Thesis:
There are several benefits in establishing a standard coding best practice for APL writing.
Background:
During Legion we have encountered a significant increase in class configurations. Where we previously almost only had to plan for talent set up and tier set bonuses, we now also have needed to take legendaries and artifact traits into account. Additionally; with different balancing and talents that impact playstyle more we can assume that classes in the future will use a larger spread of talents.
By reworking how APL's are written we can reap several benefits.
Most obvious it will increase readability. F.ex by ordering constraints in: "Talents, Set bonus, Items", readability will be increased.
Moving from complex and long constraint lists to split up rows will also increase readability as well as make fault searching in the reports, under Action Priority List section easier. It also helps identifying redundant rows that never gets parsed and enables one to easily compile shorter but more specific APL's if desired.
Furthermore clean easily readable code will lower the barrier of entry and perhaps increase participation in APL editing and improvement and possibly in the future for creating a playstyle guide directly from SimulationCraft result report.
Thesis: There are several benefits in establishing a standard coding best practice for APL writing.
Background: During Legion we have encountered a significant increase in class configurations. Where we previously almost only had to plan for talent set up and tier set bonuses, we now also have needed to take legendaries and artifact traits into account. Additionally; with different balancing and talents that impact playstyle more we can assume that classes in the future will use a larger spread of talents.
By reworking how APL's are written we can reap several benefits. Most obvious it will increase readability. F.ex by ordering constraints in: "Talents, Set bonus, Items", readability will be increased.
Moving from complex and long constraint lists to split up rows will also increase readability as well as make fault searching in the reports, under Action Priority List section easier. It also helps identifying redundant rows that never gets parsed and enables one to easily compile shorter but more specific APL's if desired.
Furthermore clean easily readable code will lower the barrier of entry and perhaps increase participation in APL editing and improvement and possibly in the future for creating a playstyle guide directly from SimulationCraft result report.