Moruk's Hidden Forest Suite Software

[cbarrett]

I started playing on THF server in late 2013, and I immediately multi boxed. I found that I needed to maintain a large spreadsheet just to help me keep track of all my characters and their quests. I was boxing 6 to start with but I very quickly increased that to 12 and eventually 18, and I was constantly forgetting which quest step each character was on. It’s not fun to dig through each characters inventory and bank looking for quest items that may or may not exist, and maintaining the spreadsheet was cumbersome and not as convenient as I had hoped. I have very limited time online and I found that I spent too much time micro managing quest items rather than playing the game.

Being a software developer it didn’t take me long to start writing my own quest tracker software that automated these manual tasks. I never wanted to log into the game anymore to look through inventories and banks, and I didn’t even want to look at my magelo profile either because I’m just too lazy. I wanted something that would do all these things for me without ever having to log into the game.

I eventually expanded the software to include a character log-in manager. I got tired of maintaining windows shortcuts for all my different toons and individually clicking each icon to log in a different toon, so I built a piece to the software that will allow me to see all my characters at once and log in any of them with the click of a button. I modified it to allow me to setup named groups for my characters and log all of them in simultaneously based on group membership.

Eventually my software matured to the point that I thought it would be fun to share this with THF players.

Features to Date:

- Log in Manager

o Character creator that stores name, class, Everquest program folder, and optional login in name. Login name is optional but it is encrypted in the xml so you can share xml files w/o fear of exposing login names
o Group manager that allows you to assign characters to a group or groups, so that you can log in any particular group of characters with the click of one button

 Eg: I’m online with 6 but I’d like to log in my buffing team. With the click of two buttons I’ve got my buff team of 4 launched.
o Built in THF patcher that will (optionally) update the Everquest program folders for all of your characters with the latest THF files. This is the same functionality as the official THF patcher except it works on a larger scale and can be set to run automatically. It allows you to maintain current server files without having to run it for every individual Everquest program folder (useful if you box 18 characters and each have their own unique EQ folder)

- Quest Manager

o Assign any character to any quest to view the milestones of the quest at a glance
o Quest Monitor uses magelo behind the scenes to scour your inventory and bank for quest items. Select the quest you are looking for and click ‘Refresh Magelo Profiles’ if one of your characters looted something in game to update your quest progress
o Most pre T8 quests have already been created
o Quests are xml based so you can create your own. Useful since I doubt I’ll ever progress past the entrance of T7 so I don’t have first-hand experience with upper tier quests.
o Quest Monitor only works for quests that give physical items, it cant handle character flags.
o Completed quests to date:

 Charm 3.0, 4.0, 5.0
 Epic 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 2.8
 Class Ring
 Key quests – Ssra, Sleepers Tomb, Veeshans Peak
 Armor quests – Chaotic Armor, ToV Armor, Ancient Armor
 Augment Quests – Sleepers Tomb, Plane of Air
 Wall of Slaughter pets
 Xegony Isle Access
 Healing Automation
 DSK I & II Quests

- Inventory Search

o Search any or all character inventories for an item (either by name or by magelo ID). Quantities are inaccurate for stacked items because magelo doesn’t provide that information (ie: app will correctly tell you that you have (4) Icy Emblems but it will incorrectly tell you that you have (1) Qeynos Tea)

- General

o Can toggle custom wallpapers if setting enabled
o Can toggle auto updating of THF files if setting enabled. Not recommended if you use separate eq folders per character
o Can toggle downloading of all character magelo profiles at startup
o Can setup custom processes to be launched at startup (ie: eqbcs, MacroQuest2)

Under Development:
- Quests

o I’m still working on completing the quests. They take time because the app uses the alla clone ID of each item to ensure ownership, and in some cases I actually have to go do these quests over again to get some of these ID’s that I’m missing. Quests I’m still building include:

 Solo Aura, Raid Aura
 Armor quests – Powerful Armor

- Login Manager

o Attach logged in characters to their Windows processes so you cant try to log in the same account more than once

- Quest Builder GUI

o Currently quests are defined by directly editing XML. Someday I plan on making a nice gui out of this to simplify new custom quest creation

- Magelo “Wish” List

o Ability to associate desired focus affects per character (ie: Cleric -> Ancient Savings etc)
o Ability to view profile and compare to saved focus list to see what focus items are missing
o Ability to create alternate “wish” profiles to compare/contrast gear

 Are those new boots really an upgrade? You gain stats but lose Dark Thunder
 Which set of items allows me to maintain the highest possible level of Dodge, Defense, etc?

[cbarrett]

Here are some videos I've made of the software:

Create Your Characters

Create Character Groups

Assign Characters To Quests

Search All Character Inventories

Login Your Characters

[cbarrett]

Testing is over and the app is ready for use.

A big thanks to Belvino for helping me test the application and setup some missing quests.

Installation url: https://db.tt/9xxDvPqM

[Safiya]

Thanks for this.
You've put a lot of time into it and I appreciate the work.

[cbarrett]

Software development is my career and sometimes my hobby. I really like writing in c# and wpf, and I got tired of tracking everything with spreadsheets, so this was fun for me.

It's a work in progress, I'm currently writing the ability to select your favorite worn effect, focus effect, and skill mod for each character and have the app show you where you are missing the items and what is the best "tier: you own (ie you prefer focus effect "health" and the best you own is "dark")

[Drythe]

This is awesome man, cant wait to give it a shot. Thanks!

[Enrikk]

This seems great!

I downloaded this, and so far I think I understand the basics. BUT, when I used it the first time, my character setups were all brand new, without any of the hotkeys I created and such.

I logged out, and then loaded my toon up the normal way, and all of my stuff was correct. What should I do to not have to make everything over using your app?

Enrikk

[cbarrett]

when I used it the first time, my character setups were all brand new, without any of the hotkeys I created and such.

I'm not sure I 100% understand. Do you mean that your EQ UI was back to default and any custom macros and screen layout that you setup were missing?

Are you using Windows 7 or 8? I use 8 and have been using this app for about a year. I spun up a VM with Windows 7 and tested there for a while and it worked ok. Belvino was helping me test and he used Win7 too.

This is strange. There shouldnt be any difference at all between the way my app open Everquest and the way a Windows shortcut works. As long as you get the folder right everything else should work exactly the same as you are used to. All the application is doing is opening EQGame.exe in the folder you provided. I've got 21 different EQ folders on my pc and I used to run all my characters using their own instance of EQ, and I never had any of the issues you are describing. Because it's a pain to patch all those folder, I now only use 1 single EQ folder to run all my characters, it seems to work well.

Is it possible that when you setup your characters that you are pointing to a different EQ folder than your Windows icons are setup to use? You might look at your Windows shortcuts to make sure the folder you are using is the same one you setup for your characters in my app.

Here is a screenshot of one of my characters, it shows the folder where I run EQ.

[Shin Noir]

Thought of using Macroquest for this?

I used ItemDisplay to give some details about quests on THF. https://github.com/Xackery/macroquest/b ... isplay.ini

You can also do inventory scouring with MQ2, if you designed a MQ2 plugin you could do a lot of the stuff you describe, but you'd write it in C++.

I've been considering making a mq2plugin that works with REST to call a website to store your stuff. Kind of overkill, though, better off just getting in sync with the coders in THF and contribute to server instead of all this effort for quest management.

[cbarrett]

I was wanting something I could run outside of the game, in a big window. Something I could run a different monitor while I play, and also offline as when I wanted.