[Request] Add Line Breaks to MyRolePlay Addon

[Jolikmc]

Hey there, AddOn sub-forum. How many of you are familiar with the World of Warcraft v1.x LUA scripting protocol? Or, in simpler terms, how many of you know enough about Vanilla WoW AddOns to make a modification to one?

Here's the deal: it recently came to my attention that the popular and very useful roleplaying AddOn, MyRolePlay, isn't working as expected. What's the issue? Well, it doesn't know how to handle line breaks. I'd like to ask someone who is extremely familiar with Vanilla LUA to have a look at MyRolePlay… maybe compare its code to that of FlagRSP or ImmersionRP… and see if some proper line breaking code can't be implemented.
(Links for all three AddOns can be found here.)

I noticed this, today, when I was working on a roleplay character. When I checked the xtensionxtooltip2 and MyRolePlay Chat Channels, I also noticed that MyRolePlay was sending my character's description without even a hint of a line break or line break character. This seems very unusual to me… like a very basic feature that should be part of the AddOn and simply isn't. I say this because when I tried this experiment with ImmersionRP, it actually did send my character description with line breaks intact. What's even stranger is that when I checked the SavedVariables files for both AddOns, I discovered that MyRolePlay actually preserves line breaks exactly as written while ImmersionRP straight up replaces any line breaks with "\\l".

Now, I've poked around the files of flagRSP, ImmersionRP, and MyRolePlay for v1.12. Something I noticed is that both FlagRSP and ImmersionRP both have code in place which both generates and interprets "\\l" and "\n" escape codes. (ImmersionRP also has interpreters for a bunch of other characters such as ">" and "\\%", but I didn't test those.) MyRolePlay also has some interpreters for "\\l", "\n", and curiously, "\r". However, that's all these things appear to be – interpreters. I can't find a single thing within the "MyRolePlayComm.lua" file that even hints at proper line break operations. It's safe to assume that I've missed something, considering my severe inexperience, but even so… it is a bit odd that MyRolePlay would just save character descriptions and history with actual, as-written line breaks instead of line break characters.

I know it's a long shot asking this community, but this is the community I call home, so I figured… "why not"?
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

[Allwynd01]

I don't know much about programming, but doesn't this require for the whole client to be modified?

Also, isn't there a way to bypass this limitation with just using tricks with programming? If one knows how to code, they should know the limits and extent of what can be done with a programming language. If I understand correct, line break is something like "/br" or whatever. Isn't there another way to emulate it?

[Jolikmc]

A very good pair of questions. Thank you.

To the first question, I imagine that all that needs to be changed is how MyRolePlay interprets line breaks. Right now, it just leaves line breaks exactly as they are when stored in the character's LUA config file. MyRolePlay would need an exception to be added which would go something like…

Code: Select all

if ("[line break]") then replace ("[line break]" = "\l")

(This is obviously not the correct parsing, but you get the idea.)

This would make sure that a character's description and history are stored as one line (split up along six chunks), each, instead of segmented lines:

Before

["Description1"] = "Testing.

Yeah, this probably isn't gonna work.
What a mess.",

After

["Description1"] = "Testing.\l\lYeah, this probably isn't gonna work.\lWhat a mess.",

This is definitely going to be a sub-version (v2.3.0) sort of thing rather than a sub-sub-version ("2.2.5"), but for someone who knows what they're doing, I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult. Honestly, if I had even a slight idea of what I was doing, I'd do it myself… but I can't even find the place where it reads from the character's local LUA and puts it into the game…

As for the other thing? Any use of slashes in a MyRolePlay profile (ex: "\br") leads to the slash being doubled (ex: "\\br") which cancels any coding it may have represented. And so, no matter what LUA code I try, it just turns into plain text.

[Sy]

like a very basic feature that should be part of the AddOn and simply isn't.

MRP has a whole bunch of issues, some more silly than others. it's better than having nothing at all, but really quite lacking in various ways, not to mention unstable.

fortunately there is a new RP addon for turtle currently in the works that will hopefully, if all goes well, become a replacement for MRP. it's still in development for now, and any public release is still a couple months away at least.

but the new addon will, presumably, have features like being able to display line breaks. ;)

[Jolikmc]

I find this solution acceptable.

Or, at least, I will in two months or so~

Thanks for the heads up, Sy!

[Gurky]

I might look into this if someone would like. It might be a bit until I get to it and I am not a role player so I would need some more info on it.

[Jolikmc]

You would be a hero to a select few, if you did! I know a few interested parties in the Discord.

I don't know much about LUA coding – elsewise, I would have fixed it, myself – but from what I can tell, the AddOn actually is working correctly. Something on the server back end changed, preventing line breaks from working in the half-arsed, lazy way that was implemented by the person who back-ported this thing. In fact, I feel like line breaks were working up until somewhere in mid-May…

Anyway, I don't know much about LUA, but if I can be of any assistance, I'll try my best! (: