Plugins

Overview

Plugins are a user-installable add-ons to the LOTRO to enhance your gaming experience. There are many such add-ons that many contributors have developed and made available to the LOTRO community.

For example, you may find plugins to help you:

Display an in-game calendar of upcoming events that you manage
Display a list of task items in your bags and where to turn them in
An inventory management system that can show you the items in any of your characters bags, regardless of which character you are currently logged in as.
A plugin that displays a menu of the in-game ABC music files you have installed, and can help you play by clicking on them.
A display to help you remember the key sequences for warden gambits
A display to help you manage all the parties in your fellowship or raid
And many-many more...

The Plugin Manager

Main article: plugin manager

The plugin manager is used to manage the list of plugins you have loaded. Be aware that use of plugins will cause LOTRO to consume more CPU and memory, depending on what the plugin is doing. Therefore, unless you have the CPU or resources to spare, it is not recommended to load all the plugins you have installed on startup - but rather selectively load plugins that are useful to you. You may configure the plugin manager to automatically load plugins for you when the game starts.

Using Chat Window Commands

Before the Plugin Manager was added to the game, players had to use chat window commands to manipulate plugins. You can do nearly everything with the Plugin Manager (with the exception of unloading individual script states; see below) that you can do with chat commands, but some people still prefer the "old-school" method.

/plugins Command

The "/Plugins" command manipulates plugins and displays information about them in the "General" Chat Window.

These are "Standard" messages and require the "chat filter" "standard" to be selected. (System defaults.)

Note: Be aware, any command you type on the chat line is NOT echoed in the chat window, nor is it captured in the chat logging. (Nor are actions by the Turbine Plugin Manager).

To display the short /plugins help in-game, type:

/plugins
usage /plugins [load] <plugin name> | [unload] <script state> | [list] | [refresh] | [manager]

To display the long plugins help, type:

/help plugins

/plugins manager

Opens the Turbine Plugin Manager window.

/plugins load <plugin name>

Attempts to load the plugin, <plugin name>.

Some errors found while attempting to load the plugin may be displayed in the chat window. It is up to the Plugin Author to use this facility.

Otherwise, if errors are found to exist, the plugin will not be loaded.

Best Practices: Authors are encouraged to include the display of an informative statement <plugin-name><version><author> when the plugin is first loaded. This information is displayed in the chat window, otherwise no feedback is given when a plugin is loaded. This same is true of plugin unloading. These messages are displayed by both the command line interface and the Turbine Plugin Manager.

/plugins unload

Unloads all the loaded plugins and resets the UI.

Successful command completion results in the message: "All plugins have been unloaded" in the General chat window.

Note: Using the "Unload all" button in the Turbine Plugin Manager will not display any messages in the chat window unless the plugin was previously loaded by the Turbine Plugin Manager. And then only the messages provided by the Plugin Author will be displayed. (The Turbine Plugin Manager does not display the "All plugins have been unloaded" message.)

/plugins unload <script state>

This command syntax is primarily for use by Plugin Authors to unload single plugins during testing.

Frequently, individual plugins cannot be obviously unloaded, as the "apartment name" (<script state>) is not always the same as the plugin name.
"/plugins unload <plugin name>" frequently gives the error: "Plugin script state "xyzzy" could not be unloaded." If this is the case you may need to resort to unloading ALL plugins to unload the no longer desired plugin.

Use "/plugins unload <apartmentname>" to unload that specific "apartment" instead of unloading all plugins (which is the default behavior).

See: <Configuration Apartment="apartmentname" /> tag in the .plugin file.

/plugins list

Lists the set of Available Plugins found in the Plugins folder and their version numbers; and then the list of loaded plugins and version numbers.

If no plugins are loaded it will say "(None)" under the "Loaded Plugins:" section of the list.

An example:

/Plugins list 
Available Plugins:
     AltInventory (3.0.5)
     AltInventory (298)
     AltWallet (1.0.6)
     ...
Loaded Plugins:
     AltInventory (3.0.5) (Altinventory)
     AltWallet (1.0.6)

In the above example:

The first value is the plugin name -- AltInventory or BuffBars.
The second value, in parenthesis, is the version.
The third value, also in parenthesis, is the "apartment name" - "(Altinventory)" and "(Vitals)" displayed in "pink". Not every plugin shows an Apartment value in the "/plugins list" command output.

The third value is the "Apartment" from the "Configuration" tag of the .plugin file. This indicates which apartment the plugin loads into and thus, which apartment you need to unload to unload the plugin.

/plugins refresh

The Plugins folder is only scanned when the Client is launched. Should you add plugins while the client is running, this command refreshes the list of available plugins found in the Plugins folder on the disk.

Where to get Plugins

There are many plugins available for you to install. Searching the internet for "LOTRO Plugins" should find a quick list. As with any software, use care with what you download to your machine. While there is limited security mechanisms built into LOTRO to limit malicious software, there is still the possibility that some poorly written plugins may cause LOTRO to perform poorly. That said - please consider only downloading plugins from websites that you trust.

A well known website that offers plugins, some of which were developed by the original LOTRO developers is available at: https://www.lotrointerface.com/

LOTRO Plugin Compendium

The LOTRO Plugin compendium is a [Windows] standalone utility to help manage the LOTRO plugins installed on your machine. https://www.lotrointerface.com/downloads/info663-LOTROPluginCompendium.html

The LOTRO plugin compendium:

Lists plugins that from well-known developers that have registered with it
Simplifies installation of new plugins
Simplifies updating plugins you already have installed
Simplifies removing plugins you no longer want to use

Plugin Development

All LOTRO plugins are developed using the LUA scripting language.

A description of the API that LOTRO has made available for use in LUA scripting language is available at: https://www.lotrointerface.com/wiki/LoTROInterface_Wiki

Lua Articles on Lotro-Wiki

* Writing Lua Scripts