Lazy Question about What gets logged - more interesting question about how to change

[andyhre]

I am at work, else iw ould check my game logs at home. I have mentioned in this forum before the desire to do some economic analysis using the EQ bazaar. To this effect, I am wondering:

1) When I search for prices, does that get logged [I think the answer is no]?

2) If no, is there any way you can think of so that i could capture that electronically?


Basically, I want to track a commodity product like, say spiderling silk (some of you may know my obsession with this little item). I can check prices three times a day, but writing it down is difficult. Is there anyway to make EQ capture these prices in a log or log-like file so I can churn some parsing and then analytical programs on the data? Or do I have long data recording and entry project ahead of me?

I'm not asking about a program to automatically CHECK prices, just a way to save, electronically, the results of my own price searches for later analysis.


Thanks,

Andy

[cattywumpus]

Prices do get logged if you click on an item in a vendor's window so that the price appears in your text box. You would have to go to the vendor and click everything he has then go to the next vendor and do it again. I used to have a log parser that would sort all of that information but I don't remember which one.

Don't know of any way to get information any faster though.

[Dunthor Warsmith]

One way that comes to mind is to take a screenshot with the prices in the bazaar window, and then find a text parsing utility that likes the window's font, background, and white text on black background, and then just run the pictures through it. The amount of work this would be depends on how much manual work you'd have to do to each picture to get the parser to like it - some should be virtually none (specify as a general parameter the part of the images you want, and it parses the text with no problem of all the screens in one batch) whereas others will require a lot of work (carefully cropping picture, inverting colors, cleaning up background and any other abnormalities, checking final text, etc).

Of course that hinges on finding the image->text parser ... I've had only limited experiences, and with non-professional low cost ones I've had rather poor results (although with the few opportunities I've had to use a few high grade programs used internally by some libraries the results were fantastic - so I know good ones do exist. Didn't catch the names though).

[Trezark]

I just use the /note command to keep track of stuff that interests me. It's certainly not as convenient as an automatic log, but more efficient than writing it down (which is what I used to do ). I just /note ,Item Name,Seller,Price and then I can open the file in Excel as a comma delimited text file for easy sorting. The leading comma is to seperate the timestamp that EQ automatically generates when you use /note from the item name.

I've actually gotten pretty good at quickly /note'ing the results of bazaar searches using abbreviations for the items I'm keeping track of. The only real gripe I'm having with using this method (aside from being dreadfully involved and monopolizing my notes.txt file ) is that even after stripping the [ and ] from around the timestamps, excel still doesn't like to recognize the way they're formatted as valid "date" values (doesn't like the day of the week abbreviation at the beginning) and thus won't sort by that column properly.

[andyhre]

Okay thanks, I will start using that today.

Hey, can I have your logs for my research too?

[Quesci]

You can just do a /say of any prices. Insert a code for the log parser and it would be easy:

/say pricelog "spiderling silk" 5000 Merchantname 150
/say pricelog "spiderling silk" 3500 Othermerchant 6

If you searched for spiderling silk a lot you could just use a shorthand version (ss). The first number would be price in coppers (or any denomination that is easy for you) then merchant name, then number in stock.

If you didn't want to do it in /say, you could make a chat channel for yourself. Then you wouldn't even need to use the "pricelog" code. Just /join pricelog:andyhre and the name of the channel will be the match text for the parser.

The downside would be that you'd have to make sure you spelled everything correctly. But it would be faster than going to every merchant, and you could do it pretty fast with the chat buffer.

[cartier]

also, you can go into bazaar window, search for all silks, do the /time command in the chat window, and take a screenshot. that way you can open up the pictures and look at different days.

[Arista]

Originally posted by Quesci
If you didn't want to do it in /say, you could make a chat channel for yourself. Then you wouldn't even need to use the "pricelog" code. Just /join pricelog:andyhre and the name of the channel will be the match text for the parser.

If you don't want create your own chat channel, another option is to send a chat-server tell to yourself. To do this, use ;t instead of /t. The chat-server tell will actually allow you to send tells to yourself, instead of displaying the "Talking to yourserf again?" message that you get with regular tells. Then you can parse for this in your log. Once you send one tell to yourself, you can easily send more by using Ctrl+R (or whatever you mapped the reply key to).

For example (using my own character name):
;t Arista Silk 5p

You'll see the following in your log (along with timestamp):
Arista told you, 'Silk 5p'

Then use the reply key to quickly send more tells to yourself.

[Panamah]

The only things that get logged is stuff that goes to chat windows.

[Sanna]

To do this, use ;t instead of /t.

OOOOOOOH!!!!!

I was so hoping there was a way to do that! YAY! tytytytytytytytytytytytyty. Sooo happy now.

-- Sanna
we need a 'page of common tricks', like that 'page of common abbreviations'. things like telling noobs to CTRL-click, SHIFT-click... etc etc.

[Quesci]

Originally posted by Panamah
The only things that get logged is stuff that goes to chat windows.

Assuming you consider the trader window a chat window, then true.