EQ2 LFG Monitor

A Windows system-tray app (WPF, .NET 8) that watches your EverQuest II chat log and alerts you when a group advertises needing a role/class/level one of your characters can fill — or when enough individual LFG players are around to start a new group.

See REQUIREMENTS.md for the full feature set.

How it works

• Roster is read from the *_characters.ini files in your EQ2 directory (all accounts, including EU).
• Class and level come from the Daybreak Census API, cached locally in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Eq2Lfg, with the class chat channel in *_uisettings.xml as an offline fallback. Level-ups seen in the log update levels live.
• The active chat log (logs\<Server>\eq2log_<Name>.txt, most recently written) is tailed once per second. Requires in-game chat logging (/log) to be on.
• Group ads ("need tank 2 dps CMM") are matched against your enabled characters by class, role, and level (zone abbreviations map to level bands via an editable zone table). Player posts ("52 Warlock LFG") feed a group-opportunity detector that alerts when enough compatible players are looking at once.
• Alerts: in-app list, Windows toast, and/or a chime — all optional, with a per-advertiser cooldown to tame repeat spam.

Installing

From a release (recommended): grab a zip from the Releases page — self-contained needs nothing installed; framework-dependent is smaller but needs the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime. Unzip anywhere and run Eq2Lfg.App.exe (Windows 10 1809+ or Windows 11). Closing the window minimizes to the tray; use Exit on the tray icon's menu to quit. Optional: to start it with Windows, put a shortcut to the exe in the folder that opens when you run shell:startup.

From source:

git clone https://github.com/williajm/eq2_lfg.git
cd eq2_lfg
dotnet publish src/Eq2Lfg.App -c Release -o publish

then run publish\Eq2Lfg.App.exe (needs the .NET 8 SDK).

Verifying a release

Every release is built by the Release workflow from the pushed v* tag — never on a developer machine. Three ways to check what you downloaded, from quick to cryptographic:

• Checksum: compare Get-FileHash <zip> against the release's SHA256SUMS.txt.

• Provenance: each zip has a signed build provenance attestation proving GitHub Actions built it from this repo at that tag's commit:

  gh attestation verify Eq2Lfg-v1.0.0-win-x64-self-contained.zip -R williajm/eq2_lfg
  

• In the app: the status bar shows the version and short commit SHA the build was made from (e.g. v1.0.0 (abc1234)).

Versioning is derived from git tags by MinVer: tag v1.2.0 and the build is 1.2.0; untagged builds show a -alpha height suffix so they can never be mistaken for a release.

Cutting a release

git tag v1.0.0
git push origin v1.0.0

The workflow tests, publishes both zips, writes SHA256SUMS.txt, attaches attestations, and creates the GitHub Release with generated notes.

First-run setup

1. Turn on chat logging in EQ2: type /log in game. Without it the game never writes the chat log this app tails.
2. EQ2 directory: auto-detected on first launch. If detection fails, open Settings → EQ2 directory and click Detect or paste the install path.
3. Characters: Settings → Available characters lists every character found across your accounts. Untick any account, server, or character you don't want matched.
4. Alerts: pick your mix of Windows toasts, chime, and in-app highlights.
5. Optional — Census service ID: with many characters, register a free service ID at census.daybreakgames.com and set it in Settings to lift the anonymous API rate limit (see below).

Building for development

dotnet build Eq2Lfg.sln
dotnet test tests/Eq2Lfg.Core.Tests

Quality gates

• CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml): dotnet format --verify-no-changes, build with warnings-as-errors, and unit tests on every push/PR.
• CodeQL (codeql.yml): C# security/quality analysis on pushes, PRs, and a weekly schedule.
• SonarCloud (sonarcloud.yml): skips until you finish the one-time setup — sign in at sonarcloud.io with GitHub, import this repo, and add a SONAR_TOKEN repository secret (free for public repos).
• Branch protection: PRs into main must pass the build and Analyze (csharp) checks and be up to date with main.

Census rate limit

Anonymous Census API access allows ~10 lookups/minute. The app stays under it (stale-entry-only refreshes, not-found caching, backoff), but if you have many characters you can register a free service ID at census.daybreakgames.com and set it in Settings to lift the limit.

Configuration

Settings live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Eq2Lfg\settings.json and are all editable from the app's Settings view: alert styles, cooldown, level tolerance, EQ2 directory, the account → server → character availability tree, and the zone table (zones.json, seeded for EoF-era Wuoshi).