Storing and sharing arbitrary text across characters
 

Hi folk!

I used to write some addons for Lotro and have a lot of fun with it -- and I have been getting that "write something" bug again. However, every single idea I've come up with, I've come across someone else that's done it already. ;) No problem of course, glad to see someone has already done it!

So anyway -- my latest little scheme is --- back in Lotro (yeah i know I keep saying that) there was a way to write up a "bio" for your character. I used to love that -- I'd get my characters to a certain level and would make a point of writing up their story that got them here. There's a lot of great lore in the ES universe so I think it would work really well with ESO as well, but there's no where to type up such a thing, and no way to see others write-ups.

So I thought hey! Maybe I can write an addon that does that:
1. Save an arbitrary block of text to be your bio (with a little UI)
2. Have some indicator to the rest of the world that you have a bio that can be read
3. Right click on such a player and choose like Read Bio or something to see it

However, I'm not readily seeing a way to read an arbitrary "something" from another player (in this case block of text and/or a flag), share it from yourself, etc. From what I'm reading -- there's decent chance this is strictly forbidden, but I wanted to bounce it off y'all to get your thoughts. Doable? No way?

Thanks!

The simple answer is, it is not possible and ZOS doesn't want addons to directly communicate between different players.

If you still want to do it, you'd have to do it in a similar fashion to how Tamriel Trade Center is sharing its data between players. That would require an external application for uploading and downloading, a server to distribute the data and ui reloads to save and load it. In other words not easy, potentially unsafe for users and "slow" to share data.

I've loved the LOTRO inspection feature and show the bio as well!
Tried to do something like this within ESO but due to the lack of the sahring of information, it was not possible.

Maybe sometoime ZOs wil lgive us an extra chat addon channel where we could shre this kind of information, but for now you could only use something like this:

Write an addon which recognizes incoming whisper messages. If the whisper message got a special format like "/w @accountname/username -showbio" then answer something.
But as addons are not allowed to write automatically to the chat the answering user would need to get a popup saying there is a bio request and if he wants to answer, then click yes and press return key so the chat message is send.

The send chat message would be a string containing all the info you'd like to share. Maybe an external link to some "sahre my bio portal online" as the string cannot be that long, only xxx chars in the edit field. MAybe use libBinaryEncode or other compression/serialization methods on sender/receiver end.

So for now this would have to code a lot, implement checks like "do not allow to spam ask -showbio requests", "do not ask if in fight", "do not ask if duell accepted", "do not ask if ...." and so on.

This is only an idea. But would work with all kind of users.
Other users would need tha ddon instaleld too in order to make this work.

If you are in the same guild you can use the guild history text of each account but it's crowded with several addons already and also not that long in char count.

If you are in a group one could use LibGroupSocket to send/receive data via a mapping but this also will only allow a distinct kind of text length and information shared, maybe only integer values (never tested or used it).

Well, crap. =) I kind of figured there was a good reason it wasn't already done by someone else.

Thanks to both of you for your responses!! I'm going to give it some more thought and take these ideas into account and see if I can come up with something, but so far it's sounding like I'd be straddling a line ZOS doesn't really want me to cross anyway. =/ I get where they are coming from though. Maybe I should simply pose it as a feature request for the game itself instead -- but then that could potentially open another can of worms. If they added bios built-in and addons could use them I bet folk could use that data field to do all kinds of things, whether good or not. ;)

Thanks again y'all!

One complicated possible solution would be to make some kind of server or website where people can put their bios, and then use RequestOpenUnsafeURL to send people to the proper URL. e.x. www.ESOBios.com/jadestorm or something.


Pure ingame solution, there's also ready checks which could be an option if the players are in group. Overall though, there just aren't really any good ways to implement it.

What you search is this addons:

In-Character - Role Play Addon: http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info2...PlayAddon.html

EsoRP - Communicative roleplay addon: http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info1...lpha.html#info

While In-Character requires you to ask/spread your bio ingame to share while EsoRP uses an exe to share the data

Oh wow! Ok I feel better about pursuing this with the RP mods in existence already. Going to look through the code of those two mods and considering integrating the website idea among others. Will be interesting to see how many folk actually use it if I go that route. =) I already have a server for other personal stuff I could tap into. Thanks everyone!! And of course if there are any more suggestions to share please do!

This is what I was going to suggest. Creating a companion site is the only way to go since it's outside of ESO.

In addition to Dolgubon's suggestion, the ability to generate dynamic armories akin to WOWs but not as complex or involved would be rad. The goal here is to show stats, class, equipment, achievements, and so forth in addition to character bio. I recommend JSON as a way to transmit all this data from the Addon to the site. Though, you may need to find out if doing that doesn't violate TOS. If it does you may need to save information to a file and have members upload it on the site. Or create a tool that'll automatically upload the file in the background after they log out.