Gearswap: Arislan V. Selendriles

Hi, anyone able to help explain why selendriles is typically considered better for gearswap vs. Arislan’s? I’ve thought about making the change but it’s more challenging to setup and seems harder to modify, but was going to start putting in the time to figure it out. Before that though, I was just hoping someone with experience of both knew the pros and cons of each?

Thank you in advance!!

i dont know man i just use my keyboard the manual macros for each spell and what not u have like 9 macros pallets or some ***,

Anyone that says one is better than the other is just being a moron, use whatever works for you. I know people that go super complicated and write their own complex gearswap luas cause they want it to work one exact way, and I know people that just download w/e is off Alan Warren's or Arislan's github and just copy/paste their gear in. At the end of the day outside of the person using it you can't tell the difference. If you like Arislan's luas, use Arislans. If you like Selendrile's, use Selendrile's. And if you want to write your own, write your own.

If you want a better breakdown between the two then it's really this: all of Arislan's Luas are based on Kinematics/Motenten, at the top of all his luas they say "-- Original: Motenten / Modified: Arislan". So essentially he takes the very basic, and adds a bunch of functionality to it, which personally I like the most.

Selendrile's are the exact opposite, he has his own libs folder with all custom mappings, states, modes, etc. His is more an ecosystem for all your jobs vs just using a random lua.

Mote's based gearswap luas are anything but basic. It just seems basic because it hides everything using nested includes. Also, the libraries are included with gearswap, so it seems like a 1 file solution. All the luas I use and share are currently mote's based luas.

Both, Mote's based luas and Selendriles luas are great until you want to do something very specific that they do not already do (which is rare) or you want to do something differently than how they do it (even rarer). Mote's provides a way to override some functionality (not sure if selendriles provides this as well). That is when I ended up playing around with writing a GS lua from scratch, which I found fun and insteresting. Updating motes "includes" functionality is not recommended, as it will be reverted the next time GS is updated. Selendriles will not have this issue.

I will say, Mote's Modes.lua is something I will use, even in a non-Mote's based lua. It is a very easy way to set up state tracking/cycling/setting.

you guys swap gear?

Mote's are "basic" in that they're very streamlined and simple. (to use!) You can just paste your gear in, and there's like 3 commands.

Silendrile's on the other hand will ws for you. cast for you. eat food. use items. automatically put up ja's. It's a ton of automation.

Even the dumbest person can take a mote file and get full functionality. There are dozens of accounts of people having no *** clue what selendriles does and getting stuck in modes or failure to function.

I'm not familiar with arislan's files to comment on them. Motes are just simple macro replacers. Silendriles will literally automate the game entirely.

Ya that's generally what I meant, basic for the user. Throw your gear in, done.

I turned down using Selindrile's when I looked at all the stuff he stripped out of Falkirk Beastmaster lua and I said, nope. not redoing all that.

then I like Elizabet's mage luas and Archie's pup lua.. though I'd want to personalize that one alot.

so I'm not going to adopt a whole system that clashes with my other job files.

Both are based on Mote's, they just went about extending Mote's work differently.

Arislan's luas pack everything into each Charname-JOB.lua. This makes things really simple if you only have one or two jobs, but likewise that also means if you want to change behavior on every job you have to edit every single file.

Selindrile opted for a layered approach. Core logic goes into the libs, job-specific logic goes into the JOB.lua, and user customizations live in the User-Globals.lua and Charname_Job_Gear.lua(s). The big advantages of this approach are consistency across every job and easy updating. If something in the core or job logic changes, you can just download and replace that file without touching your gearsets or customizations. If you play multiple jobs or characters, the ability to customize behavior for all jobs and/or all characters by updating a single file is a massive time-saver.

I just use files that change the gear when I hit a button and sometimes when the weather is nice. None of these fancy automatic modes and weaponskills and ***that needs 9 extra files to work.

They are Mote's luas, not mine.

(edit: looks like others have already mentioned that, tip of the tricorne to you guys)

Arislan's BRD & COR Lua's are fantastic, a bit of automation but most of it requires (like most lua's), for you to choose your primary weapon using Windows + E/R and main TP/DT sets using CTRL10/ALT 10 etc.

It also has a lot of checks such as "if not Fili+3, use Fili+2, or Fili+1" etc for the applicable/bis JA/song duration buff etc. This applies for Cor too for rolls.

I also love how you can manually switch to "dummy mode" for harp with ctrl + `, so even a new bard doesn't need to use Singer or any bot to help them do their songs/swap instruments.

It's also very clearly written, spaced out, without janky language.

Both are great if you just put your gear in and do exactly what they designed them to do. If you want to do anything outside of that, well things get far more complicated because all the core logic is tucked away inside an external shared library. Lua is a very simple and easy language to earn and this type of programming isn't hard. I always encourage people to learn how to do it themselves.

When I returned a few months ago I blundered and wiped all of my prior lua files and had to rebuild from scratch. I heard about Silendriles and took a good look and it looked intimidating so I passed on it, at least for now. Didn’t look difficult just looked like it would take a larger-than-usual chunk of time to get it working properly so I continued search and found Arislan’s stuff…

Very well made luas but holy ***his RDM lua has 1600 lines of code and has almost his entire keyboard mapped out with key-binds lmao. Both look fantastic but I’ve been using some of Arislan’s for some of the cool features.

I just did the usual bit of populating gears, added some lua features/rules from other Mote-based luas and changed most of the key-binds to my F-Keys (I’m one of the controller weirdos and never used them anyway) and I’ve been pretty happy with it so far.

There are other great authors in GitHub as well but you can’t go wrong with Silendrile, Arislan, Mote and one other I can’t remember right now.

It's been awhile but IIRC I lifted that bit from Selindrile's. XD

The average player just wants a 'plug and play' solution. LUA represents complete character customization so the hole goes as deep as you want it to go. If you don't make your own files you're essentially trying to fit into a suit that was tailored for someone else.

It matters not which one you use.

What matters is that you take the time to prepare for a situation because when the time comes you either have a solution or you don't.

Each one of these lua gear systems attempts to do that in their own ways.

That being said
There are plenty of things I don't use in selindriles luas but the things I do use I love.

For example if horde lullaby 2 is down it casts horde lullaby 1.
Or a warp macro you can make without selindriles aliased many times over to use other items.
Countless toggles that probably exist in some form in all gear luas now.
Weapon toggles are great which I absolutely hated in the beginning, especially if a monster unequipps your weapon

If SE didn't make loading into any instanced event like Dynamis, Sortie, Ody, Omen, et al., a pain in the butt, I'd imagine lua's would be way less prevalent.

You can spam an equipset/JA/song macro 100x and each time after entering an instance the following will occur:
1. It'll ignore the equipset
2. Partial equipset applied
3. After your whole party finishes buffing then it does so

This leads to people having to pre-apply the equipset for gear they're going to use, as to not delay by 1-2 minutes their party/alliance. This is all due to how SE still prioritizes packets for the game.

If you think people are using luas because of the time it takes gear to load after zoning, I've got a bridge you might be interested in.

People are using gearswap for the dozens and dozens of "QOL" improvements they offer, and not because of how quickly you can hit a macro after you've zoned.

well it's the only reason I use lua's. I don't need a bot to play the game for me, to swap shields for me based on mob abilities, or weaponskill for me.

Look up Arislan's BRD LUA, it does exactly the simple and convenient things I mentioned that still put you at the helm of responsibility for playing your job.

I'd be careful about applying your experiences to everyone else though. Basically every single person I play with uses gearswap and not a single one has ever mentioned this as the reason they do so. I'd say much more compelling/common reasons are:
-Compatibility with other things like shortcuts
-Ability to use spells/JA from menu and still apply gear
-Ability to swap gear on for every one of the hundreds of spells without having to make a macro for each one
-Instant swaps not requiring 1s delay between them
-Ability to use FC on extremely short spells while still having potency gear on for their midcast
-Can change "modes" between DT/acc/Quick Draw modes/healing modes depending on situation, including permutations of all the above
-Don't need <st> macro for every WS because you can just pick it from menu and WS on a different target with full gear swaps
-Swap back from FC/midcast/WS gear faster, spending less time in lower DT sets, risking taking extra damage

Oh, and then you can get into automation like applying phalanx gear when being hit by phalanx or regen, using obi during weather, osash at range, auto-ranged attack, auto-WS, etc. if you'd like; but you don't need to be using any automation or even conditional statements to get a massive advantage from gearswap alone. This is why people use it. Dynamis is a 2 hour event, nobody gives a ***if you start buffing 15 seconds slower. Most people are still trying to get out of the pile of bodies by this time, and there are no enemies remotely close to the entrance of Odyssey, Sortie, etc.

Arislan's LUA is one of the reasons which kept me playing FFXI, his custom LUA's were structured in a way that appealed to me, and most importantly were not designed towards automation, something I dreaded, and despised when players in my group used. Seeing that he's back now, I wish I was still playing and enjoying his (presumably) expanded job selection of LUAs.

Kind words, thanks!

I completely share your sentiments on automation.

selendriles was recomended to me by my ls i am a pc noobs it really easy for me to use then my friend recomended me Arislan's also nice i really thank you both of them for the hard work and sharing it to all FFXI players /Respect

I prefer Arislan's because if I wanted to watch a game being played for me I'd go watch a streamer and for some strange reason my lockstyle randomizers only work on mote based gearswaps.