A few years ago, the most experienced developers in our community got together over a shared realization that MacroQuest2 needed help. It was a codebase that had been spliced together by people of different skill levels and competing visions since
2003, and any serious attempt at modernization would require a near complete rewrite. However, they were bound by thousands of user macros and plugins that needed backwards compatibility, and on top of that, they didn't have access to the full source code. A large and tedious portion of the job would be figuring out what was missing.
After three years of daily commits and a few painful slogs with tech behind the scenes, brainiac, Knightly, dannuic, alynel and exspes have given us
MacroQuest: a modern scripting platform that's light, fast, and easy to maintain. You may not notice any changes initially, except that everything runs smoother and more stable. However if you look a bit deeper you may notice a few benefits, such as...
All the ini, yaml, and cfg files for every piece of software on RedGuides are now in the same place: the "config" folder.
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But you won't be visiting that folder very often, as you can now change settings in the GUI:
/mqsettings
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We've also been granted a proper console, like most games released this millennium:
ctrl
+
`
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Which leads to some useful options,
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Sic outlines these, and many other new features in his MQ video here,
RedGuides staff urges you to switch over now by grabbing the latest launcher, which ChatWithThisName
outlines below.
Developers will notice the biggest changes: professional quality code, manageable third party libraries, Lua scripts, and many more as Knightly
summarized here.
And if you're the type that enjoys looking under the hood, you'll be happy to know that MacroQuest is once again a free and open source project. For the first time in
seven years I have access to our source code, and
you do as well. My most exciting years running RedGuides were back in the open source days and I'm eager to get back!
If this were a corporate project in Silicon Valley, it would have cost in the high six to seven figures. When I asked brainiac about his motivation to spearhead this purely as a hobby, he said his greatest desire was to see everyone use the platform as a sandbox, to experience all the unique things people create like
MAUI and
Lootly. So the best way to pay the dev team back is to open up Visual Studio and unleash your creativity.
Congratulations to the MacroQuest dev & test team: brainiac, Knightly, dannuic, and everyone who helped and tested over the years.
And congratulations to the entire EverQuest playerbase, as you're about to experience a software renaissance.