The long awaited diary on the new Lua Scripting has been posted with some very cool insight from Narrel on the process to get Lua scripting into the game.  Even more exciting is the confirmation that Lua Scripting will be in the game at launch of F2P.  Granted Narrel does put some caveats in there, but assuming all goes well it will be in launch.

I’m always fascinated about how these things progress and appreciate the insight on how the internals of Turbine work.  This certainly sounds like an impressive effort from Narrel, ForsakenArcher, Agiclaw and Frosty with the support of the whole dev team I’m sure.  It was also very encouraging to see the beta community step up and not only try things out but post some pretty darn cool UI scripts.

At the initial launch they will restrict the system to the following areas:

  • Quickslots – Allows for the creation and customization of additional quickslots.
  • Player self-vitals – Exposes effect information as well as health and morale for only yourself – party member and target vitals did not make it in for this release due to time constraints and will be addressed in a future update.
  • Inventory – Allows for custom organization of your inventory. For example, creating a single-bag view of your character inventory.

In addition Narrel is very specific to mention what applications they’re going to avoid, those being “bot-ing,” “macro-ing,” and things like gear score comparisons.  Also, notice in the list below they’re still not allowing you access to damage or healing output so we won’t see any sort of threat, DPS, or healing meters from this system either, which makes me VERY happy.

In addition to the launch features, they also have a few items on the planned list:

  • Party member vital information
  • Target vitals
  • Vault UI
  • Mouse cursors
  • Chat window customization
  • Kinship UI

Feel free to look at my post and video on the system as well as the video from Merric mentioned in this post and especially the posts from Mike mentioned in the comments of that post.

For me, this could be the single most anticipated system of the entire F2P launch 🙂