Friends List Plugin?
 

Hello all,

I would very much like to see a friends list plugin for LOTRO that would improve upon the existing method of alerting you that a friend has come online or gone offline. I am constantly missing the small text alert due to chat spam, and well...it's annoying. :P

What I am envisioning is a scrollable, resizeable and moveable window (preferably with a transparent background) that would reside on the main game screen. All your friends in your friends list would be here with their names being either grayed out (offline), blue (AFK) or bright yellow (online). This would enable you to see your friends' status at a glance instead of opening up the social window or hoping you see an alert in your chat window.

Is this even possible? If it is, I would be eternally grateful to any of you plugin wizards out there who could make it a reality. Thank you very much in advance! =)

Wow...97 views and not a single comment? :\

well. I don't think it's doable yet as Lua writers can't interract with those things. But interesting idea for the future I'm sure.

This is not possible with the current Lua API and with the slow rate of feature additions, I doubt that it will be possible in the next year. :(

Its been a few years now. Has the API changed at all to perhaps make this possible now.. Basically, anything that would help making your friends standout when they come online would be nice..

Thanks..

The only source of information available to Lua plugins for whether your friends are logged in is the chat window.

So, when you first log in, there is no way for a plugin to know which of your friends are online. It also can't know which people are on your friends list; you would have to manually enter them.

However, a plugin could easily monitor the chat window for messages such as "Your friend X has just logged in" and display a big message in the middle of your screen (I think there is already at least one plugin that will do this), or update some sort of window as described in the OP.

At login, there is a clunky way that a plugin could find out which of your friends is online. Each time you log in, you would have to click a button n times, where n is the number of friends you have. This button would execute the "/inspect X" chat window command to find out whether each person is logged in.

Edit: Check out Garan's LotRO Alerts plugin, which allows you to monitor the chat window for specific messages, and blow them up in the center of the screen.

Something like this would be perfect. I have looked through the mods and did not see any titles that stood out as having this. If its built into another mod that does other stuff, could take forever to find it. Would like something simple.

Thanks for your response!!

If Garan has time, maybe he could add another entry to the LotRO Alerts FAQ showing you how to configure LotRO Alerts to do what you want.

That would be very kind if he was willing to do so, or a quick guide here explaining how to set it up..

thanks again.

I went ahead and made a small plugin to do the job. It's called Friend Alert.

The basic Alert setup would look like this:

which creates a scrolling text alert whenever a friend logs in - you can easily change the style of the response on the Response tab. The major points are the Channel and Pattern, I believe Standard is correct but as I didn't have any friends on to test with you might have to use the log feature to find the correct channel (just use "/alerter log show" to open the log and then start the log to see the channel and text of each chat message and have a friend log in to identify the correct channel and change the channel on the Trigger panel if I had it incorrect). The Pattern should be correct if I recall the message format correctly - if not, just use the logger to determine the pattern and replace the person's name with (.*) including the parenthesis. Note, the pattern shown is only for the EN client - for this to work for FR or DE clients you just have to use the log to capture the text and substitute for the name as show above and it will work fine.

Thanks much to the both of you!! It's another reason why I love the Tolken (in general) fan base so much..

*respectfully bows*

This is perfect! Thanks so much for doing this, Thurallor!