Back and thinking of writing an app

[Geddak]

Hey all,

After an 18 month break from EQ and programming, I have returned, to both. So, I am thinking about writing an app (probably in Ruby) to track recipes and current components. Be a little of a pain to manually enter all the components as you get them, but would make it easy to see what you still need to make any particular item, where to get those components, etc.

I thought I should check first that no one has already done this, and if it's ok for me to use the information from EQTC for this.

Great to see you still around, you've been my friend and resource for 4 years, and I find you indispensible.

Geddak Mezzcal
250 Blackelf Darksmith
Prexus

[Aethn]

The new tradeskills UI already covers everything you want to do accept the location of the items. Since its a 3rd party app, you will need to alt tab from EQ to use it, and the EQTraders.com Database is already inplace with a superior amount of knowledge greater then one person could complie.

Probably save yourself some coding headaches by not duplicating whats already inplace. But then again, its really up to you. It might be something you would enjoy.

[Naedea]

I think he meant that he would be writing an app that would provide you with a sort of shopping list, given your current inventory. Like, say you farm 60 arctic wyvern hides and want to work on tailoring. You record your inventory, and choose what you want to make, and the program tells you how much velium and cobalt cod you will need to acquire to complement it, and where to get it.

I imagine you could assign your own values to each item, for rarity or price, in order to quantify each recipe in terms of time or platinum expended. These values could be updated with current bazaar prices to weigh the relative cost or difficulty of various skillup paths to be able to determine whether a path is inefficient or beyond your means. If you're a halfling druid, haversacks will be available to you, and quadding will be an option. If you 2-box a shaman and shadowknight, you'll get tae ew blood easier than a solo cleric would, but a solo cleric can AE for shadowscream.

Would you rather pay 10k or farm greens for a few hours?
Should you start a foraging character and get it yourself, or spend 25k on the foraged items?

What is the bottleneck in a given recipe? If someone has a pile of panther skins, you might know off the top of your head that the hard part is yew leaves, but what about the thousands of other recipes? How many of you smiths have been approached by people with piles of acrylia but no windstones? The tradeskilling community could provide input to help assess the relative difficulty of the various skillup paths.

A program to quantify these factors would be useful to many, and is currently beyond the scope of the eqtraders site.

[Aethn]

I think he meant that he would be writing an app that would provide you with a sort of shopping list, given your current inventory

Ah I see, if that is the case then it would be interesting to see.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Yes you can use our data. We do ask that you give us credit within the documention and "about".

No we will not give a dump of the Database, sorry... I know this would make it easier, but we just won't do it. There are many reasons for this and they have been repeated on these boards many times.

[Geddak]

yes and new ideas

Yes Naedea, that is close to the idea.
I have been trying to find an easier way of comparing what I have with what I need for what, where and how hard it is to get, etc. Was relatively easy with smithing 2 or 3 years ago, but add 5 expansions and cross-skills and it's a bit mind-boggling now.
Though you have given me a couple of new ideas...not sure how feasible they may be, but going to play with them. I expect this to be an extended project but will post as it develops.

Thank you for permission to use information here. Of course a db dump would be helpful, but I've been coding with text editors for well over a decade, am used to doing things the slow way .

Aethn I like to see what other people have done, and how they have done it, but I like coding for codings sake, so don't mind reinventing the wheel for a better appreciation of how it works and ways to improve it.

Good clicking all, will keep you updated.

Geddak