EQFriends consolidation tool

[salimoneus]

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...

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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...

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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:


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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 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.