Master_Yeti

That's great news! So glad to hear you already have this on your radar!

Rhongar

Hey Garan.

Took a (looong) break for a while but now working on my story again.
I've run into an issue and I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if something isn't working right.

For my quest I'm sending the player to gather 'intel' from mobs. The way I thought of implementing this was to make the quest count when a certain item drops. Went with a crafting item cause it's quite common yet not too common that it drops from any mob. Ofc I'm not telling the player that it's the item that updates the quest.

Now it works a bit weirdly. Played around with it a bit and found the following.
When I set the objective to:
Type: Receive chat
Next C: Use Transition
Depeds on: Select
Name: loot
Channel: Self Loot (36)
Message: You have acquired: [Polished Sword Sheath].

Because many folks use always loot all I also made one with the message
You have acquired: [Polished Sword Sheath] (Pending).

I also had a mob kill quest with it so I used the transition menu to make sure both combination (mob kill + loot & mob kill + pending loot) would advance the quest. But when I put it to practise it doesn't register a drop.

When I use an item with a dash in its name. So Rune-carved tablet for example, it doesn't register it either. So I used Rune%pcarved and that makes every single dropping item complete the quest. I can't seem to find a way to make the plugin register just the item I want it to. Do you have any idea how I can fix/change these results?

Garan

You could simply use the acquire item condition rather than trying to match the acquisition chat. If you still want to only allow acquiring the item (to prevent getting one from storage or another player causing the quest to prematurely complete) you can fairly easily. Note, the message actually has a lot of hidden characters that you can see using Anthology's chat log but you don't actually need to bother with them for this particular issue. Since you are limiting the chat to the self loot channel, you can ignore everything other than the item name which will help avoid the problem with the hidden tags as well as account for pending loot. The next issue I see in your pattern is you did not escape the square brackets, '[' and ']' are used in Lua patterns to define a set of characters and that definitely would have caused problems. As to the dash character, you should be escaping that as %-, not %p. You may however need to account for multiple quantities if the item can drop 2 or more at once (unique items like [Shadepaw's Paw] should not).

For instance,
You have acquired: [Chunk of Barrow-iron Ore].

is really:
Note, there is indeed a bug in the chat log that incorrectly replaces the hidden '<' character when displaying it. I'll make a note to fix that.

Anyway, the simplest way to match this is to just use the name of the item and the enclosing square brackets (to avoid matching anything else that contains your item description. Since the pattern match just looks for any message containing your pattern it will match. Note that "[", "-", and "]" are special characters in Lua patterns so you have to escape them with a '%'. You also should account for any items that might be acquired in quantities of 2 or more (such as [2 Polished Sword Sheaths])

So, your pattern would be:
Message:%[.*Polished Sword Sheath.%]

The '%[' matches '[', the '.*' accounts for any quantity followed by the exact item name followed by a single '.' to match zero or one characters for a possible plural and the '%]' matches the closing bracket.
Since you are specifying the loot channel, most of the possible false matches, such as someone linking an instance of the item in chat, etc. are already eliminated.

It may however prove significantly easier to just use the "acquire x items" objective type. The exact item needed isn't displayed to the user, just whatever you enter for the objective 'Text'. They will see a "0/x" next to the text but they still won't know what exact item they are looking for until they get it.

Rhongar

Thank you for you swift reply. Unfortunately I still have not managed to correct the issue. Forgive my ignorance but I know very little about coding and the like.

I tried copying the code for the item from the chat. (changing the < symbol so it matched the piece of code you gave me.
I tried the exact message you provided: %[.*Polished Sword Sheath.%]
Tried with both the sheath with which I'm testing it atm, and the item I actually want in the quest, the rune-carved tablet.

None of this registers a drop for me.
And yes I thought about using the acquire item option, but that requires the item to be present in the player's inventory. I myself always have a full inventory, taking out of pending loot what I want. I don't wish to tell folks the item they're after, but if I don't I foresee a situation where people simply don't put it in their inventory if it's in pending loot.

Garan

[Rune-carved Tablet] should simply be:
Message: %[.*Rune%-carved Tablet.%]

I will verify this live later (my test case was Barrow-iron Ore since I wasn't sure where Polished Sword Sheaths drop).

This may sound silly, but I notice you have the Next Chapter set to "Use Transition" - do you actually have the transition correctly defined? You could set a specific chapter for the Next Chapter to verify whether the objective is being met - theoretically you should still see a green checkmark next to the objective in the reader when it is satisfied but I thought I'd ask. FWIW, I double checked and Anthology warns you if you try to save a chapter with "Use Transition" without a valid transition defined so this shouldn't be the issue.

EDIT: The above Message definition is incorrect, I left out a '?'. Here's screen shots of the objective definition and transition of a working chapter using that objective:
Rhongar1

Rhongar2

If you still have trouble with it, I can send you the simple story definition with a sample objective that I used to test this.

One other thing worth noting, including an embedded item link in the chapter text will display a text only version of the item name in the current release. The next release (assuming I ever get back to working on plugins) will properly display a clickable item link in the chapter text (if the examination link is defined correctly). Not a big change, but a tiny QoL improvement.

Rhongar

Once again thank you for your reply. Still it won't work. Here are some screenshots of my setup atm and also one showing (well, not showing) the quest updating when the item drops.






I really don't get what it is that I'm doing wrong at this point.

Garan

Ah. Sorry, this one's all my fault for a bad copy/paste and a bad test case.

The message pattern should be:
Message: %[.*Rune%-carved Tablet.?%]

Note the '?' after the period, that means 0 or 1 occurrence of any character - I accidentally left out the '?' which meant it ONLY worked for multiples. That should fix the problem for you.

I updated the original screenshots to reflect the correct pattern.

Rhongar

That did it! Thank you so much! Getting that to work was quite the ordeal lol but now all good thanks to you. On with the story

Garan

You're Welcome. I'm going to look into adding a simpler way to copy and paste messages from the chat log to make this feature easier to use.

pinkkatie

After being on LOTRO for fifteen years I thought I would finally jump in and try out some plugins. I came along this one and I love the idea! Is this going to be updated in the near future? I see the author is currently active on the site, but this plugin hasn't been updated since 2018.

Garan

Thanks for your interest in Anthology.

There is nothing that would need updating in Anthology (or most other plugins) due to its age since the API has not changed significantly since 2014. There are a couple of known minor bugs in Anthology that I haven't bothered publishing a fix for since they don't have a serious impact on the plugin. While I have had a few ideas for additional features, unless there is significantly greater interest in the plugin, changes are pretty far down my ToDo list. RL has been keeping me quite busy so, unless you find a glaring, serious bug, I would not expect an update for quite some time.

Unlike some plugins that are intended to simply display in-game information in a different organization, Anthology is a system for publishing your own stories/tutorials. While publishing a fully fleshed out story with animations and significant plot lines (including potential forks and alternate endings depending on user interaction) will take a considerable amount of time, the flip side is that you CAN publish your own interactive stories, INCLUDING pictures and animations, something that is not really possible with any other plugin (there was one other attempt at a custom adventure plugin but it kind of fell short, especially on the authoring side, having nothing like the Storyboard in Anthology).

If you have any questions, please feel free to PM me here on lotrointerface.com

EDIT:
After reviewing the version history on my local copy, there was an unpublished change to account for the "/loc" chat command response that was changed to include the server ID. Without this change, the location trigger for advancing a story will not work correctly. I don't know of any authors that were using this specific trigger (it seems everyone transitions on making kills or acquiring items), but it should be fixed and will be updated soon.

EDIT2: The /loc change is published and available.

lotrofamily

I have only just stumbled on this plugin as I'm going through nearly all listings right now (that have been updated in the last 1½years or so).

As I have written LOTRO FanFic (and I'm waaaay overdue for writing another), this plugin really intrigues me, so I will be giving it a test spin.

Thanks!

FibroJedi