Player Stat Plugin? : DAOC Discussion

[Mantiss]

Howabout a plugin that let's me type in a player name and server and info is checked against Herald and relayed back? Helps me to determine enemy class and weapon effectiveness since I'm an archer.

[WyvernX]

This has been brought up before. I will help anybody willing to try and script this. It can be done with scripting alone.

[Devestator]

Hmm I'll do some refreshing on accessing webpages through VB and see if I can get something like this done. Dont think it would be to hard of a task. Basically just Get the appropriate XML file off the herald and then scan it for the info you want.

[Devestator]

An immediate problem I see with this is the only way to search for a specific player would be to hard search the herald XML files.

What I mean by this is say your on Pendragon.. you'd have to search all the guild xml files till you found the player you are looking for. Lets say you were looking for JoeBlow on the Pendragon server and he is in guild number 281 (XML files are labeled by guild number). The program would have to do a search through XML files Register to unlock hidden link to 281.xml

This would put quite a noticeable amount of requests on XML files from your IP and could lead to mythic easily figuring out what your doing.

Now I think the map plugin can show the guild of players. I can't remember to be honest but if it can, and that guild name can be converted to the guild number somehow then you could easily find the info on someone loaded on the map screen because you'd only have to scan the one XML file. So it wouldn't be nearly as noticeable as the previous.

At one point Mythic had a search feature to search for a player. I would figure out a way to use that to make it look like your actually searching for the player but I can't find that page anymore, anyone know where it has gotten to?

[Devestator]

Ok forget me I found it...

Register to unlock hidden link

that is the search function, If I make a vb plugin I could use a IE Plugin to load the page directly into a vb form then look at hte source to get the link to the closest matching name (there could be a JoeBlow and a JoeBlowSo, both would return with this search) and that would return a character information page.

This would give you the class realm points and all of that. That would be all the information you would want correct? If so that page could be loaded into VB and the source of it could be parsed out to get the information you want out of it. This would never even touch an XML file and to mythics servers it would look as if you actually went to their page and searched for this player.

[WyvernX]

You can also do it with script. Grab the xml, parse it for the info, and dump it to a gui form.

[switch]

IMO we should use a database that is updated with all of the xml-files on a regular basis and query for a specific name to retrieve data... I doubt anything else would be performant at all

[Devestator]

Switch while that is a novle idea, in theory, in actuality it wouldn't work so well in anyway that I can see. Where would this database be hosted? Or would you be proposing each user that uses this plugin has their own database. If that is so the server load on camelotherald.com would prob increase a noticeable percent for each new user of the plugin.

I mean imagine, lets say the database updates every 2 hours while the plugin was running (this would actually be a little slow in a statistics stance, but to fast on a server load stance. That means you are going to be downloading a couple hundred XML files for each server and there is what, 15 to 20 servers in daoc now? I suppose if we did do this we could cut down on it some by letting the user specify which server to download the XML files for but still, that is a lot of bandwith going to one IP address in a very short amount of time.

What I'm working on right now already works reliably, I have but to finish parsing the wanted information and I'll have my first version ready. As for perfomance, if your on a slow internet connection it might take up to 30 seconds to return the information. If you are on a broadband connection you should notice little to no delay unless the camelotherald server is having issues or completely down.

Also I'm at a point in my plugin now where I can go one of two ways and I'm experimenting with both to decide the best one. I could pull up the guild XML file for the requested player's guild and retrieve the stats from there. Or I can just pull up the templated character information page from the camelot herald and parse the information from it. Either way I'm using camelot heralds search page to do all the querying, so it makes it look natural, as if the player actually opened the webpage and did the search. I'm trying to keep this plugin from being a possible way to detect XU users.

[switch]

@devestator: As far as database is concerned I thought that i.e. xu-guys would set up an main-database that would retrieve information from camelotherald for all servers on a daily basis like Register to unlock hidden link does (IMO a daily upate is enough) clients with your plugin then would have to implement a small database locally (or simply have data dumped in arrays) and download all data for the server they are going to play each time data changes...

Furthermore the data that would be collected by the "main"-database would just contain relevant data (meaning no info on crafing etc.) and without the xml-overhead so in my opinion the amount of data would be reduced to a minimum - one could also think of having this data compressed to zip-files automatically yielding a very small file that could be extracted by the plugin again...

doing so mytics attention wouldn't be attracted which doubtlessly will be the case when hundreds of players would download all xml files regularly - and amount of data could be reduced significantly.

[Devestator]

Yikes what is that site German lol? I saw what you are refering to and are you sure they have a database? If they do I'm fairly surprised they are getting away with hittin the camelotherald with that much bandwith each day. I'd be more inclined to think they are only getting information when it is requested on their site, possibly then downloading the information into a database for the day, but not all the information at once every day.

That is what I do on my guilds website, I have a database on our server and only get information off the herald if its requested on my site, and then I put it in the database for the day.

Anyway the point being even if a database like that were created would XU want to host such a database on their site with the added need to run scripts on the server to update the database when necessary? But also you speak of only needing certain information to cut down on the data, you still have to download the entire XML file from the herald and parse out the information so there is no way to cut down on the bandwidth usage on their side. Also if the server is doing the downloading there is the bandwidth of the file coming into the server. If it is then parsed, filed, zipped, compressed this is adding to the server processes and total bandwidth, with the only reduction being on the downloading to users computers, but in all a large increase in bandwidth to the XU server as well.

Honestly again I just dont see a database idea suceeding without causing some sort of bandwidth issues somewhere.

[supasoul]

Will this type of plugin also work for Euro DAoC? Register to unlock hidden link is the main info site currently

[devestator]

I have this plugin working just waiting on the next RC release of XU to fix a bug so the plugin works properly full time (currently only the first run works and then it causes other problems throughout xu due to a bug). As far as working on Euro servers, I dunno. I wasn't aware they were under a different system. I would have to look into it.

[Admin]

Devestator, the bug is fixed in the next verision of XU. I'll try to go ahead and post it for ya tonight or tomorrow. Send me a PM if it doesnt get posted tonight.