Cairenn

Originally posted over here.

Digital_Utopia

This was posted by mistake on Palantir's page, but since it is good advice, I'll repost it here where it does more good.

Apparently I'm at least consistent with my spelling mistakes, and seeing as how every time you update a Sidebar Gadget, the installer will wipe your settings, this is really the best way to fix it - without having to do file system olympics in the process of fixing it.

The next update, which will provide support for EU servers, will also come with Dwarrowdelf spelled correctly Sorry for the troubles, and thanks again to Krunj82 for taking the time to give that mini-tutorial

Digital_Utopia

v9.4 has been uploaded and is awaiting approval. This version includes a spelling fix that was preventing Dwarrowdelf players from adding characters, as well as the addition of (formerly) EU servers to the list.

Former Codemasters players should check the section above, titled:

To European (Formerly Codemasters players)

for more information.

mglinka99

Hi!

Very nice gaget, unfortunately not working for EU players .

For those who can not finde the gadget after installation.

Unzip the gadget to a folder. You will find a folder "en-US".

If you are a german guy like me, you have to rename this folder to "de-DE".

After that you zip the whole thing and rename the zip to "LotROchar.Gadget" without zip extensions.

Now the installation works.

regards

mglinka99

Digital_Utopia

oops!

new version uploaded (v0.9.4.1)- with localization stripped from it. Should work on all Vista/Win 7 systems, no matter what language/country.

The gadget will, however, remain in English only until such a time that Turbine introduces multi-language item data.

rafalek

Hello,

I just noticed that the EN-RP Server Laurelin is missing form the selection drop-down list.

Digital_Utopia

Good catch!

After taking another look, Gwaihir was missing as well - both of these have been added in 0.9.4.2. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

rafalek

Anytime, Sir Thank you for your bombastic work!

Wicked Mouse

Would it be possible that if I create a second gadget instance on the desktop, that I could manage a second list of characters (so that they don't share libraries)? For instance so one could have a gadget with only freeps and a gadget showing only creeps.

Digital_Utopia

The only way I know to do that is to make a copy of the installed gadget folder, with a new name, and change the gadget's name in the xml file to tell them apart

Wicked Mouse

It occured to me that the tooltip of the class slots show the same as the crafting tools, on every character =)

Digital_Utopia

I'll check it out when I get home. Should have an update later this morning

aaaaand....9.4.3 squashes yet another bug. Thanks for the feedback!

Adder

After a lengthy absence from LOTRO, I came back last summer and started over on a new server. I recently decided to start making use of the plugins and skins available since there are so many more now than when I left in '09. While perusing I found this golden nugget and I absolutely luv it! Thanks for the effort and work you've put into it!

That said, I do have a few requests/suggestions for the gadget...

1. Would it be possible to add the character's coin to the display?
2. Are you planning an update to account for the changes to mitigation, finnesse, etc?
3. Would it be possible, instead of displaying the first character's panel as default, to instead (or as an option) display a list of selectable characters?

On item #3, what I'm getting at is the fact that for altoholics like myself , the linear list is a real hassle to go back and forth through to find a particular character. I have 9 characters on one server alone (not counting the Creeps) and have a total of 24 spread across 5 servers with an additional 10 Creeps. If I add them all to the gadget, it would be a tedious chore to search through each one to find that one character. It would be much easier with a list of selectable characters, accessable at anytime, and perhaps sortable by server, alphabetically (or custom such as by level, rank, race, class, etc.), and Creep/Freep.

If not on any or all of the three, no biggy though. It's still a very handy and useful gadget.

Digital_Utopia

First off, I'm glad you like it, and of course, welcome back!

Sadly, the first two (coin/new stats) aren't possible right now. This gadget is, for better or worse, at the mercy of Turbine's character data API, which hasn't really seen much of an update in what data is available, for probably over two years now. So not only is the latest RoI stat types unavailable, but same goes with the slightly older stat types introduced around SoM.

Coin on the other hand is simply not available due to privacy concerns. As the API is essentially public (with a Turbine provided API key), there's no player-based security on it. Therefore, information that's considered "sensitive" isn't included. This is also pretty much why you're forced to add each individual character, instead of a much more user friendly way that would simply allow you to "log in" and automatically get all your characters. While some web voodoo, involving logging into lotro.com and farming such data from my.lotro.com would be technically possible, there's no acceptably safe way to do so (especially with this gadget) without placing undo risk on a player's account security. Something I'm, understandably, not willing to do.

As far as the list/sorting goes - that's another great idea, and while that is technically possible, it's not going to happen with this particular gadget. To be fair, I need to give a little background. When I started this project, I wanted to take advantage of the fact that Windows Sidebar Gadgets would be able to be used by pretty much anybody with Vista (and now 7), without requiring any additional third-party downloads. While that advantage is certainly true, it turned out that's about the only advantage there was. Windows Gadgets suffer from display issues (anything outside of the core gadget produces pink artifacts), structure (two display "pages" and a single options window), and primitive user data (stored in an .ini file, as opposed to a database). All together it makes the ideas of not only sorting, but displaying such a "picker list" in the first place, about as excruciating and feasible as walking barefoot through a pile of broken glass.

These limitations are basically why I decided to create a new gadget using Adobe AIR - hoping that most users would welcome the numerous benefits (including being cross-platform) for their trouble of having to download AIR to use it. While that gadget certainly looks/performs about 100 times better than this one, displays every last possible bit of available info, I found out shortly after the first release, that AIR will either work beautifully, or not at all - no matter what you do. The nice part about it is that such a sortable list would be more than possible - as user data is stored in a mini local database, and there's more than enough flexibility to give that picker list room to exist. However, I don't like leaving whether one can use it or not up to, what for all intents and purposes is, fate. Even still, I do encourage you, if possible, to check out that AIR version. If it works for you, it's a much better experience overall - at least in my humble opinion.

The final attempt is likely going to use what's known as Kludget Engine, which is basically a third-party utility that allows one to use Mac OS X type widgets in Windows and Linux. However, at this point - I'm kinda up to my ears in projects - both LotRO related and other. As far as LotRO goes, I'm in the middle of a major rewrite for the next big version of Palantir - a Heads-Up Display (HUD) plugin, and once that's done, it's back to working on what's essentially going to start out as a LotRO Herald equivalent app for Android devices, named Thelyn (Sindarin for "Heroes") Which, is really taking this gadget idea to the most logical extreme.

At any rate, sorry for the novel - I just felt it was more fair to give reasons, instead of just saying "thank you but no"

Adder

Thanks for the welcome back and for the nov, errr, reply. Seriously though, I appreciate it. I had no idea the gadgets were so restrictive. As for the coins, I can understand that. It's too bad Turbine couldn't take a look at the API CCP uses for EVE Online which uses two types of personal keys per character that can be used to access different levels of info for your characters, the second being just about anything in the game. It is a very secure system and yet gives a LOT of freedom for third party mods and applications outside of the game which are all but indespensible since the EVE player has to deal with huge volumes of info to be effective ingame.

I'll give the AIR mod a try this evening. I already have all of Adobe's apps on my system including AIR so I don't expect any difficulties. I only went for the Sidebar Widget because I keep the SB open all the time on my second monitor and have used various gaming gadgets there in the past.

I can understand too that you don't really have the time since both the gadget and the widget are really more for a limited audience while your other projects will in all likelihood be of more use to quite a few more players. Thelyn sounds awesome! I'll have to get my Droid operable again (its on the fritz atm) so that I can try it out. And I'm looking forward to the Palantir rewrite too. I just downloaded it along with a boatload of other mods which I'm going to attempt to put together into one HUGE Skin along with some of my own elements if I can get them to all play nicely together. I'm not a coder by any stretch of the imagination but I learn fast and have played around with other gaming skin/mod languages like the one for Everquest II (years ago) with some success. I've been downloading and reading everything I can get my hands on about Lua. Should be fun (or a total disaster o.O).

Anyway, thanks again, and good luck with all of those projects!