New Storyline Alchemist's Bible

[Andrew80k]

I created and uploaded a new version of the alchemist's bible on eqinterface.com under Interface Pieces->Story Content, for those that might be interested. I still have some work to do to it, but it is probably 90% complete. I'd like to get some feedback on it as to mistakes and such.

Thanks.

[Quichon]

Not bad, although using .htm files rather than .txt files was an interesting choice.

The one I'm writing up is going to be significantly more complex. It will have an item database, and every recipie will coss-reference every ingredient, which will have the full stats, including how to get them and will cross reference every item that uses that ingredient.

of course, being more complex, it's gonna take me a LOT longer to write up...

[Andrew80k]

I chose .htm so I could see the formatting of the file outside of the game. While not 100% HTML, it still allowed me to do a fair amount of troubleshooting of my formatting without having to be in game. I'm hoping to add component source cross-referencing as well... maybe I'll wait for you to get done...

[Quichon]

I chose .htm so I could see the formatting of the file outside of the game. While not 100% HTML, it still allowed me to do a fair amount of troubleshooting of my formatting without having to be in game. I'm hoping to add component source cross-referencing as well... maybe I'll wait for you to get done...

I understand that was a joke, but the implication that you're willing to pirate other people's code can really offend some people. Particularly with the implication that you'd steal it and not give credit. Unfortunately, from what I have seen of your system, our styles are rather different and it will be difficult to try and snag any sort of cross-referencing since it's all hard-coded right into the recipies, and I really don't see any way to create a module to make them compatable without more effort than it's worth.

In theory, it isn't too difficult... all you have to do is manually build an item database which includes a seperate file for every ingredient listed for every alchemical formula you wish to include. The total comes out to over a thousand ingredients, not counting sub-combines, which are their own formula.

Grunt work? Oh, a tad... I'm already dispising the <br> and not anywhere close to being done. Fortunately, I managed a cute trick with the quick-triv list and did a Find/Replace SHM for <br>, so that went by fast, but just manually inserting some thousand ingredients and recipies is going to be a lot of keyboard hours.

[Andrew80k]

I understand that was a joke, but the implication that you're willing to pirate other people's code can really offend some people. Particularly with the implication that you'd steal it and not give credit. Unfortunately, from what I have seen of your system, our styles are rather different and it will be difficult to try and snag any sort of cross-referencing since it's all hard-coded right into the recipies, and I really don't see any way to create a module to make them compatable without more effort than it's worth.

In theory, it isn't too difficult... all you have to do is manually build an item database which includes a seperate file for every ingredient listed for every alchemical formula you wish to include. The total comes out to over a thousand ingredients, not counting sub-combines, which are their own formula.

Grunt work? Oh, a tad... I'm already dispising the <br> and not anywhere close to being done. Fortunately, I managed a cute trick with the quick-triv list and did a Find/Replace SHM for <br>, so that went by fast, but just manually inserting some thousand ingredients and recipies is going to be a lot of keyboard hours.

But you misunderstood my joke. My joke wasn't that I'd pirate your code, which would be difficult to do considering you probably wouldn't include it in the distribution. The joke was that instead I'd just use the work once you were completed, instead of doing it myself. Assuming that you were going to allow others to use it. From your post asking for permission to use the information, I assumed that to be true.

As for me, and my style, this is mostly a hack job, considering I wanted something I could use to bring my shaman along and I just thought I would share it with others. I basically mine the alchemy tables and just straight reproduce it. It's all written in perl and runs on my linux box. It takes about 2 minutes for it to create 98% of the files. There are a couple of files I created by hand, but most of it is written by the perl code.

The code you refer to isn't hard at all. I can easily create name value pairs based on the ingredient and a file reference. One hash reference to the entire name/value set of ingredients. The ingredient being the key to the file reference. When I come to a "key" I represent that as the reference, plus the "key" and the closed anchor. Voila! I've still got a LONG way to go to actually getting this to work the way I'd like. Creating the ingredient files is merely another mining task, simple once you've done it a time or two. I'd be happy to share the code I've written with if you'd like. It cost me nothing to develop short of a couple of hours of my time and the information is not something I own anyway.

It would be probably easier in the long run for me to just mine the contents of eqtraders, put that in a private database and create the storyline files out of the database. The code would be prettier. But then I'd have to sync fairly often as things would change and I'd want to stay up to date. Not sure I really want to do that at this point. Right now I just want something I can use.

[Quichon]

Ahh, you cheat and use Perl... I don't have access to that at the moment. I'm putting everything in manually. Furthermore, I'm extremely leery of using data mining code due to certain federal hacking laws. While I'm fairly certain they don't apply in this case, I tend to try and be safer than sorry.

The entire set of tools I have access to right now is NotePad, IE, and the clipboard.

The 'code' to which I refer is NOT a hash board or database query. Every recipie and ingredient is it's own .txt file, and every ingredient has a <a href:///storyline/tradeskill/alchemy/recipie.txt>recipie</a> link to every recipie it's in. Likewise, every recipie has links for every ingredient to those ingredient pages.

*old geezer voice* When I was your age, we didn't have none of this pentium crap. I had my TRS-80 and I was proud of it! Back when FORTRAN wasn't even Three-TRAN and we had to do everything in machine language... yep, just good ol' 1's and 0's, and sometimes we ran outta 1's...

[Andrew80k]

Ahh, you cheat and use Perl... I don't have access to that at the moment. I'm putting everything in manually. Furthermore, I'm extremely leery of using data mining code due to certain federal hacking laws. While I'm fairly certain they don't apply in this case, I tend to try and be safer than sorry.

The entire set of tools I have access to right now is NotePad, IE, and the clipboard.

The 'code' to which I refer is NOT a hash board or database query. Every recipie and ingredient is it's own .txt file, and every ingredient has a <a href:///storyline/tradeskill/alchemy/recipie.txt>recipie</a> link to every recipie it's in. Likewise, every recipie has links for every ingredient to those ingredient pages.

*old geezer voice* When I was your age, we didn't have none of this pentium crap. I had my TRS-80 and I was proud of it! Back when FORTRAN wasn't even Three-TRAN and we had to do everything in machine language... yep, just good ol' 1's and 0's, and sometimes we ran outta 1's...

Heh. Dude, I turn 40 this weekend, much to my chagrin. I grew up with VIC-20's, Commodore 64's/128's, TRS-80's and mainframes. I've been writing code for so long it surprises even me sometimes.

And I can't imagine trying to hand jam all that stuff. That is a LOT of stuff. I started doing it that way, but had to quit as the task became too overwhelming. After I started mining the stuff it became MUCH, MUCH easier and lots faster. And there are no relevent laws against what I'm doing. I'm only making automated queries against the website. Nothing that you aren't doing by manually clicking the links. I just parse the data out of it and repackage it. With their permission I might add...

I wrote the code to retrieve all the component data last night and it works very well. I still have to parse and repackage the component information which isn't too hard as I've been doing that with the other recipes. Once that is done, then I will recreate the package I have to include the component information and link it within the recipes themselves. Probably take me another week or two to get it done.

Then I'm thinking of taking on Spell Research...

[Quichon]

Heh. Dude, I turn 40 this weekend, much to my chagrin. I grew up with VIC-20's, Commodore 64's/128's, TRS-80's and mainframes. I've been writing code for so long it surprises even me sometimes.

And I can't imagine trying to hand jam all that stuff. That is a LOT of stuff. I started doing it that way, but had to quit as the task became too overwhelming. After I started mining the stuff it became MUCH, MUCH easier and lots faster. And there are no relevent laws against what I'm doing. I'm only making automated queries against the website. Nothing that you aren't doing by manually clicking the links. I just parse the data out of it and repackage it. With their permission I might add...

Yea, if I had access to Perl, or even Java, I could probably come up with something like that. Unfortunately, I don't. Since you do, you're in a much better position to do this than me

I wrote the code to retrieve all the component data last night and it works very well. I still have to parse and repackage the component information which isn't too hard as I've been doing that with the other recipes. Once that is done, then I will recreate the package I have to include the component information and link it within the recipes themselves. Probably take me another week or two to get it done.

Do that, and every alchemist will cheer your name!

Then I'm thinking of taking on Spell Research...

Heck, once you've got the package coded, you could do them all in a week or two. Just do a new query for the next tradeskill info, parse the data, repackage it, and slap it out. In fact, do that with all the tradeskills, and your storyline file will be the best to have ever come out.

[Andrew80k]

Yea, if I had access to Perl, or even Java, I could probably come up with something like that. Unfortunately, I don't. Since you do, you're in a much better position to do this than me



Do that, and every alchemist will cheer your name!


Heck, once you've got the package coded, you could do them all in a week or two. Just do a new query for the next tradeskill info, parse the data, repackage it, and slap it out. In fact, do that with all the tradeskills, and your storyline file will be the best to have ever come out.

Not sure why you don't have access to either of them as they are both free, but I do understand the difficulties of adding software to PC's, especially those used by others.

I've looked around at some of the other tradeskills and I don't think any of them would be too hard. Some of the code would have to be tweaked a bit depending on which tradeskill I was doing, but for the most part you are correct, I could do them all as storylines pretty easily. I don't think I would package them together though since I'm not sure how many people would be interested in all of them at the same time. Who knows. I might give it a try when I get through alchemy.

[Quichon]

I've looked around at some of the other tradeskills and I don't think any of them would be too hard. Some of the code would have to be tweaked a bit depending on which tradeskill I was doing, but for the most part you are correct, I could do them all as storylines pretty easily. I don't think I would package them together though since I'm not sure how many people would be interested in all of them at the same time. Who knows. I might give it a try when I get through alchemy.

Reason to package them all in one file: Everyone who does any tradeskill will want it.

Seriously. You could make an alchemy bible, then a spell research bible, and so forth... or you could create the ultimate Tradeskill guide with ALL the tradeskills, including Alchemy and Spell Research. The former, everyone would have to get each one seperately, for every tradeskill they want. The latter... everyone who is even moderately interested in Tradeskilling will grab it. Plenty of tradesills need things from other tradeskills (Cured Silk requiring Heady Kiola, for instance), so most people will want several different ones anyways, even if they focus on one specific tradeskill.

To make it more convenient, I'd just include them all in one large Storyline file. If there are parts some users won't use, then fine. But every user will get moderate use out of it, which is good. And most users will need to at least reference more than one tradeskill to create a given final product anyways.