Helms Deep Lua Updates?

[Galuhad]

It's been a long time since we've heard any news or received any communication from Narrel concerning the Lua APIs. The last forum post was over eight months ago, on Oct 15th 2012 (post). Just wondering if we can expect any new APIs with Helms Deep? I know it's not 'officially' supported by Turbine, but the more APIs available, the more plugin authors can contribute to the game - which is a good thing

While raising the topic of communication, I have a little rant to share (sorry).

It really would be nice to see more dev interaction. There's a lot of posts with queries, suggestions, and feedback, it would be great to have posts confirming acknowledgement etc. The author community is fractional compared to the rest of the forum community, but we do add to the gaming experience of people playing LotRO. I just wish this could be recognised by the few devs involved - after all, they work so hard to develop the APIs for us to use in the first place.

Thanks,
Galu

[VincentAC]

I'm really hoping they add some new APIs for things like reading vendor inventories and the documentation is sadly out of date.

[Sapience]

As a non-supported aspect of the game and one that requires a dev to devote personal time and not work time to support, I wouldn't expect a lot of interaction. When a dev working on the system has time they may post, or they may do the work. Again, it's a pure volunteer project so set expectations accordingly.

[Elderban]

As a non-supported aspect of the game and one that requires a dev to devote personal time and not work time to support, I wouldn't expect a lot of interaction. When a dev working on the system has time they may post, or they may do the work. Again, it's a pure volunteer project so set expectations accordingly.

There is a plugin manager built into the game and LUA Scripting was used as a marketing tool for the game as well, yet it's not an "Official" part of the game?

And how can you expect players to freely create plugins when Turbine doesn't even support it?

Might as well just remove it from the game because, due to lack of support on Turbine's part, script writers have pretty much given up on it.

[Erroneous']

Can the players make an official request for LUA to be a supported part of the game?

How about a kickstarter to fund dev time to bring LOTROs LUA up to date ? I'll chip in $100 over and above all the money I have spent here in the last couple of years.

[Dvarlin]

Can the players make an official request for LUA to be a supported part of the game?

How about a kickstarter to fund dev time to bring LOTROs LUA up to date ? I'll chip in $100 over and above all the money I have spent here in the last couple of years.

+1 to the idea of a kickstarter - I am in limbo waiting for an update to this. A trick is being missed here as an update to the LUA functionality could really inject new life into the game.

[Piedtendre]

As a non-supported aspect of the game and one that requires a dev to devote personal time and not work time to support, I wouldn't expect a lot of interaction. When a dev working on the system has time they may post, or they may do the work. Again, it's a pure volunteer project so set expectations accordingly.

I feel very bad about this, many players are spending a lot of time and hard work on this, for the benefit of the whole community, and for free.
Many, many players are using LUA pluggins, some of them are even indispensable !
This is a big bonus for Lotro.

"it's a pure volunteer project" that's the problem, shame.

[Dvarlin]

Stances are changing - any word on if we are getting stance enumeration updates?

It is also interesting to read we are getting bars that proc as well - Sounds like stuff we (As in LUA authors!) added in our plugins!

You have stolen my idea! It was my precious, MINE!

*grin*

[Galuhad]

Stances are changing - any word on if we are getting stance enumeration updates?

It is also interesting to read we are getting bars that proc as well - Sounds like stuff we (As in LUA authors!) added in our plugins!

You have stolen my idea! It was my precious, MINE!

*grin*

I believe they have been - from what I can make out these are the only updates to Lua in HD. Disappointed.

[Dvarlin]

I believe they have been - from what I can make out these are the only updates to Lua in HD. Disappointed.

I too wish there had been a bigger update, but - my biggest worry was that the work that had been done thus far would not be maintained. If the enumerations are being updated then time is being spent on the project. A step in the right direction.

[Narrel]

Howdy folks,

Apologies for the radio silence for so long: I was temporarily not on the project for much of last year and really didn't get any time to work on the Lua stuff. I just got around to getting my forum name fixed back up now that I'm back and I haven't forgotten you guys! I believe Frosterra and Ransroth made some bug fixes/small additions to the system while I was gone. I will follow up when I can to see where everything is at and catch up on it all. Just be patient with me since it may take a little while. As Sapience said, this is still very much a side pet project so I can't make any promises with how much I can do for it amidst everything else but this is still a labor of love for me so I'll see what I can do.

~Narrel

[Garan]

Howdy folks,

Apologies for the radio silence for so long: I was temporarily not on the project for much of last year and really didn't get any time to work on the Lua stuff. I just got around to getting my forum name fixed back up now that I'm back and I haven't forgotten you guys! I believe Frosterra and Ransroth made some bug fixes/small additions to the system while I was gone. I will follow up when I can to see where everything is at and catch up on it all. Just be patient with me since it may take a little while. As Sapience said, this is still very much a side pet project so I can't make any promises with how much I can do for it amidst everything else but this is still a labor of love for me so I'll see what I can do.

~Narrel

Great to hear that you are back and officially looking into dusting off the unofficial Lua API pet project. I don't know what your priorities will be but I do know there are a few significant client crash bugs that have been long outstanding and prevent a number of good plugins.

My personal pet peeve is the SetBackground client crash for non-image resources (and no way to verify that a resource ID is valid before passing it to SetBackground) which has been around since the initial release of the Lua API. Another significant client crash is related to the GetEquipment method which will crash the client after plugins are loaded/unloaded a couple of times (often on a single load/unload cycle). I haven't read back through the current issues thread lately but there are a number of other significant bugs lurking around.

If you're interested in what kind of enhancements Lua authors are most interested in, the most talked about issue seems to be regarding items and the lack of a means to programmatically retrieve an item ID from an Item or ItemInfo (preferably both generic and unique IDs when available) with additional item specs like item level and stats being a close second. I'm pretty sure there would also be some interest in Quest log and Deed log APIs.

Perhaps when you've had a chance to catch your breath and review the current state of Lua you might find time to give us a heads up on what you plan to work on or better, give us a poll with several choices so the authors can give you feedback on what we would find most useful. That would not only help you prioritize development and maintenance but would also help revitalize some Lua authors' interest as a number of authors have given up and moved on to other projects.

[Galuhad]

Howdy folks,

Apologies for the radio silence for so long: I was temporarily not on the project for much of last year and really didn't get any time to work on the Lua stuff. I just got around to getting my forum name fixed back up now that I'm back and I haven't forgotten you guys! I believe Frosterra and Ransroth made some bug fixes/small additions to the system while I was gone. I will follow up when I can to see where everything is at and catch up on it all. Just be patient with me since it may take a little while. As Sapience said, this is still very much a side pet project so I can't make any promises with how much I can do for it amidst everything else but this is still a labor of love for me so I'll see what I can do.

~Narrel

Thank you for taking the time to stop by and let us know. You have no idea how grateful I am just to see your post. There have been a few things driving me crazy with the API over the past year(s) that I hope you'll find time to adjust in the not-to-distant future.

Great to hear that you are back and officially looking into dusting off the unofficial Lua API pet project. I don't know what your priorities will be but I do know there are a few significant client crash bugs that have been long outstanding and prevent a number of good plugins.

My personal pet peeve is the SetBackground client crash for non-image resources (and no way to verify that a resource ID is valid before passing it to SetBackground) which has been around since the initial release of the Lua API. Another significant client crash is related to the GetEquipment method which will crash the client after plugins are loaded/unloaded a couple of times (often on a single load/unload cycle). I haven't read back through the current issues thread lately but there are a number of other significant bugs lurking around.

If you're interested in what kind of enhancements Lua authors are most interested in, the most talked about issue seems to be regarding items and the lack of a means to programmatically retrieve an item ID from an Item or ItemInfo (preferably both generic and unique IDs when available) with additional item specs like item level and stats being a close second. I'm pretty sure there would also be some interest in Quest log and Deed log APIs.

Perhaps when you've had a chance to catch your breath and review the current state of Lua you might find time to give us a heads up on what you plan to work on or better, give us a poll with several choices so the authors can give you feedback on what we would find most useful. That would not only help you prioritize development and maintenance but would also help revitalize some Lua authors' interest as a number of authors have given up and moved on to other projects.

I agree with what Garan has written. The main crash I experience is when using the GetEquipment method, which is frustrating because it has a lot of potential.

Secondly, with regards to the items, you have no idea how much it would mean to me to have fully functioning item APIs that'll basically give us everything the old data.lotro.com API did. I have an addon (Tulkas) which utilises a rather large items database which we have to build ourselves. At the moment it has about 61,800 items, half of which came from the old Lorebook API, the other half have been added manually by myself, users of the addon, and some very dedicated Russians Everything about the item has to be physically entered into the database, from the name, item level, and required level; to class, quality, and individual stats. Needless to say, it is very time consuming. Finding new items to add is not so difficult as the IDs tend to follow on from each other between updates. However, maintaining items when the stats have changed, as I believe a few are set to with U13, is a mammoth task in itself. There is no way of knowing without physically checking each item in the database against those in-game. It's such a task, it has literally given me grey hairs.

I would love to see a fully functioning item API with ways to get an item ID and create item instances from given information (for example, an item ID may produce different variations depending on the item level). As an example, at the moment if I want to get the items from a players equipment, there is no way of linking accurately the items to those in the Tulkas database because the only thing to compare with, really, is the name. And names are not always unique. To be able to get the item ID directly would eliminate any possible confusion about the item equipped.

An even better update would be to retrieve everything about that item within the API. This thread has some ideas of the sort of information that would be useful. It would make maintaining the Tulkas database significantly easier. It would also open a world of possibilities for many other types of addons.

Anyways, that's enough of my ramblings Welcome back, I hope to hear more about your plans as you get more settled.

[Narrel]

Thanks for the info folks! The first thing on my to-do list for Lua updates is definitely to try and brush the dust off it and address any big bugs/crashes that have been lingering around. As for additional systems, I haven't come up with a plan of what to do first but I will definitely take a look at the item info stuff and see if I can expose some more data bits for it.

[Galuhad]

Thanks for the info folks! The first thing on my to-do list for Lua updates is definitely to try and brush the dust off it and address any big bugs/crashes that have been lingering around. As for additional systems, I haven't come up with a plan of what to do first but I will definitely take a look at the item info stuff and see if I can expose some more data bits for it.

Thank you, that would be awesome if you could

[Valamar]

Thanks for the info folks! The first thing on my to-do list for Lua updates is definitely to try and brush the dust off it and address any big bugs/crashes that have been lingering around. As for additional systems, I haven't come up with a plan of what to do first but I will definitely take a look at the item info stuff and see if I can expose some more data bits for it.

Greetings!! Welcome back.
I finally got a "heads-up" email from this thread last night (5/5) so, the Lua API is not the only thing "broken." (Possibly related to the fact that "What's New?" in the forum is also broken.)

At any rate. The Lua Interface from the Mac Client point of view appears to have some kind of Timer-runout problem.
Some percentage (I haven't done any kind of statistics but it appears to be 50%) of the Mac Client crashes have a pointer to the Lua API.

I've shipped stacks of dumps in as bugs in the past year, most recently for the period 13.0 to the end of the month.
Needless to say, I have no idea where they go or what (if anything positive) has been done with them.

The particular "event" happens with the client simply sitting there -- any place -- not doing anything -- some update takes place and throws a (SIGBUS) - address failure and Kernel Protection failure at "0x0"

[Thurallor]

Hi Narrel, welcome back. I just wanted to say that I think the Lua interface is really cool, and I very much enjoy writing plugins with it. (Even though I rarely finish any of my projects.) So, thanks for making another way I can enjoy this game.

Is there any chance you can create a mechanism for passing strings between players? This was probably proposed long before I ever came along, and was deliberately not implemented for philosophical or practical reasons. If so, what is the policy, or design goal, that would preclude it?

[Kalidori]

Thanks for the info folks! The first thing on my to-do list for Lua updates is definitely to try and brush the dust off it and address any big bugs/crashes that have been lingering around. As for additional systems, I haven't come up with a plan of what to do first but I will definitely take a look at the item info stuff and see if I can expose some more data bits for it.

I seldom post in the forums but LUA is such a nice feature to have in LOTRO so i have to say THANK YOU for looking at this again.