Dev Diary – Lua Scripting

The long awaited diary on the new Lua Scripting has been posted with some very cool insight from Narrel on the process to get Lua scripting into the game.  Even more exciting is the confirmation that Lua Scripting will be in the game at launch of F2P.  Granted Narrel does put some caveats in there, but assuming all goes well it will be in launch.

I’m always fascinated about how these things progress and appreciate the insight on how the internals of Turbine work.  This certainly sounds like an impressive effort from Narrel, ForsakenArcher, Agiclaw and Frosty with the support of the whole dev team I’m sure.  It was also very encouraging to see the beta community step up and not only try things out but post some pretty darn cool UI scripts.

At the initial launch they will restrict the system to the following areas:

• Quickslots – Allows for the creation and customization of additional quickslots.
• Player self-vitals – Exposes effect information as well as health and morale for only yourself – party member and target vitals did not make it in for this release due to time constraints and will be addressed in a future update.
• Inventory – Allows for custom organization of your inventory. For example, creating a single-bag view of your character inventory.

In addition Narrel is very specific to mention what applications they’re going to avoid, those being “bot-ing,” “macro-ing,” and things like gear score comparisons.  Also, notice in the list below they’re still not allowing you access to damage or healing output so we won’t see any sort of threat, DPS, or healing meters from this system either, which makes me VERY happy.

In addition to the launch features, they also have a few items on the planned list:

• Party member vital information
• Target vitals
• Vault UI
• Mouse cursors
• Chat window customization
• Kinship UI

Feel free to look at my post and video on the system as well as the video from Merric mentioned in this post and especially the posts from Mike mentioned in the comments of that post.

For me, this could be the single most anticipated system of the entire F2P launch 🙂

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Examples of the Lua Scripting Plugins

I played around quite a bit with the Lua Plugins during beta and I wanted to share some of the plugins that I really enjoyed.  I also suggest checking out the LOTRO Plugins site and keep your eye on the LOTRO Interface site for more details on the plugins and some help in how to actually script using Lua.  I will admit I didn’t write any plugins I just used them and tested them out.

Here’s a screenshot of my listing of the plugins I played around with:

A favorite for all you Wardens (and Hunters) who hate taking quickslots up with travel options, look at the right side of this shot:

It takes all the ports, maps, etc. and puts them on a scroll bar such that you can just select the one you want and use it instead of having all of them loaded.

I’m a bit on the fence about the bag-space options, but certainly I like the option to set them up in different ways.  Check out the before and after:

However, by far my favorite ones are the Plugins that allow you to re-orient how your vitals display looks.  In the below shots, just focus on the area at the center of the screen and not the Warden wheel section, I’ll get to that.  The area at the center is actually 2 plugins, Palantir and FX – FX is just the horizontal bar and Palantir is everything else.

Palantir puts up the big morale and power bars which for me are much easier to look at then the normal display.  It also has boxes at the bottom which light up when hit by a fear, poison, wound, or disease.  The FX Bar is a nicer customizable display of all buffs and de-buffs on your character.  The nicest thing for me is the “wheel” count-down that graphically shows how much time said effect has before it wears off.  I absolutely LOVE this as it REALLY helps know when things are coming on and off.  The top of the bar shows all the buffs I have up and the bottom any debuffs.  Another nice option is shown off below in that you can select buffs/debuffs and have them show bigger whenever that same effect comes up again as shown in this shot below:

You can see these in action in this quick video I took:

As for the Warden Trainer, it is a cool little script where you can right click and get a list of the gambits and it will populate the bar with the correct builders.  I can see that really helping folks out in learning the gambits or if there’s one critical gambit you always forget.  The gambit loaded below is Mighty Blow.

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Developers clarify the Lua Scripting in LOTRO

This was originally posted over on a Casual Stroll to Mordor but as I’ve gotten a few comments on this I figured I’d post it as well.  I’m glad to see we finally have a blue-name piping up on the forums to clarify what they’re planning to do with the Lua scripting.  Here’s the link to Frelon’s post and you can read the rest of the thread – or his text is below:

We wanted to clarify a few things about the potential implementation of LUA scripting. As it stands right now, the LUA scripting ability is completely controlled by us and its use is limited.
The Framework API, which controls what can and cannot be done, is separated into two main functional areas. The Framework API provides the basic structure of the scripts (classes), UI creation (windows, buttons, images, etc.), and a controlled setting to receive input, events, and actions generated by the game. The Gameplay API provides access to internal gameplay systems. The first pass of the gameplay API includes access to your own character’s vitals, the ability to interface with quickslots, and the methods for interacting with items in your inventory.
So what does this all mean? Right now, given the limitations we have in place, the “plugins” players can create are restricted to the above Gameplay API areas. They can change some of your UI elements, add built in HUDS and allow for things like a travel panel or a single window inventory bag. Our intent is to not allow players to make “plugins” that will give them any kind of advantage over other players. The main idea here is that LUA allows the players the ability to customize their user interface the way they want to.
We are going to handle things very carefully as we move forward; to be very clear, LUA Scripting is still in the early stages of testing and we don’t yet have a date for when the system will go live.

The big things for me are that they’re being careful about what they allow and that you only have access to your own stuff not others, which I assume also means you don’t have access to information on mobs either.  I think this is a great initial plan as it provides good utility and doesn’t open the flood gates to all sorts of other insanity (hopefully).

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Lua Scripting and LOTRO

I’m a bit behind here on the breaking news here, but as you can see on Casual Stroll to Mordor and the LOTRO Reporter Turbine is adding Lua scripting to LOTRO.  Now I know very little about Lua (even though I do have a programming background) but from what I have seen from the other folks it can be used to create add-on or mods to the game.  We don’t really know too much about what can and can’t be done with it, so this will be a bunch of speculation on my side but I figured I’d post a bit on what I’d like to see and what I don’t want to see.  I will be a bit biased and say that I love this concept, but I understand and can see the point for those who don’t agree with it.  For me there’s a line, as long as Turbine doesn’t cross it we’re all good, but if they do cross it (which they’ve proven to me at least they won’t) my assumptions could be totally off base.

I’m quite the fan of customization with regards to the User Interface (as my screenshots will show) and will admit that I’ve been a bit frustrated with what’s available currently to the folks willing to spend the time developing new UI skins.  For me, I’m really hoping Lua gives us more access to the sub-elements of the UI and just more options as a whole.

I will admit in this area that I’m not so much excited about what I can do I’m more excited about what others will be able to do.  I’ve been a huge fan of the LOTRO Interface site and am always amazed at what folks can do with the limited current assets available so I’m SO excited about what will be possible when that’s opened up.

What I want are ways to streamline the user interface to make it such that I don’t need a ton of buttons for all my horses or ports, or a better way to manage my bag-space.  I think those are my 2 biggest issues, quick-slots and inventory management so any options here would be very welcome on my end.  I also think there are many other ways the overall user interface can be tweaked to make it more friendly for the individual playing the game.

Now what scares me about this option is in the area of playing the game for you.  I want customization but not macros or idiot proof screens that allows folks to hit the “I Win” button.  To further explain this, I don’t want to see it possible to have a macro to automatically take a morale potion if you drop below 50% morale or cast a heal if player X is below 50% morale.  I personally don’t have an issue with alerts or popups that tell you to do something but I do see an issue with making that process automatic.  I’ve heard (although haven’t seen or played) the stories from folks from WoW so I will admit I am a tad skeptical that this won’t pose a larger problem down the road, but from what I’ve seen from Turbine I’m optimistic they can make this work.

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