Friends consolidation tool

[salimoneus]

Was wondering if there is anything out there that can help consolidate friends lists from serveral toons into a single list and then set that list for all toons. Have been toying with the idea of coming up with something like that but wanted to make sure I wouldn't be reinventing the wheel.

[IanelarAzure]

I haven't seen anything, but it wouldn't really be hard to do as long as you have the friends setup all on the same machine. Its just text files.

[salimoneus]

Nah shouldn't be too difficult at all.

[Nefarum]

I would love for this tool to exist.

[Doil_Boil]

It's called control + c and control + v :D

[fastboy21]

i don't have any friends...

can someone write a program to help me?

[myriverse]

i don't have any friends...

can someone write a program to help me?
Chat bots! How quaintly 90s.

[Thulack]

Go to your characters ini file and your friends are listed in it. Open up a new text doc and just copy and past all the names into file one then copy that back into all your ini's. You would have to do this each time you added new friends on each toon but its better then nothing.

[salimoneus]

The problem is that when you add a friend to one toon's ini file, it's not added to any others. So all toons ini files are out of sync unless you manually edit each one and figure out who has been added to which files. Plus they will be out of order in each file, so good luck trying to keep 8 or 10 or more (incl mules) all updated and in sync with manual edits.

[fastboy21]

The problem is that when you add a friend to one toon's ini file, it's not added to any others. So all toons ini files are out of sync unless you manually edit each one and figure out who has been added to which files. Plus they will be out of order in each file, so good luck trying to keep 8 or 10 or more (incl mules) all updated and in sync with manual edits.

its really not that hard...even if you don't have the computer know-how to write some basic code to do this without having to manually edit, it isn't that tough to manually cut and paste every once in a while if it is really that important to you.

[salimoneus]

its really not that hard...even if you don't have the computer know-how to write some basic code to do this without having to manually edit, it isn't that tough to manually cut and paste every once in a while if it is really that important to you.

You're right it's not that hard, but it could be time consuming depending on the number of toons, and if you're not careful you can accidentally delete some friends from one of several toon files. On the other hand pushing one button that updates everything seems easier and eliminates human error.

I take it you won't be a user of the tool, which is fine I don't expect everyone on the server to find it useful. For example people who rarely update their friends lists, they probably would see little value in it.

Others who are frequently adding someone's alt here and some other new player there, on different toons, they perhaps might find it useful.

[Yumyums Inmahtumtums]

Could put it in notepad when you add a friend. Can aslo tag why you added them in the first place. Nice for when you add a wizard or Druid porter for easy lookups.

[Deadlyfury]

Could put it in notepad when you add a friend. Can aslo tag why you added them in the first place. Nice for when you add a wizard or Druid porter for easy lookups.

This.

I had a spreadsheet with bad ass sellers, porters and people who were bad at grouping so I could stay away from them lol, was just easier to keep notes, otherwise you find myself asking people on my friends list why you added them lol

[Thulack]

You're right it's not that hard, but it could be time consuming depending on the number of toons, and if you're not careful you can accidentally delete some friends from one of several toon files. On the other hand pushing one button that updates everything seems easier and eliminates human error.

I take it you won't be a user of the tool, which is fine I don't expect everyone on the server to find it useful. For example people who rarely update their friends lists, they probably would see little value in it.

Others who are frequently adding someone's alt here and some other new player there, on different toons, they perhaps might find it useful.

If you care enough to want to keep your friends list the same then you will go through the time consuming process because there is no automatic way of doing it. But feel free to write a program to do it somehow. and i have 16ish toons that all have the same friends list so i know how long the process takes once every month or so. I mean honestly how many new people do you add to your friends lists in a given week?

[salimoneus]

If you care enough to want to keep your friends list the same then you will go through the time consuming process because there is no automatic way of doing it. But feel free to write a program to do it somehow. and i have 16ish toons that all have the same friends list so i know how long the process takes once every month or so. I mean honestly how many new people do you add to your friends lists in a given week?

If you add someone's new alt to one of your toons, you wait a month to add that friend to all the other toons you play? That doesn't seem very practical or convenient.

I think I prefer clicking one button, over manually editing a dozen or more text files to copy and paste which ever ones need copying. And even then each file is in a different order so you can't just do a simple side by side compare.

I still think it would be useful to have an app that creates an all-inclusive unique list of the friends from all toons, and then re-writes the friends list for every toon.

But if you enjoy doing all that manual work which is prone to mistakes, have at it :D

[Lunababy]

here ya go:
http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=172964

[Captiv8]

There's your answer! Funny it is currently the next thread

[salimoneus]

here ya go:
http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=172964

Interesting. Does it have a UI of any kind? What was it coded in? Is it an open source project? How does it handle the case where there are more than 100 combined friends on all toons for any particular server?

Normally I hesitate to run foreign executables from someone who I am not familiar with, and this goes double for someone with such a short history on the forums. Not saying there are any issues with your utility, but providing the source code goes a long way to alleviate these types of concerns.

Thanks for the link, will give it a look.

[Lunababy]

Interesting. Does it have a UI of any kind? What was it coded in? Is it an open source project? How does it handle the case where there are more than 100 combined friends on all toons for any particular server?

Normally I hesitate to run foreign executables from someone who I am not familiar with, and this goes double for someone with such a short history on the forums. Not saying there are any issues with your utility, but providing the source code goes a long way to alleviate these types of concerns.

Thanks for the link, will give it a look.

It has no UI as I purposefully wanted it to be an automated, invisible feature. Though with ideas popping into my head at the time about future features I imagined at least an options UI (for things like toggling ignore compilation, etc).

It was coded in c++ and is not (currently) open source. With more than 100 friends it will truncate the remainder (based on character file name). This didn't explicitly require code, it just compiles the first 100 friends it finds.

[salimoneus]

It has no UI as I purposefully wanted it to be an automated, invisible feature. Though with ideas popping into my head at the time about future features I imagined at least an options UI (for things like toggling ignore compilation, etc).

It was coded in c++ and is not (currently) open source. With more than 100 friends it will truncate the remainder (based on character file name). This didn't explicitly require code, it just compiles the first 100 friends it finds.

I had considered just truncating more than 100, but that didn't seem like a very good solution. I may try working up something more UI based and see if it goes anywhere.

Again, I would strongly urge that the project be posted as open source so the code can be verified as safe.

[salimoneus]

I have the bulk of the app written, just need to finish up some testing on the actual file updates. I decided to write a separate app since I do not run eqlauncher or any other launcher program, and I prefer not to interject anything into the normal start-up process if at all possible. Here is what it looks like in the early stages:


http://oi62.tinypic.com/15me684.jpg


Basically you select the EQ install folder, then select a server (list is built from whatever .ini files are found), it will then populate the Character box with all toon files from that server.

Then just select whichever characters you would like to combine the friends list for, and it displays a unique list of friends from all selected characters in the right box. As you can see, my list is over 100 (max supported by the EQ client), so I will need to delete a few from the list on the right before it will allow me to Update the selected character files.

It works exactly the same way with Ignore lists, so I added that as a radio toggle option. Ignore probably isn't nearly as useful anymore since the casinos were banned, but it was trivial to add support for that so it's in there.

I could probably post up a version now, but I'd like to do some more testing, and I also plan on adding a backup feature, so that in the event of something going wrong, the last good set of files will be available for a simple copy restore.

Comments/feedback always encouraged.

[salimoneus]

A pic of the server selection box with a few actual servers in the list:


http://oi60.tinypic.com/i558w4.jpg


The server names are parsed directly from the character .ini files, so they may not be as descriptive as I would prefer. They should still be fairly easy to figure out which is which though, and if not all you need to do is select one and see what toons are listed for it.

[Zaela]

was bored so I made one too: link (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70648819/downloads/P99%20Friends%20Manager.zip)

http://i.imgur.com/IR0SUcs.png

More or less like the above guy's, except it assumes you want the same list on all your characters on a server. If more than 100 names are found, excess names will be remembered and go into an overflow list which you can swap names from.

Can add/remove names in the tool, etc. Can also filter the lists of names, why not.

Changes are saved to all relevant files automatically; if you just want to copy the first 100 or less friends and ignores to all your characters, just start it up, select your server and it's done.

[Clark]

its really not that hard...even if you don't have the computer know-how to write some basic code to do this without having to manually edit, it isn't that tough to manually cut and paste every once in a while if it is really that important to you.

sounds tough to me!:)

[salimoneus]

I have released the initial version of this tool, it can be found here: http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=173380

Signing off of this thread.

[captnamazing]

praise for this