Toast - My first successful macro! So stoked (1 Viewer)

[Monkers]

I've been playing EQ on and off for 20 years, with only *very* basic usage of MQ2. I figured being a programmer for over a decade, maybe I should try writing my first macro to automate an extremely tedious endeavor.

After about 100 lines of code, constantly scouring the scattered documentation, I tested it out for a few minutes, and voila, worked like a charm. That feeling is just unreal, it's like unlocking a massive hidden power.

Writing the script in the MQ language was not the best experience. No syntax error highlighting, no compile time warnings/errors, etc, awkward syntax, missing tons of language features that I've been spoiled with, no method discovery. It did have this fun nostalgic feel to creating it though, and the final vision of seeing my character accomplish the task felt amazing.
It makes me regret not writing more macros for all these years, but I figured better now than never. I look forward to writing more scripts to automate stuff, I just need to figure out what is worth the effort.

 

[Vivicide]

Nice man Grats!

 

[Lockney1972]

Congrats! I can't even write English so am going to let the experts do all the macros. That is a lot of work with a huge learning curve.

 

[timmy]

what did your macro do? not asking you to share it, just curious what level of tedium finally convinced you to assert your dominance.

 

[Zeeeeeee]

nice man...I dont have brains for it (went to law school) so i think you guys rock in making EQ more fun with those macros for us

 

[Monkers]

@timmy It was a macro to automate some chars to complete/farm an instance. Nothing too impressive, but did require some clever "hacks" to get it to work correctly within a reasonable amount of time, and to be stable.

Understanding the capabilities of the tools at hand is a challenge, but starting out small is easy, i.e. navigating to a target, destroy an item on your cursor, activate bandolier. Learning to listen to/handle events seems tricky, but a simple google search or example code is enough to help you accomplish what you need to do.
At first, I had to debug *every single line* of code to ensure I know what its doing, but after I while I started to remember things, familiarize myself with the syntax, and not have to worry about the little things breaking. Organizing the code looks like an afterthought for some of the macros I've seen, with GOTO sprinkled around like it's a magic panacea, but I've had experience in that realm so it's natural to me. Naming subs is fun, because I don't have to be professional, so they can say nasty things, which adds an element of fun. It would be frowned upon to name stuff on professional code like, "CalculateBitchTax".

@Zeeeeeee Finishing law school is *vastly* more impressive than writing macros. You have to be articulate, coordinate with people, study etc. With coding, you can just dick around till it works, and people rarely question your wisdom.

 

[RangerDanger13]

Congrats, I've really wanted to make the leap to make a custom Ranger macro like the magic Chat does with his class macros, but I have lacked the time so far. Not to mention it is a little daunting to think you will still fall short of what you envision, but not trying will never get you there. Great work taking the leap and I look forward to hearing about you making more!

 

[Knightly]

In the words of Smash Mouth, "You'll never know if you don't go."

Use VS Code, search VS Code add-ons for MacroQuest. Syntax highlighting.

 

[brewmaj]

I've been playing EQ on and off for 20 years, with only *very* basic usage of MQ2. I figured being a programmer for over a decade, maybe I should try writing my first macro to automate an extremely tedious endeavor.

After about 100 lines of code, constantly scouring the scattered documentation, I tested it out for a few minutes, and voila, worked like a charm. That feeling is just unreal, it's like unlocking a massive hidden power.

Writing the script in the MQ language was not the best experience. No syntax error highlighting, no compile time warnings/errors, etc, awkward syntax, missing tons of language features that I've been spoiled with, no method discovery. It did have this fun nostalgic feel to creating it though, and the final vision of seeing my character accomplish the task felt amazing.
It makes me regret not writing more macros for all these years, but I figured better now than never. I look forward to writing more scripts to automate stuff, I just need to figure out what is worth the effort.

Been wanting to try my hand with MQ2. I used to use it years ago, but I'm just a casual player and didn't know if spending the $$ would be worth the effort. I'm not a programmer, but I program a lot of Excel VBA. I thought it would be fun to try out a bunch of other's code and see what I could do to clean theirs up, or make my own, but it almost looks like you have to be pretty handy to multi-box without lots of TPWOs. I really like the Guild Buffers and wanted to look at that code.

 

[Aipoc76]

Been wanting to try my hand with MQ2. I used to use it years ago, but I'm just a casual player and didn't know if spending the $$ would be worth the effort. I'm not a programmer, but I program a lot of Excel VBA. I thought it would be fun to try out a bunch of other's code and see what I could do to clean theirs up, or make my own, but it almost looks like you have to be pretty handy to multi-box without lots of TPWOs. I really like the Guild Buffers and wanted to look at that code.

Well you earn 50 Red Cents you can get a second months sub. Heres a free month on me.