merlin's blog

As you have noticed, some guilds are having issues with LOTROster and Turbine's data feeds since they updated the my.lotro.com website..  This is due to the fact that inactive characters are now archived by Turbine, and any request for their detailed character data returns a "noCharacterData" error, which LOTRoster interprets as a hard failure, and makes it stop processing any further roster entries.

The short term solution for guilds using LOTRoster is to disable the fetching of Extra Data, which will at least let you get a basic roster working (and updating).  In the mean time I have already updated my internal build to gracefully handle this error message, and keep processing the roster, simply not updating the extra data for those archived characters.  I am waiting before releasing it because data.lotro.com should be getting some additional data next week, and I want to see if a) there's anything worth adding to LOTRoster, and b) nothing breaks in LOTRoster (it shouldn't, as I'm properly parsing the XML based on attributes).  Expect 1.3.0 to be available within a week or two at most.

Beside this change, 1.3.0 mostly consists of improved error handling related to data.lotro.com access,  and full support for character levels up to 65 (although the only issue with 1.2.0 is the Guild Chart filter limits queries only up to level 60).

As a reminder, you can subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified whenever new versions are released.  Just click on the orange RSS icon on the LOTRoster download page to subscribe using your favorite RSS reader - I use Mozilla Thunderbird myself.

EDIT: I misread the Turbine developer message.  Turns out the new fields are already published by the feeds, so expect 1.3.0 to be released sooner than first expected.

This is just too funny.

Yesterday, my boss was trying to renew our subscription to a Microsoft partner program.  He was trying, unsuccesfully, to fill out the form on their website.  So he ended up calling them to obtain support in filling out the online form.

After the Microsoft guy on the phone also encountered issues with it, he had to contact his own tech support within Microsoft.  They finaly figured out the problem:

I finally got around to implementing options that allows LOTRoster (and RMSA as well once I get the chance) to have fields allowing icons to be shown as either Text, Icons, or Text+Icons.  Here's a sample showing fields set as "Icon only" in the current development version of LOTRoster (in addition to custom rank names):

I'm hoping to have a new LOTRoster version available in a near future, after which I'll be implementing the same features in RMSA.

After a lot of work (helped by the fact that my summer vacation have been mostly rainy here), I have completed LOTRoster 1.1.0 and RosterMaster 4.1.4, and made both of them available for download.

Most of the changes in RMSA are actually features that I have written for LOTRoster and then ported back to its parent.  While nothing really major in appearance, I believe that some of them like the vBulletin integration will be appreciated by quite a few people.

On the LOTRoster front however, there's been a lot of work since 1.0.0.  The changelog might not be that long, but some of these (like all the new artwork support, tribes support, etc...) involved a good amount of work.   When I first released 1.0.0, I was pretty much in the dark as for how popular this would prove to be with the LOTRO crowd, not having the slightest idea of how many LOTRO guild websites were out there, how much importance those guilds put into their member rosters, etc...  The popularity quickly outgrew all my initial expectations as the word started to spread out there.  Every time someone downloaded LOTRoster Beta 1, God I killed a kitten bug. 

(Click on "Read more" for the rest...)

LOTRoster is now out of beta.  Version 1.0.0 is now available for download.

As this is essentially a port of my own RosterMaster StandAlone to the Lord of The Ring Online MMORPG, there's probably not a lot of additional features left to add (RMSA itself has been pretty much in maintenance mode over the past year, after over a year of very active development, including nearly monthly releases at one point).  During development, a couple of new features were added to accommodate some needs that were specific to LOTRO.  Basically:

• Offline Updating.  LOTRoster has to pull a LOT of XML pages from Turbine's website.  For load reasons (and as good etiquette), those separate page pulls are throttled at 1 page per second.  The need for offline updating then became essential, as opposed to RMSA that only has to pull 3 pages in total (one XML, one HTML and one CSV page).  However I still intend to port this one to RMSA, as for some large guilds it might still be beneficial.
• Multiple roster pages.  LOTRO has a LOT more stats available to third party applications.  This forced me to implement additional stats pages (which are optional and can be disabled), each with its own configurable template.  I doubt this will get ported to RMSA, unless people actually ask for it.
• Log filtering.  I was hoping to implement a more complete filtering system (that would, for example, let you search for entries related to a specific character).  It didn't make it into 1.0 as it would involve a fair amount of code (security is very important when implementing that kind of feature where a user can input text that gets used in a database query).  I haven't decided yet if it will appear in a future version and in exactly what form, but it's noted on my potential list of things to change.

And, of course, a few bugs showed up while working on LOTRoster that for some reason never appeared during RMSA development/usage.  A couple of bugs inside the charts generation code came up, and will also be fixed in RMSA.

So, what's coming next?  For LOTROster, it's wait-and-see for now.  I need to see what is the general response from the LOTRO community, to see if there is as much interest in LOTROster as there was in RMSA.  This is where your feedback is going to be important, as the amount of future development time will be highly influenced by the popularity of LOTRoster.

I have just made LOTRoster 0.9 Beta 1 available for download.  LOTRoster is a new web application written in PHP and based on my own RosterMaster StandAlone, but aimed at players of the Lord Of The Rings Online MMORPG.

The features are pretty similar to those offered to RMSA, with a few additions to handle all the extra data made available by Turbine (who did an excellent job at providing such a complete access to user data through XML feeds).  I have also implemented an offline updating system that is required for LOTRoster due to the large number of URLs it must access from Turbine's website to update its local cache.  I might eventually port this system to RMSA, although the performance of EQ2Players is pretty good these days, so there isn't much need for this feature.

Since it is a first public release, and also due to the fact that I am not a LOTRO player myself, I'm open to suggestions, comments, etc...  Please drop me a note if you do install it and even if everything seems fine, so I can get an idea of actually how much interest there is for LOTRoster.  This will be critical in determining how much further development time I should spend on this after version 1.0 is finalized.

Nearly a year since the last update...  I haven't done much on it over the past year (as TSO came and went without bringing any changes to the EQ2Players data feeds, which is both good and bad).  I figured it was time however that I pushed out this update, despite being relatively minor.  One new feature in it however, which is the ability to export your roster to a CSV file.  I initially wrote this bit of code because, as our raiding guild was gonna use a spreadsheet to maintain attendance and loot tracking, I wanted to avoid having to manually retype everyone

Hello everyone!  This is the sixth version of Merlin's Tower.  Two important changes:

1. Site moved to a new host.  So far this personal website had always been graciously hosted by friends of mine.  I figured it was time I paid for my own hosting solution, just to avoid any potential surprise.  Thanks a lot Mike for freely hosting this for the past ten years - that was really appreciated!
2. After having experimented a bit with a CMS (Joomla) in the previous version I decided to switch to a different CMS named Drupal.  This CMS is far less powerful, but for a personal website it also means it will be much easier to manage the content.  Joomla was more geared toward a large corporate site where you have multiple collaborators writing, reviewing and publishing content.  This new CMS will also make it possible for me to use my website as a blog, something I have been considering for quite some time.