Arcane Academy - A Conveyance of Cooldowns! (2024)

Other Great Guides: Customized Gaming, Cooldown Conveyance, Nameplate Navigation

Now live in Classic UO!

Greetings, and warm welcomes! I am Avalon Alduin, Chancellor of the Academy of the Arcane Arts.

Once again I bring to you, another guide, a conveyance of Cooldowns on Outlands! Not only a conveyance, but a repository of a variety of different cooldowns offered both by myself, and from the community itself. After such a guide is provided, I hope it'll inspire my students to offer up their findings, to post for others, so they can enhance their gameplay, and enjoy the informative nature of Cooldowns. In fact I invite everyone to add anything not covered here in the teachings, to update, to post, to help enhance others knowledge, as knowledge evolves and advances, in order to help all future generations of Avadonians!

Now it should be noted that such a feature is now available in the beta regular version of the ClassicUO! As they say, in order to make a delicious omelette, sometimes you have to break a few eggs. Speaking of which, I'm famished, I'll need to grab breakfast after this lesson!

We'll tackle a few topics below including: (CTRL-F to search for one!), before getting to the repository!

What is a cooldown?

Cooldown Bars

Covering your Cooldown Header (Custom Macro buttons)

Cooldown Types

Razor Scripting Commands

The technical nature of Cooldowns (Cooldowns.XML)

What is a cooldown?
Sooo, jumping right into things! What is a cooldown? It is a bar, or a visual aid to tell you when an ability or spell will be available again. The color of a cooldown is entirely up to you, some say it makes sense to group like skills in similar colors, other to have a rainbow of colors as color association can be much quicker than trying to read the cooldown name, but most would agree, that mushrooms should be pink! Also, while I tend to lean on the magical nature of things, such a feature isn't only useful for magic, and while I offer up some solutions, I hope that we'll see all variety of cooldowns added beyond the scope of these teachings, that such teachings will invoke, and inspire many more learnings.

Arcane Academy - A Conveyance of Cooldowns! (1)

Arcane Academy - A Conveyance of Cooldowns! (2)

There are several ways from which a cooldown can be triggered, from system messages, to a variety of systemic implementations such as Bandage Timers, and criminal timers, right down to Razer scripts which involve self triggered responses, while they aren't always the most accurate, can have some very creative implementations that'll mostly ensure your cooldowns are effective and true!

Let us begin with a Recap on a previous lesson, how to enable Cooldown Bars, before diving into the meat of the matter eh?

Cooldown Bars
The cooldown bar is a new powerful feature, that allows you to see cooldowns based on system messages or overhead messages. Great for use with things like wizard grimoire spells, barding cooldowns, artisan or discipline procs and much more! Unfortunately that's also a limitation as not everything has system messages when they trigger - hopefully the devs will grant us additional system messages to take advantage of such a great feature.

Arcane Academy - A Conveyance of Cooldowns! (3)

Arcane Academy - A Conveyance of Cooldowns! (4)


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Cooldowns can be configured at the bottom of the options menu - starting with general settings to choose if you want to hide inactive bars - so they only show when on cooldown, or if you want to always show them. In addition to that you can choose the size of your cooldown bar, with the smallest size being 20 height, and 100 width.

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Covering your Cooldown Header (Custom Macro Buttons)
In addition to this, before diving into the cooldowns themselves, not everyone enjoys the default fonts of the Cooldown headers themselves, I'd highly recommend creating a custom macro button, which can hide the Cooldowns header, with a much more visually appealing header, that is more to your liking. I'd highly recommend either 30077 or 30061, both of which can cover it over quite nice while looking quite exquisite!

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Arcane Academy - A Conveyance of Cooldowns! (8)

Cooldown Types
Here we cover the various Cooldown types, but we'll defer to the Regular type as last as it's the most common.

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The Bandage Timer, Criminal Timer & PvP Timer, we'll group together, as they all act & react in a similar faction, driven systemically, when you trigger one of these timers, the cooldown will trigger automatically if you've chosen this type of timer. They will be listed first in the repository.

A Regular Cooldown, has two methods of triggering a cooldown, you can trigger this through a system message, or through an overhead message. Overhead messages are often triggered through scripts, but can also be systemic, depending on how you've set your messaging through the [commands settings in game.

Additionally, any of these cooldowns can be triggered through Razor scripts - these come with some warnings, and limitations, in that if you trigger a cooldown through a razor script, you can potentially trigger a cooldown to happen without an action happening, due to aborting a sequence, or easily over-write any sort of cooldown timer, based on how often you spam the action, or how you write the razor script.

Razor Scripting Commands
To trigger a cooldown through a razor script
cooldown 'cooldownname' timeinmilliseconds
ie. cooldown 'Fireball' 60000

To check if a cooldown is active through a razor script
if cooldown 'Fireball'
if not cooldown 'Fireball'

The technical nature of Cooldowns (Cooldowns.XML)
Lastly, before diving into a repository, I'd like to dive into the technical nature of Cooldowns, and the XML file in which they are stored, as it's an incredibly efficient way to store and pass on knowledge to others. Hidden in spoilers here, because as I understand it, the technical nature is too much for some!

Cooldowns are saved to an XML file in your character folder which resides in a path you can find through your UO\ClassicUO\Data\Profiles\AccountName\Shard\Character folder. You can edit these directly in notepad, to change the order in which they are displayed, or copy/paste new cooldowns in, which will be recommended below. I'd also highly recommend saving a backup of the cooldowns.xml file before editing it at any time.

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The cooldowns.xml file is a very structured file, there is a version code line, then all cooldowns are encased in a <cooldowns> </cooldowns> set of codes. Within such a grouping are a set of <cooldownentries> </cooldownentry> for each and every cooldown you add. Colored separately below for 3 unique cooldowns. While I won't dive any deeper than this, you can definitely use the <cooldownentry> </cooldownentry> wrappings as a start & stop to share various cooldown code, easily for those more advanced with XML code.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<cooldowns>


<cooldownentry name="Lightning" defaultcooldown="20" cooldownbartype="Regular" hue="93" pauseduringworldsaves="True">
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="20" triggertext="lightning spell hinders" />
</cooldownentry>

<cooldownentry name="Mushroom" defaultcooldown="0" cooldownbartype="Regular" hue="223" pauseduringworldsaves="True">
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="60" triggertext="consume a magic mushroom" />
</cooldownentry>

<cooldownentry name="Disco" defaultcooldown="5" cooldownbartype="Regular" hue="153" pauseduringworldsaves="False">
<trigger triggertype="OverheadMessage" duration="0" triggertext="Your barding skill cooldowns reset." />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="5" triggertext="You play successfully, disrupting" />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="5" triggertext="You play successfully, provoking" />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="5" triggertext="You play successfully, pacifying" />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="5" triggertext="You play successfully, briefly pacifying" />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="5" triggertext="You play successfully, briefly discording" />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="5" triggertext="You fail to incite" />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="5" triggertext="You fail to pacify" />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="5" triggertext="You fail to discord" />
<trigger triggertype="SysMessage" duration="10" triggertext="effect of a song" />
</cooldownentry>

</cooldowns>


This concludes the lessons for today. While I know it was a lot to take in, I also know that you will find great use out these features. If this was useful to you, give this a like below - and if you have ideas for future guides, send me a message on the forums or on Discord. Perhaps you'll become part of the next Academy lesson!

Yours Truly,

Avalon Alduin
Chancellor of the Arcane Academy

Pathfinder

PS. there is still the repository below!
PPS. I've now added a copy of my cooldowns file you can extra, and drop into your folder.

Arcane Academy - A Conveyance of Cooldowns! (2024)
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