Clone specific buffs

[elzibubble]

I'm running Charged Staff in PoE2 and staring at topleft to track my power charges and buff. Trouble is, I get short buffs that last a few seconds sometimes too, so they're not in dependable positions. It should be possible to image search for the buff icon (being careful to only use the portion not overlaid by the stack counter).

[Lailloken]

Yeah, I had a working proof-of-concept for that two years ago, but there were (at least) two problems:

• the game's engine (haven't tested PoE2 yet) handles icon rendering/scaling in a weird way: let's assume the buff area in the top-left is a 12x1 grid where icons can be placed

  • you can take a screenshot of a buff-icon in spot #1 and paste it into an image editor

  • if the same buff is in a different spot and you take a screenshot again, the buff-icon looks different (sometimes pixelated, other times skewed)

  • to take that into account, you need to make the image search quite loose, which hurts performance quite a bit

• this concept can be easily modified to also track dangerous debuffs and then play audio/visual queues that alert the player, or other dodgy things GGG wouldn't be happy with

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I personally avoid "chameleon syndrome" by cloning CDs/charges/combo to the center of the screen so that the skill-bar itself no longer needs to be checked. So all I have to pay attention to is my character and the top-left buff area.

[elzibubble]

I wonder how many versions there are? Could depend on resolution + a number of factors though. Frustrating, I'm not holding my breath for GGG to make buffs easier to manage. Thank you for the quick response.

[Lailloken]

I just remembered something tangentially related. I was playing around with a feature to scan and sum up trade-window contents, and that UI has the same scaling/rendering issue: https://youtu.be/rJT9WElo_Zo?feature=shared&t=14

1440p has 4 different versions for a currency stack, and 1080p had 8 IIRC.

[elzibubble]

Yeah I can't imagine running 8 image searches will be too fast, even in a small area

[Dagothur]

+1 for this. I'm only interested in one buff and it's constantly switching between buff positions 3-4.

I haven't looked under the hood of what you're doing but if you used AHK's GDI library the function to find an image / image search comes built in with a variance setting. Extending the existing functionality to seed the clone region's xy based on a target image and search region xywh would be awesome.

Or an alternative for my personal use case would be hotkey(s) to enable some sort of toggling or cycling of positions.