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salimoneus
06-04-2019, 01:06 AM
Tired of having your friends list be out of sync between all your toons? You know that you added your buddy's new necro alt to one of your toons, but were you on one of your several mules at the time, or perhaps was it your main?

Now you can eliminate all the guesswork and manual editing of character files, trying to keep a dozen or more files in sync. EQFriends is here to help!

Basic Mode

The Basic mode uses a fairly straight forward interface, and once a couple quick steps are completed it's as simple as a single click operation to sync all your friends at once. To get the program configured initially, just select the EQ installation folder, then select a Server, and the program will let you know if your friends are out of sync and you can simply click the Update Files button...

http://i.imgur.com/3yJUIbz.png

The number of combined friends is displayed in the window title "EQFriends (89)" in the above image. If you have over 100 combined friends as seen below, the program will indicate that deletions are required, and at this point you must switch to the Advanced tab to perform the deletions (See the Deletions section below for more info)...

Advanced Mode

In Advanced mode, you will be able to delete friends from the list, have full flexibility on which character files are updated, copy/paste friends from one toon to another, or even copy/paste friends from one installation folder to another...

http://i.imgur.com/0GPv0ok.png

By default it will pre-select all characters files in the left box for the chosen Server, but you can change the character selections and perform updates on whichever characters desired. For instance I could change the selection to only Edith and it would only show friends contained in the selected character files. Pressing the Update button would set the friends list for only the selected characters. However most people will probably just want to use the default behavior of having all characters selected, but the flexibility is there.

Deletions

Since the EQ client only supports up to 100 friends or ignores, pressing Update will pop an error message if there are more than 100 in your list. If this occurs simply switch to the Advanced tab and you will notice the friends list will be highlighted in red to indicate that deletions are necessary. Go through the list of friends and delete enough so that there are no more than 100, and then perform the Update again. You can see below I have too many friends in my list, 107 to be exact, so I have selected one for deletion and can delete it by hitting the Delete key:


http://i.imgur.com/GG1FYPX.png

Ignore Lists

The application can be switched to operate on the ignore lists simply by changing the mode selector from Friends to Ignored. Everything else will work the same.


Backups and Errors

If the Create Backups option is enabled, it will create backup copies of all character files before any change are made. This option is enabled by default, and I would suggest leaving it enabled to allow for a simple copy restore. The backup files are stored in the EQFriends_Backups folder under the EQ installation directory.

The tool will write all runtime errors to the EQFriends.err file in the same folder as the program itself. If you are having some issues or the tool does not seem to be working please PM me the contents of this file so I can investigate.


Preferences

The application does save your preferences, so in between each run it will remember your EQ Install folder, selected Server, and Backup option. It will start up with everything loaded as it was when last used, and allow for a "single click" update.

Technology and Download Links

This tool requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17851) so if you do not have that please install using the link provided.

The complete C# source code package is available, built with VS2010, as well as a zip file containing a Win32 executable. On Windows 7/10 it will save your settings to an XML file in the c:\users\myusername\AppData\roaming\EQFriends folder, and the location will vary on other versions of Windows. It is open source code with no viruses or ads, nothing but the code.

Latest release on GitHub: https://github.com/salimoneus/EQFriends/releases/latest

This program has been tested a fair bit and has seen several updates since the initial release. I'd like to thank those who have provided feedback thus far, it has really helped improve the tool. For more info on the history of EQFriends feel free to check out the old thread.

Please feel free to post feedback and/or any issues you may have.

Jibartik
06-04-2019, 01:18 AM
what is this dwarf magic

salimoneus
06-04-2019, 01:34 AM
what is this dwarf magic

it may look like just a dull rusty, but there be some power in this here slasher...

https://i.imgur.com/h4H8VRZ.jpg

Jibartik
06-04-2019, 02:05 AM
very powerful

Ghostly
06-04-2019, 07:14 AM
Not Classic.

salimoneus
06-04-2019, 02:50 PM
Not Classic.

Nope, neither is Discord but a lot of people sure do use it and find it useful. I guess if someone doesn't have any friends it's probably not so useful a tool.

Thanks for the feedback, always appreciated.

Jibartik
06-04-2019, 02:55 PM
Dont listen to em this is neat magic! Guys, this is why dwarves live in the mountains in caves away from humans.

DinoTriz2
06-04-2019, 02:58 PM
I want "clampiercer' to be my friend.

Hideousclaw
06-04-2019, 03:24 PM
I want "clampiercer' to be my friend.

salimoneus
06-04-2019, 03:46 PM
I want "clampiercer' to be my friend.

Hah was wondering if anyone would ever mention that, it's been in the screen shots for years. Too bad you can't just "like" or add an emote to a post or reply. This forum software must be as old as the game. And that would probably be...Not Classic.

loramin
06-04-2019, 03:51 PM
Hah was wondering if anyone would ever mention that, it's been in the screen shots for years. Too bad you can't just "like" or add an emote to a post or reply. This forum software must be as old as the game. And that would probably be...Not Classic.

The staff here actually tried to upgrade the forum software a few years back. Unfortunately they lost a couple of features that this version had in the process, and on top of that it just looked new and strange ... not to mention very un-1999.

After a great deal of complaining by the forum the staff reverted to the old(/current) version of the forum software.

Personally I'd love to see them try and do the upgrade again sometime, because I'm sure the newer features would be nice. They could avoid the past problems by making sure all the right functionality was enabled from the start, and they could use a custom skin to make it still look like an old EQ forum ... but after the savage complaints everyone gave them I can't really fault the staff for never wanting to even think about upgrading again :)

salimoneus
06-04-2019, 04:33 PM
The staff here actually tried to upgrade the forum software a few years back. Unfortunately they lost a couple of features that this version had in the process, and on top of that it just looked new and strange ... not to mention very un-1999.

After a great deal of complaining by the forum the staff reverted to the old(/current) version of the forum software.

Personally I'd love to see them try and do the upgrade again sometime, because I'm sure the newer features would be nice. They could avoid the past problems by making sure all the right functionality was enabled from the start, and they could use a custom skin to make it still look like an old EQ forum ... but after the savage complaints everyone gave them I can't really fault the staff for never wanting to even think about upgrading again :)

Yea it suits the purpose just fine, even if a bit clunky and spammy. Definitely not a big deal, just don't see many of these still hanging around. It's been a hellova long run for them through dev/testing/gming working out all the kinks with the game itself, they could use a much needed break from having more shit to do. Like being able to actually play on the new server. Imagine that!

Jibartik
06-04-2019, 05:25 PM
I would also like to send a friend request to clampiercer.

Iksar Master Race
06-07-2019, 06:41 AM
Reporting Clampiercer for naming policy abuse.

salimoneus
06-11-2019, 12:25 AM
Reporting Clampiercer for naming policy abuse.

Lame! He was a super cool barb rogue who I grouped with through my 20's on my first toon here. I hope he is reborn in greener pastures...

Iksar Master Race
06-11-2019, 01:44 AM
Lame! He was a super cool barb rogue who I grouped with through my 20's on my first toon here. I hope he is reborn in greener pastures...

Nah, I'm just kidding. I might use it as a surname on my Rogue.

ReadOnly
06-12-2019, 11:23 AM
badass tool salimoneus!! thanks so much for this

salimoneus
06-13-2019, 01:02 AM
badass tool salimoneus!! thanks so much for this

Glad you are finding it useful, cheers!

salimoneus
07-02-2019, 11:31 AM
Someone had asked what happens to the older versions of the character files, before they are edited by the tool. There was a concern about losing previous toon configs. Valid concern.

If the Create Backups checkbox is checked, and it should be by default, then the toon config files are copied into a backup folder before every change, so they can easily be copied back into the main folder to perform a restore. There is a small section about it in the main post under Backups and Errors. Being able to do a restore of a previous version right from within the tool is a feature that had been requested, just haven't had time to get to it yet.

Another feature request I've received is preventing a toon from having itself added to it's own friend's list. I think right now that's a fairly lower priority change since it doesn't seem to occur very often with most people, but I'll keep it in mind. Thanks for the feedback.

salimoneus
09-13-2019, 01:02 AM
Had another request to prevent adding a toon's name to it's own friends list, I think it seems to come up more with couples that have an IP exemption or something similar. I'll probably take a look at adding that in. Also considering adding a Restore feature so that you can very simply revert back to a previous set of friends lists.

a_gnome_collector
09-13-2019, 01:12 AM
a classy way to remove slackers ;)

salimoneus
10-25-2019, 02:23 PM
bump for Green release day, see yall out there!