Casual Stroll to Mordor

LOTRO Plugin Compendium is an external program (available in Mac, PC, and Linux versions) for Lord of the Rings Online that takes all of the manual work out of installing plugins.

One of the few plugins that I miss from World of WarCraft is ArkInventory. And although due to Lua constrictions we don’t have a plugin that can match that utilities functions, Hugebag is definitely a step in the right direction.

The first review I ever did a review on the Plugin Manager that I personally use; however it seems that with Update 5 I will be ditching this manager in favor of the built-in manager that seems to be an (at least so far) undocumented change coming with the update.

This week we take a look at Gambit Helper from Zanttux. This plugin is something that I have definitely been in need of for a while. Although I have covered Warden plugins before I found myself needing something a bit more extensive.

Tasks are not something that I had a lot of experience with before this plugin. Sure, I would occasionally find some trash items that I could turn in here or there, but it was always difficult to figure out what items needed to be saved if I ran out of inventory space, which ones were safe to sell, etc.

A couple of months ago we sent out a post on Facebook and Twitter asking people what plugins they found to be a must, and without doubt Mouse Cursor Highlighter Advanced was one of the most popular ones that was listed. And although I had personally never used it before this, I was aware of the plugin and decided to give it a try.

If you’re like me, you like to have your backpacks organized in-game. But one of the issues that I have is how long it can take after an hour or more of playing to reorganize my packs into something resembling “order”. Enter, the plugin SortPack which will sort your pack for you automatically!

In this episode we take a look at Lyrical by Astleigh. This plugin allows you to write and store poems, lyrics, speeches, or whatever text you’d like and recite them back into the last chat channel you spoke in.

Last Thursday we released an article on my own views as well as some of the Player Developers of Plugins about the state of Lua (and to some extent skinning) in LOTRO. Amazingly enough, we had two readers (thank you Garan and Rulez) point out that Narrel, the developer who headed the release of Lua at Turbine, posted on Friday for the first time in a long time about the actual state of Lua.

In this episode we take a look at Palantir by Digital_Utopia. This plugin allows you to have a H.U.D (Heads Up Display) representing your vitals. It is one of the few plugins that I see as essential for all my characters.

In this episode we take a look at Emo by Frellco. This plugin allows you to create multiple groups of emotes for fast access. It also has the ability for you to create custom emotes and it is also “future proof” in that it allows you to add new emotes added by Turbine with a simple command.

In this episode we take a look at TonicBars by NuclearTonic. This plugin allows you to create multiple action bars that have a variety of customizations including size, visibility in combat only, visibility only when ctrl, shift, and/or alt is pressed, opacity, and even if it extends out additional quickslots.

In this episode, we take a look at the FilterBag by Betsiel. This plugin combines all your inventory bags into one large grid and adds a search bar so that you can easily find items within your backpack. It also includes a “Sort” button that will alphabetically sort your inventory as well!

In this episode, we take a look at the Songbook plugin by Chiran. This plugin creates an in-game interface that allows you to choose which song file (installed separately) you’d like to play, which part you’d like to play in the song, synchronizes group play, and includes a readycheck alias; which truly makes playing music in the game much easier!

It seems there’s still a bit of confusion out there on how to install plugins. Sometimes a video cannot be substituted for the written word, so I thought it would be good to go ahead and write up some written instructions to accompany my previous video.