Universal Friend's List?
 

I've been looking on here and the forums and I can't find anything on an Universal Friend's list. Is there a way to do it? Has it already been done? Proved impossible?

If it can be done I might start work on figuring out how.

Friends list is stored server-side unfortunately, so there's no easy way of making a "Universal" friends list.

Friends lists are stored server-side, so there's nothing a UI mod can do about it. All you can do is ask (via /feedback or the like) for ways to merge friends lists between characters.

One option is the new Station Launcher. It doesn't let you share friends lists between characters, but it does display all your friends for all characters at once. It'll let you sort things to show you characters on each friend, then you can add characters to friends that aren't on all of them. Time-consuming but doable.

If you can get the text of the name from each row, then I would say a mod is definitely doable.

It would just be a lot of extra round'about coding.

I was afraid I would hear this. Thanks everyone for letting me know, it looks like too much work for me atm. I might try a few things to kill time but until I hit success, I'm not holding my breath.

No problem to get the text, friends list in ProfitUI has invite/tell buttons for example.

You can get the names, but what method would you use to save them from one character to another? I can see it as doable, but only through a roundabout way of saving data.

What we really need is a custom XML file (either for the install, account, or even per-character) that we could write to from within the game. That'd make so many things easier.

Save it to a POI file, load it on the other character and then you'll probably need to add "add friend" buttons next to each of them.

I didn't say it was a good idea, I just said the names could be grabbed. With the station launcher giving you a superior friends list I don't see why such a project would be undertaken via a UI mod anyway, just synchronize them in the station launcher...

Yeah, that's the method I was thinking of, but it's still very kludgey. Thus my comment on how nice it would be if we could write to an XML file on our own terms, hehe.

Aye. Writing it to the POI file would work great. The thing about writing "new" data is even though it's written to the file right away, it's not loaded into game memory right away.

So if you switch a toon before relogging it wouldn't be in the correct place in memory.

So you either fake it by assigning it to that "location" in the UI code, or you just load it into a place holder to read from. Like a page with 1-100 with names assigned to each. I dunno if the friend limit is 100 or not, but...
I know you can get the name from the Community window, as I saw how you did it originally gm9 :) I guess you could just go row by row, or make a fake "loop" in the code to catch them all.
But that tells me you'd get a lot of blank names... except it wouldn't be NULL it would just be a space or maybe just blank.

A script to add a lot of friends at once might get blocked too. You'd probably have to have a button to add each friend 1 by 1 from a list as to not spam the server with request.
I'd say it's 100% doable. But again, a lot of outta the way work.

Honestly I just keep notes for every single friend. The notes file gets saved to a txt document. The first word of each line is the friend name. Parse it out to like Excel or something and then add your friends to your alts ;)

Yep. Heck, you could even keep them in a text file with the friend_add command and then just run that file by /do_file_commands. The nice thing about /friend_add as opposed to just /friend is that /friend toggles between them, while /friend_add will only ever "add" a friend (if it's already on the list, it just fails with an "Already in List" error).

Mmm, I actually like that idea so much I think I'm going to start keeping my own list in a .txt. I have a lot of alts, so that is a pretty easy way of keeping them all updated.