Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Tonicbars, lotro horse corral

Someone asked recently how I keep up with all my horses. I built a corral for them of course!

When I was younger and had fewer horses, I slotted them on my skill bars. That worked just fine until I ran out of skill bar slots and had to choose between seeing all my horses and having easy access to things like potions. What I needed was MORE skill bars, and possibly something that I could toggle on and off. Behold, there is a plugin for that, called “TonicBars”.

Ok, I’m no plugin master like some, but this particular one let me construct exactly what I needed. Tonicbars is particularly useful for opening “skill bars” for “tonics”, like when you need a potion. I’m not sure if anyone else (so far) uses it as a horse corral, but I'm going to lay out how I did it.

First of all, download the plugin named Tonicbars. Don’t be freightened; it will be ok, and you will be happy that you did. http://www.lotrointerface.com/ is a home site for the plugin. Follow the directions for getting it into the correct folder on your computer.

My friend Dandur tells me that lotro has a plug-in manager that can be useful for starting the plugins. I keep it fairly simple though without the manager and slot loading the program like this:

Type /shortcut 1 /plugins load tonicbars and it will put a button on the skill bar that you can click and start the plugin when you want to. Move the button to a happy place for you.

I put my button out of the way until I need it.



So, to set it up to look like a corral…

Main menu is first to come up; go to “quick slots”.

For me, I don’t really want to see ALL the steeds all the time, so I set a “Trigger” of when I “press Alt” so they will show up only when I need it (see what the screen looks like below).

Down lower on the quick bars tab, you can see that I set my horse corral to be 10 rows by 10 columns. 100 slots should be enough for the horses to all find a place to be. Of course, set the size however large you want it. Also, you can set how big the actual button slots are further down the page.



Finally, put all your steeds in the newly made corral!

Here is a shot of what my screen normally looks like.



And, here is what it looks like while I’m pressing ALT. (of course, the red lines and text are added to the picture). I can pick out any of those 62 steeds with ease (looks like a few steeds snuck out of the pen as I think I have closer to 70, time to go on a steed hunt through the skill list). I have three tonicbars set up for all my happy convenience: Horses, Travel, Festival... you can set it up for any occasion and use whatever toggle makes sense to you. I think I need a new one for Emotes!



Yay for more horses! Here is the Reveller’s steed, bedecked in red, fresh from the lotro store. Very fancy and matches my outfit fairly well!



And, my most recent horsie, one that I have been working toward (More ponies) is the Isengard War-steed.  It is bartered at the Ox-Clan camp for 99 Orthanc sigil-fragments. It is so classy I feel like I should dress up. :)


5 comments:

Lothirieth said...

:O

This looks quite promising for my festival emotes! As a loremaster, quick slot space is at a premium and my emotes kinda end up scattered everywhere. If I could get it to work, I could see this working for LM pets as well! And travel skills? That would be pretty sweet.

A question though. You have it set up to appear when you press alt, but do you actually use any keyboard shortcuts in your regular play that involve alt? I do. Even more so for shift. So I'm wondering if using these keys to make it visible would mean that every time I use alt or shift based skill, the bars might pop up?

I appreciate any advice you might have! :)

Unknown said...

Yay Lothirieth!

I don't actually use many keyboard shortcuts during regular play, so ALT never gets in my way. But yes, I am fairly certain that with the ALT trigger, EVERY time I hit ALT, the "tonicbar" set would open for me. That probably wouldn't be a very good trigger for you. If neither ALT nor SHIFT are good for you, mebbe CTRL? That one appears to be a standard choice.

Tonight, I will peel through the Tonicbar options to see if there might be a more useful trigger or "bar visibility" that does not involve the ones shown the in picture.

Unknown said...

le sigh... I looked over TonicBars and the Triggers I showed in the picture are the only triggers it has. If you click multiple boxes (for example, ALT & SHIFT) either one will open the bar, was hoping that both would be required.

The TonicBars still has lots of uses, just haven't found a work-around for those who use ALT, SHIFT, CTRL for keyboard functions. It is still full of amazingness though and might be a good place to put LM pets, emotes, etc. It is after all a great way to get more slots than allowed by the typical skillbars, and its original function of popping up Tonics when diseased, low morale, etc is super.

Good luck and let me know if you learn something more!

Lothirieth said...

Thanks for checking that out! Very kind of you.

Hmm... I suppose I'd have to play around with it.. perhaps just make a shortcut alias to show it, afterall I'd be saving quickslots by putting pets or festival emotes there. You helped give me some ideas, so many thanks! :)

Lothirieth said...

Update: I think I got this working and that it will actually work for me!

I was getting *really* frustrated at first as I had everything setup, was pressing alt and nothing was showing up. The boyfriend suggested I use the other alt, ie the right-side alt and suddenly everything popped up. So I think I should be able to use it! Though I can't get the pots to work... always something!

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