> midcast -> aftercast and executes the logic inside them.

The logic can easily be expressed as a simple series of conditional statements, if a then b, elseif c then d. We're not needing to optimize for performance so we can be a bit sloppy with giant if/elseif/else structures.