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Originally Posted by Eili
Well i am just a little voice here, but i wish you the best in which way you decide to go. You deserve it.
You were always helpfull and respectuous towards us, and i thank you for this.
Life is what you are doing of it, your time to fly away from Lotro is arrived and you will find probably new heavens. Enjoy them.
Eili aka Moranae
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Thank you
I've had a lot of good experiences, good memories, and good times in LotRO, and I'll never forget them. This bridge hasn't been burned, so if the glitter should fade from where I am, and time has lessened my frustrations, there's always the chance to cross that bridge again.
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Originally Posted by moebius92
I'm probably biased, since I've only had limited experience with modding communities (mostly WoW, and some single player games), but one thing that struck me about the WoW plugin community (when I briefly rejoined WoW at the start of Cataclysm) was a bunch of plugins saying, "we no longer use the incoming healing library" or "we no longer use the threat library" - and the reason was, Blizzard had finally gotten around to adding that functionality to the API. But the plugin authors weren't waiting around for Blizzard to add the functionality, they went off and hacked it in, and people would use the tools even if they were crude or weren't perfectly accurate. And it wouldn't surprise me if that was the sort of signal to the UI devs that you're looking for - that, there's this crude tool, and it's horrible and inaccurate, but people are using it because they really want the functionality, and they'll grab at anything that provides it, no matter how badly it works.
So, I think the challenge to us, as plugin authors, is - use the functionality they've provided to the fullest (I mean, there's my plugin handling fellowship/raid vitals, and that's it. And it's being written by someone that doesn't understand the design philosophy behind what's probably the most popular set of WoW raid vitals in existence - which is kind of funny from my end, but probably less funny from the user's end). Go off and write something that the API doesn't explicitly support. Or better yet, write something that people are going to say, "you can't write a plugin that does X" - write a threat meter, write an equipment manger, write a skill cooldown tracker. And if you do that? ...well, at the very least, it'll give the devs a signal of what unimplemented features there's a demand for. At the best? Incentive - "that's what people who are willing to put the effort in wnat, and if I implement this, I can give it to them", inspiration - "imagine what they could do if they had more access, had a more expansive API?", and satisfaction - "look at what they've done with the things I've added to the API."
I mean, I'm too lazy to do that, because quite frankly, it sounds like work and effort and bunch of other tedious stuff, but if you want to send a signal to the devs - that's how I'd go about it.
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There are modding communities that have been created - and have prospered, without any developer help at all. Grand Theft Auto and Need For Speed seems to come to mind the most - but in these cases, there were no editing tools, no API, or so much as a hint from a dev. Everything was figured out by those interested in not only adding their own stuff - but the basic desire to see how things work.
In the case of MMOs, it's a little bit different obviously - as technically speaking, you really can't add anything to the game itself. However, finding out how stuff works definitely still applies, and, of course, addons/plugins are the closest thing to adding new stuff. While I haven't really looked into WoW addons, the general feeling I get, is that these libraries are mainly for making things easier for other authors. It's important to note that the major difference between WoW and LotRO when it comes to this, is that even core UI elements are done the same way as addons are in WoW. Obviously there are some functions/API that are off limits to addons; but generally speaking, players create their UI elements using the same methods that Blizzard does. With LotRO, the plugin system is a completely separate entity - with the client modified to communicate with this system. While this greatly reduces the chances of Exploits and botting, it also makes the system require more effort on part of the developer, and limits the power of plugins to only what's been added to that system.
So while it may be unrealistic to pull off a healing library, or a threat library - it is certainly possible to create libraries that make other author's jobs easier. One of the best tips I can give any plugin developer is to not limit yourself to just what the API appears to allow. Between the basic elements of the API, and the power of Lua, there is a lot there that is possible - as long as it doesn't require game data. As examples I can point to the UI library I created, Palantir's bars/color change, and even that raycasting example - all done using nothing but Lua and the base UI class. Other experiments I've done - some which I may still clean up and release, when I find the time/energy, is an XML parser, and the beginnings of a method to parse XML into a UI layout. All that stuff, I think - shows the power of what the API started off with, along with the Lua scripting language.
However, at the end of the day - you can only show so many examples of what could be done, before you're stuck asking when Turbine is going to make this have more of a point. In that end, for better or worse, plugin authors are at the mercy of Turbine.
As far as file formats go of course, I really would like to see players that have had experience in recognizing and understanding various unknown file formats. There's already an app that will extract the contents of a .dat file, and of course textures and audio is fairly easy. However, stuff like filenames, 3d meshes, the world terrain/buildings, and even the local database files that keep local information are far from being figured out - as I'm nowhere near proficient enough in 3d formats to get anything worthwhile out of them,
But, hopefully someday that type of person does come along, and wishes to help out - and then things can really start getting interesting.