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LotRO UI implements Lua, preps for extreme makeover
The upcoming free-to-play conversion isn't the only big change coming to Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online over the next little while. In a new dev diary released yesterday on the European community website, Games System Engineer Narrel provided a glimpse into what began as the "pet project" of three developers and has now morphed into a full-fledged extreme makeover of the game's user interface capabilities. Using the venerable and lightweight Lua scripting language, Narrel, Agiclaw, and ForsakenArcher are closing in on their stated goal of bringing extensive customization possibilities to LotRO's UI. "The future of Lua in LOTRO is a bright one," Narrel writes. "While the current functionality is certainly limited, we fully intend to continue the development of this system so that both existing and new game systems will expose functionality to the user, allowing for a much more personalized user interface."
Turbine expands on LotRO's Lua scripting
Ever since hearing the news that Turbine will allow players to create mods for Lord of the Rings Online using the Lua programming language, the community's been abuzz about what this means for LotRO -- good and bad. Would this allow for the creation of game unbalancing add-ons, or perhaps the rise of a LotRO edition of WoW's controversial GearScore? Or does Turbine have a specific vision in mind for the scope of mods? Yesterday on the LotRO forums, Narrel, Turbine's Games Systems Engineer, posted a clarifying note about why the company chose to implement this and where it plans to go with it. The devs' main priority with Lua scripting was to empower players to tweak and modify the user interface more to their liking, as the default UI cannot be all things for all folks. While it is going to prohibit mods from botting or macros, Turbine will open the field for players to work with the inventory layout, information that the HUD displays, quickslot bars, target info, fellowship info and raid vitals. "We are very excited about this feature," Narrel said, "and look forward to the day when it goes live allowing players to have a much more customizable experience with our graphical interface."
