This article was one of the most popular posts on my old site, A Wall of Text.  I’m reposting it here by request as the old site is no longer available.

I recently took a few hours to finally dig into the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning’s macro and scripting system. I had been meaning to do this for a while now, because I have looked long and hard across the great wide internets for a guide, tutorial, or any other tidbit of info about this. I was unable to find anything substantive about it until the API turned up in a mostly documented form over at thewarwiki.com. I had read that Mythic will be fully supporting mods and Lua scripting for War, but I had yet to even see how to make a basic macro. Well, I finally figured it out and have plenty of info to share with you for those curious about macros and scripting in Warhammer Online, complete with another narrated video. Read after the break for I’ve been threatening to get into mod development at some point (I have a background in web development and programming) but I know how time consuming that can get and have decided just to stick to poking around the macros and basic scripts that can be used in most games. I think that trend will continue in War, but its worth mentioning that the objects, properties and methods listed in the API documentation are the same ones used by mod makers. I am just tapping into that in a small way by putting scripts into small macros. Let’s dive into the video and then I’ll do some follow up after:

What I forgot to mention in that video, was that apparently a way to easily open the macro window was added so there’s really no use for the script command that opens the window. Just hit your ESC> key and choose “Macros” from the menu that appears to open the window!

Ok class, lets review, step by step. Here’s how you make a basic macro in War. This is accurate as of the time of this writing: (click an image below for a larger view)

1. Hit the <ESC> key and click the “Macros” option. Your macro window will appear. Alternatively, you can type in the following script to launch the macro window:
   /script WindowSetShowing( “EA_Window_Macro”, true )

   

2. Next, click on a macro slot that is empty. When empty, it will say “NO ICON SET” like in the picture below:
3. Next to where it says, “Macro Name” click the empty icon to pick your icon picture for this new macro. After you select an icon picture it will be shown in the slot:
4. Type in a name for your macro where it says, “Macro Name” and type in the actual macro commands where it says, “Macro Text”. In my example below, I called it “Assist” and the macro text is “/assist”:
5. Finally, click the icon in your macro window and drag it to your hotbar where you can click it or use a keybind to execute it:

And that’s it for making a basic macro!

If you weren’t able to discern what it was that I typed in the videos, here’s a few of the commands:

Target self:
/script TargetPlayer(towstring(GameData.Player.name))

Target player by name:
/script TargetPlayer(towstring(‘playernamehere’))

*note: /target playername works just fine too

Open bags:
/script EA_Window_Backpack.ToggleShowing()

Open Macro Window:
/script WindowSetShowing( “EA_Window_Macro”, true )

As I said before, the full API is documented (mostly) at thewarwiki.com, so go check it out as there are tons of commands there to experiment with. Give me a shout with cool macros you guys find, if I get enough submissions I may start a new macros site or page here for them!

As a reminder, here’s the tips I mentioned in the video:

- To scroll through the previous text you’ve entered into the chat window, press <SHIFT> + <UP ARROW>

- Right click any chat tab and choose Command Lists>Commands or Command Lists>Emotes to see a list of either. /help shows the command list also.

© Posted by br3ntbr0 for Im Talkin Games with One comment on 05/29/2010.
Posted in: Technical, Tips Tags: Macros, Warhammer Online

It has been many many months since we built our machines at home.  Tarkheena and I both build new machines every couple of years.  On this last build, we installed Win XP Pro on our two main gaming machines.  I foolishly didn’t anticipate how XP Pro wouldn’t play as nice with the XP Home machines on the network and set myself up for a permission-setting fiasco.  Luckily, I built a server a couple of years ago and installed Windows Home Server on it.  This serves as a file and print server, media server, as well as a backup device.  I won’t go into too much detail at this time, as that isn’t the purpose of this blog.  Suffice to say that the WHS has saved my bacon a couple of times.

As XP machines tend to do, performance degraded over time, as the registry slowly gave up it’s integrity to multiple installs and uninstalls.  So we decided to make the leap to Windows 7.  Since we both have machines that support a larger amount of addressable memory, we also decided to make the leap to 64-bit.  For the uninitiated among us, 32 bit Windows capped your memory at 4 GB, and it really didn’t quite make use of much over 2GB of user space.  Windows 7 64-bit (Ultimate, Professional, or Enterprise) will address up to 192 GB of physical memory.  Obviously much more than today’s motherboards will support.  Needless to say, the more headroom your applications have in memory, the better they are going to run.  This is because accessing the physical disk is one of the slowest processes in your computer and so if that can all happen at once, and up-front, the machine will do much better.

Windows 7 seems to be a little less of the pig, as well.  That is to say that it seems to run better on the same machine than Windows XP did.  This is a remarkable turn-around in Microsoft’s practices where previously each new OS was intended to take advantage of new as-yet-unavailable pieces of hardware.  In other words, products were designed to eat processor clock cycles so their friends at Intel could sell you a new computer.

As a discalimer, I should mention that I didn’t take advantage of the migration tools that MS offers, because I wasn’t comfortable with how they work and I don’t like to be my own guinea pig.  It’s always much easier to do with someone else’s data and asking them “Are you SURE you want me to try that?”  ”Well OK, then.”  Having Windows Home Server with a complete backup of the network does add a level of comfort to the process though.  And I’m glad I had it.

Tark and I decided to just add a new hard drive to each machine (you can never have too much storage) and change that to the primary partition and install the new Win 7 there.  That way we would have all of our data on the old drive, and a fresh shiny new Windows 7 installation on the new one.  In the interim, if anything catastrophic happened, I could always switch the boot order and get back to status quo.  Nothing bad happened, but there are some consequences to migrating already-installed games from XP to 7.

First of all- since Vista, Windows has changed the way that it stores user data.  I won’t get too technical but suffice to say that there is more to the change than renaming your “My Documents” folder “Documents.”  This causes difficulty if you try to migrate games from one platform to the other, because saved data, patch data, etc., might not be where the program expects to find it any more.  Or more accurately it’s not in the NEW place Windows is looking for it.  This happed for us with both WoW and Torchlight, while the remainder of my Steam games were perfectly happy with me doing a new Steam install on the new drive and copying all of the game files over.  For the Torchlight saved games I had to find where it used to store them, and then it was a simple copy and paste to the new location.  Not bad but not something every gamer is going to be comfortable doing.  When I moved the famously portable WoW directory to the new location it really messed with my Curse installation.  It mostly ran fine once I upgraded to Curse Client 4.0, until the mini patch Monday night.

On both machines, once WoW started to patch, it seemed to be confused about where it was in the patch process and it seemed to basically repatch everything from v 3.0.  While annoying and time-wasting, this was hardly a deal breaker.  On my machine, right-clicking on the patcher and choosing to “Run as Administrator” cut down a little on UAC asking me if I was sure so often.  Yes, I’m sure, Dammit!  On Tarks’ machine, however, there was a glitch.  Somehow one of the important WoW files got deleted.  WoW objected at the end of each patch.  Having the server backup I was able to find and reinstall the missing file and after that and a lot of patching WoW seemed happy.  It’s pretty much run better than it did on XP since.

So here is my recommendation to you guys.  If you are technically savvy and feel comfortable moving things around in your system, you can do what I did.  For two computers I spent the better part of a day messing with stuff, reinstalling certain apps, toying with the interface.  I lost some things that I can’t find the install disks for, but that was going to happen no matter what I decided on a new OS.  If you aren’t as savvy, You may want to use the Windows migration tool, do a migration and reinstall all of your games from disks.  To do that you will need to use an external hard drive, so that may be an additional expense for you. You can probably check the game’s forums right now and get good information about migrating since so many people are doing it at the moment.

Now that it’s mostly done (I still have one more machine to migrate) I have to say that I’m pretty thrilled with Win 7 so far.  It’s lighter and faster, and the interface is a step ahead of XP for sure.  The networking is so much simpler it isn’e even close.  And I love being able to use all of my physical memory.  I’m giving it a “thumbs up” as long as you follow the caveats above.  I’d love to hear what your experiences have been like!

-Genda

© Posted by Genda for Im Talkin Games with 6 comments on 11/11/2009.
Posted in: Analysis, Commentary, Featured, Opinion, Technical Tags: Torchlight, Windows, World of Warcraft