Not A Bug Bug in macro comments feature....

Discussion in 'Resolved' started by Tatanka, Feb 1, 2021.

  1. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    I just started adding comments to my in-game macros (socials). The way it's supposed to work, you put a "#" in the social line, and everything after that is just a comment. I did that for all my socials on three chars, and everything seemed fine. Until last night, I parsed my session, and noticed that my SK pet had done no damage.

    Further investigation showed that, with the comment after "/pet attack" in my social, the pet does not engage. Verified also by seeing no "Xartik told you, 'Attacking ...." chat text.

    I tried with different comments, even just a "#" with no text after it. With a /pause preceding the /pet attack or not. Didn't matter, as soon as the "#" comment was put in place, then the pet wouldn't attack.

    I did not see a problem with any other commands in my socials. Comments did not affect any of them. Just "/pet attack".

    Seems pretty straight-forward and completely reproducible, so hope it can be fixed without much effort.
  2. Cragzop Cranky Wizard

    Where did you see this (the part about # means comments)?

    And also, why do you need to comment a /pet attack line?

    Edit: I've always used ** in my macros for comments (almost always alt activates now that you can useitem actual item names).

    The /pet attack command looks like it will take an argument and have the pet try to attack what is after the space after attack. So /pet attack combat_dummy_uzah will attack the combat dummy in my guild hall. But /pet attack # or /pet attack ** will do nothing ... probably because the command cannot resolve what is after the word attack.

    Pretty sure that's not a bug ... just have to know that anything after /pet attack is going to cause it to bug out (or attack that specific mob name).

    I would not want to lose the functionality of a specific pet target able to be made just so a comment in a macro could happen.
    Duder, GNOME_POWER and Metanis like this.
  3. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    Pretty much every ref site I looked up on the net (search everquest command options, etc)

    Because it was the first line of the macro, and I use it for some general notes on the macro. Otherwise, yeah, no need to comment /pet attack. Re-inforcing that, on my Mage, I didn't see this issue, because in that macro, it was the second line (first was to select tank's target), so I didn't add a comment.

    None of the references I looked up mentioned ** to delimit comments. I may try that instead.

    So, it's not a bug, but causes it to bug out? ;)

    So, it looks like the parser server-side looks for a possible parameter for /pet attack, but doesn't take the comment delimiter into account first.

    Sounds like a bug to me. Not a big one, not a serious one. But should be easily fixable without impacting the ability to have a mob name after the /pet attack. Pretty sure mob names never have "#" in them.
  4. Soulbanshee Augur

    This is not true.

    It's possible that player sites are wrong, it's just that invalid parameters or too many parameters after a command are automatically thrown away so they are forcing certain functionality that's not explicitly coded to work that way.
  5. Svann2 The Magnificent

    Not finding it in google but if you did the site is wrong. You dont need any delimiter at all. For most macros you can just start typing after the macro (leave a space between obviously) to describe what it does. Your macro isnt working because there is an optional extra field which is confusing it.

    We used to use ; because thats common in programming. You could try that instead of #.
  6. Nniki Augur

    Those sites are incorrect. There are no special comment characters in socials/macros. As far as I can tell, commands in this game simply continue to parse arguments as far as they can.

    For example, you can do /overseer #blahblahblah or just /overseer blahblahblah, regardless of whether you have the # symbol or not. Both will work just fine. Another example, either of these will work fine: /alternateadv on 10 #whatever or just /alternateadv on 10 whatever.
    The designers use '#' as a hidden character at the beginning of NPC names to indicate that they are a unique creature and only one can be up at a time (e.g. trigger NPCs and named).
  7. AB_H'Sishi Augur

    It MIGHT be the informations on player sites were correct but are not anymore. The game gets new features and such, the player sites are often poorly maintained and the authors of a certain hint might have stopped playing and abandoned their posts.

    Also some sites disable editing after some time - this forum does after a few minutes, for example, other forums block a post edit once the post in question got quoted in a later reply.

    Anyway, "/pet attack" is pretty self-explaining and doesn't need comments.

    Spaces in Mob names are substituted by "_" (as Cragzop pointed out).

    But the info "# is used as 'unique marker' in mob names" is something new for me.
    More than 18.25 years EQ and there is still something I didn't know ...
  8. Troutfest Augur

  9. Warpeace Augur

    Not likely a bug
  10. niente Developer

    Social macros don't support comments.
    If the line contains /timer or /pause that will be interpreted, followed by checking for a comma.
    After that it grabs the next word and looks up a command. Any argument after that is passed to the command.
    So if you make a social that says "/invite Soandso #this is a comment" it will do exactly what happens in chat if you type that (it thinks "Soandso #this is a comment" is the name of a player you're trying to invite). Some commands probably stop reading arguments and that might be why it seems like you can add comments (/alt act does this).
    DebonAir and Barton like this.
  11. Troutfest Augur

    Thanks for this info
  12. Wulfhere Augur

    Also note that the semi-colon ';' character also starts a comment. The parsing of ';' and '#' is different and I've found that there are places where one works to delimit a comment but not the other.
  13. Iribabh Augur

    I don't know about that Niente. Your example yes it doesn't comment but if you did "#/invite Soandso blah blah blah" that line wouldn't run.

    For years now I've used comments on my spam key to swap my ae attacks in and out. I also use it in my nuke spam macro for when I want to add a 5th spell to that key (IE I'm being lazy)
    Here's example:
    Code:
    Macro Name: Kick 1
    /alt activate 972 (roaring strike)
    /disc Batter Rk. III
    /disc Maelstrom of Claws Rk. III
    /disc Bestial Savagery Rk. III
    #/disc Focused Clamor of Claws Rk. III
    When I am in a situation where AE's are a bad thing I move that # to be in front of Maelstrom and remove the one infront of Focused Clamor. I also use this in several other macros across several characters.

    To the point of the OP though - you can just put your comment in parens at the end of a line. That's what I do for all my burn socials that call a bunch of AA stuff to tell me what is in that line (like shown above).
  14. Cragzop Cranky Wizard

    Pretty sure you are misunderstanding what Niente said.

    He told us there was no explicit commenting available in social macros. Which simply means there is not a character (or set of characters) you can use and always have it ignored in a macro line.

    That's all he said.

    All of us that have used macros over the years have found various ways to comment in/edit out lines. And they work because EQ only has a certain number of ways to run commands (almost all require / at the start).

    Your example is one of hundreds that each of us can give that are all slightly different.

    Niente just confirmed that there's nothing that will work 100% of the time. Which is useful to have confirmed.
  15. Beimeith Lord of the Game


    There are no comments in socials.

    Some commands stop reading after a certain point so you can put whatever after it and it won't cause an error. Other commands read the entire line and will not work because you put garbage there.

    Neither of these are a character-delimited comment.
  16. Wulfhere Augur

    Okay so much for all the hearsay and variant practices. My observation of ';' parsing differently at times is true however (for whatever reason). /shrug

    I think many of us are going by Fanra's table (https://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/Useful_commands#Macros) where's had '#' listed as a comment for years.
  17. Beimeith Lord of the Game


    If I were to hazard a guess, ";" may be treated differently by some things because it signifies the start of several chat commands (;oplist, ;moderate, etc.) somewhat like "/".


    Fanra generally copies things from other places and doesn't always verify them.
  18. Bigstomp Augur

    I sometimes use // to start a line I want to disable temporarily. The ability to actually comment something out would be nice though (the //blah is not a valid command annoys me a little)