timing-focused view of wand output

[ashleybaldock]

A view that gives more insight into timings would be quite useful.

Saw this suggestion on reddit a little while ago and having thought about it it's a neat idea.

• educational, visualising the delays and timings going into a cast would make it a lot more obvious what is going on
• easier to tweak complex timing-sensitive wands
• easier to adjust cast delay in relation to casting time (teleport wands are a good example of why this is useful, you kinda want to have just enough cast delay that you fire them a frame or so slower than the time they take to teleport you)

Not 100% sure what this would look like, I like how things like metronomes/sequencers visualise actions happening repetitively over time though.

[salinecitrine]

some thoughts on this:

• I like the timeline view idea, and the example you linked
• In order to make it fit on the screen, it would have to be much simpler (in terms of how many spells+details it shows) than the existing projectile or action views.
  • To address this, I think we can show only the root projectiles for each cast, and abbreviate or ignore any triggered spells
• some wands might not be sufficiently periodic - they might sometimes run out of mana; wrapping might also be weird, but I'm not as sure about that one. These could lead to either very long, or at least hard to understand visualizations
  • this could be partially addressed by only considering one full cast of the wand, but that also doesn't represent the actual behavior in game, where you're casting repeatedly

[JonathanShor]

Came here looking to see if anything like this was on the roadmap.

Even just some basic summary stats, without visualization, would be very useful:

• How long is a full cycle of the wand? (sum of all casts' effective cast delays + recharge delay)
• Mana consumption per second (just sum of all the Mana Drains / full cycle time)
• Effective Mana Drain (Mana consumption per second - Wand chg. Spd)

Perhaps could be additional lines with the effective Recharge Delay at the top of the Projectiles section.

[ashleybaldock]

Full cycle time and mana/(cast/second) are good quick wins. I’ve been reworking the projectile section to include a summary of cast state stats grouped by triggers - timing would fit in there. :)