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Weapon Assistant Tool

Meculus said:
Its not a matter of being thick, we're being thorough. As I've already stated I have faith in Jdegre's software, so much so that I have contacted him in the past to discuss integration into the plugin section of Entropia Life. Jdegre used to be posted as an approved tool, and I'm sure the only reason its not now is due to something more along the lines of webpage design on MA's site than anything heavy. We like to be thorough, and discuss what we develop openly with the community as it is in development, As I said.... we'll keep you posted as this evolves,
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I'm sorry - whats the relation of using the already existing avatar skill data in Entropedia to Jdegre's program?
 
remontoire said:
I'm sorry - whats the relation of using the already existing avatar skill data in Entropedia to Jdegre's program?
Click to expand...

Ive been looking into collecting the skills from Entropedia.
The way we can collect data from entropedia is via their "chart" page. That produces XML we can read and parse into our site. Weapon stats for instance.

There also is a "Skill chart" we can use. However, the way is is presented via their chart is less than optimal.
You can load it here: http://www.entropiawiki.com/ChartData.aspx?Chart=AvatarSkill

Tread lightly, your browser might crash.

From what I could read, before my browser (IE or Firefox) crashed - the list contains every single skill for every single avatar.

There is some issues with that which I need to speak with Witte about. Currently the only identifier I can use to tie an Entropia Life account to an avatar skill set on entropedia, is the avatar name.
You would be surprised how many ppl dont know what their avatar name is. ("first last nick" .. or "last first nick" .. or "simple spelling mistakes".... are often errors we see)
Assuming that an acceptable percentage on entropedia has entered their avatar name correctly, we would then need to load all of their skills into our system.

Now, I know that I have not entered (scanned) my skills since 2008 or something to that extend.
So, if we update every single avatar with their "entropedia skills" many will be wrong.
This means that people will have to update their skills - manually or via Entropedia (skill scanner)..
Then we would run the importing again..

Alternatively we would have a button on the profile page that say "update my skills from Entropedia", but as you see on the "Avatarskill" list on entropedia .. its +20MB.. if people did that all of the time, EL would slow down.


Then we have the "why wont you upload values to Entropedia" .. short answer is; I dont know how thats possible.
What we will offer, as we already do on several things, is to provide the weapon data we have collected in a more modern way via SOAP. This is faster and more elaborate than a simple "list" with everything in.
This way Entropedia (or anyone else) can collect the weapon stats from us if they want. :)
We will also build in so we can receive updates to the weapon stats via this SOAP. That way we are more or less just acting as a database, with an interface attached.

None of the data we have on the site is something we charge money for.
If anyone want to build "Entropia Life version X" .. they can do so via the webservices we offer.
The only thing we charge money for, and please remember you can get everything for free by running the client - and contributing to the accuracy, is the digested charts we have spent a lot of time making.

- so, please stop saying we are capitalistic pigs (reading between the lines). If you want to make a site that has the same complexxity as Entropia Life, and offer it for free. By all means, do so - we even provide you a way of getting all the data so you dont have to create a client, get about 2000 ppl to use it on a regular basis and so on.
 
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jdegre said:
there you go:

http://www.entropiawiki.com/AvatarSkills.aspx?name=Ms Kazzza Milla Starfinder
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Thanks jdegre. I knew there was a way to do that from my work on wikitools and before that when we were using it to find skill contributions, but couldn't recall exactly how to do it. :dunce:

Starfinder: The advantage you have with EL is that you know the exact name of the avatar. You just poll entropedia to see if the avatar exists and, if so, provide a button to upload skills from it.

There is a date listed in the avatar profile page for when the skills were last updated, but it doesn't seem like it's part of the skill chart API output. If you do set it up to scrape that page, though, you can then present the user with a date for when their skills were last updated on Entropedia as a guide.

I'm perhaps overly protective of the interests of entropedia because it suffers from the same "Tragedy of the Commons" that other wikis do: they provide a service disproportionate to the popular support they tend to get in return. This is compounded because wikis don't usually have a high profile lead developer like other sites or tools do (by their very nature).

When it comes down to it, entropedia is the only EU-related website that i couldn't do without, and i think that's true for many people. So i want it to remain to first place people go to upload new item stats and data. I think it's reasonable to expect that other popular tools using its data will promote its popular support.

Anyway i think everyone is on the same page now. You now have the API (such as it is) to access the avatar skill info, which was the original point of discussion here. Regarding the weapon chart info that came up later: I do hope that you will put a small notice that the weapon data originally came from entropedia and encourage users to update it there when they make changes to the data in EL. That's as much as anyone can expect.

Still no response to my support case about adding Entropedia to MA's recommended resources/tools page.
 
Doer said:
Still no response to my support case about adding Entropedia to MA's recommended resources/tools page.
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entropedia is indeed listed under the "community" section, but not on the "tools" subsection. it is in the "knowledge" subsection.

btw, i noticed they removed "entropia tools" from the "tools" section; i guess someone reported that it no longer exists (this, or MA is reading this thread :p)
 
jdegre said:
there you go:
http://www.entropiawiki.com/AvatarSkills.aspx?name=Ms Kazzza Milla Starfinder
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Perfect, thanks! :)
I wonder why the list always show "Scan Animal,137.54" ... ive never scanned a single animal (well, perhaps once or twice).. But it lists that for everyone.. weird..






Doer said:
I'm perhaps overly protective of the interests of entropedia because it suffers from the same "Tragedy of the Commons" that other wikis do: they provide a service disproportionate to the popular support they tend to get in return. This is compounded because wikis don't usually have a high profile lead developer like other sites or tools do (by their very nature).
Click to expand...
Instead of staying at status quo - because "everything works as it is now". Im very much in favor of facilitating data sharing as oppose to "one site to rule them all".


Doer said:
When it comes down to it, entropedia is the only EU-related website that i couldn't do without, and i think that's true for many people.
Click to expand...
Again, why do you have a romantic relationship with one site? I would rather have it so "The data entropedia offers I can not do without". That I can agree with, the site means nothing to me. As does Entropia Life. The site dosent matter at all. What is important is the data.

This is why we are making the webservices (SOAP) so you can interact with Entropia Life data.

We are trying to gather as much "Entropia Universe" data as possible on Entropia Life, and we are also making it so we can share that data with everyone. Much of this is a two-way service. If we deliver it to you, you can also send updates to us.
If I could update Entropedia's weapon info via SOAP so it would happen when you updated the weapon data on Entropia Life, it would be a non-issue. Of course I would do that then, but asking the user to manually update the data two different places is a little "1995" ...

It basically boils down to this.
Do you want one wiki site where you are at the mercy of that single site.
Or do you want a system where data flows between every site there is.

Im very much in favor of the second option...
 
jdegre said:
entropedia is indeed listed under the "community" section, but not on the "tools" subsection. it is in the "knowledge" subsection.

btw, i noticed they removed "entropia tools" from the "tools" section; i guess someone reported that it no longer exists (this, or MA is reading this thread :p)
Click to expand...

I pointed that out in my support case and suggested they replace it with Entropedia. I guess they have now responded to the case. Will check when I login to EU...

Next up is get Skill Scanner on their tools section again...
 
Starfinder said:
Instead of staying at status quo - because "everything works as it is now". Im very much in favor of facilitating data sharing as oppose to "one site to rule them all".

Again, why do you have a romantic relationship with one site? I would rather have it so "The data entropedia offers I can not do without". That I can agree with, the site means nothing to me. As does Entropia Life. The site dosent matter at all. What is important is the data.

This is why we are making the webservices (SOAP) so you can interact with Entropia Life data.

We are trying to gather as much "Entropia Universe" data as possible on Entropia Life, and we are also making it so we can share that data with everyone. Much of this is a two-way service. If we deliver it to you, you can also send updates to us.
If I could update Entropedia's weapon info via SOAP so it would happen when you updated the weapon data on Entropia Life, it would be a non-issue. Of course I would do that then, but asking the user to manually update the data two different places is a little "1995" ...

It basically boils down to this.
Do you want one wiki site where you are at the mercy of that single site.
Or do you want a system where data flows between every site there is.

Im very much in favor of the second option...
Click to expand...

I would take one wiki site in community hands that is the source of data for more specialized tools but serves as the point of origin over any other option. It's much easier to maintain some kind of coherency and user-mediated control on what gets left in the data that way (we have locked fields accessible only to moderators, similar to what sometimes gets done on wikipedia) than it is with any number of point sources of data that come from projects that are (even benevolent) dictatorships in nature.

Now, the main weakness of Entropedia is that it isn't entirely in community hands in the sense that there are too few developers (1) to support it and keep the tool portions of it modern and accurate. Not only that, but a wiki isn't intended to be all things to all people. That is why I actively encourage and support the creation of tools that use the wiki data (for example yours, in this thread), but expect said tools to send people back to the wiki when it comes time to enter data... because the strength of the wiki is the data. It would be nice to have the wiki in question be a more modern design and support more modern protocol for data sharing. Nevertheless, a wiki is the ideal tool for collaborative sharing in a community.

n.b. i'm not stuck on entropedia. It just happens to be the best example of a community-accepted and community-maintained EU-related wiki, and as long as that is true i will treat it as the community's most valuable resource. Not just for the data it currently contains, but for its ability to have that data updated tomorrow by a couple dozen different users and double-checked for apparent foul play by a few others.
 
Starfinder said:
I wonder why the list always show "Scan Animal,137.54" ... ive never scanned a single animal (well, perhaps once or twice).. But it lists that for everyone.. weird..
Click to expand...

this seems to be a default result page when the avatar name in the URL parameter does not exist; when the avatar does exist, the list of skills is correctly returned. looks like it is a small unhandled error case in the script, which witte would fix in a couple of minutes, if he were around, but anyway it is a tiny mistake which can be handled very easily at client side.
 
Doer said:
I would take one wiki site in community hands that is the source of data for more specialized tools but serves as the point of origin over any other option.
Click to expand...

I agree that some data should only be maintained from a single site. But, something like avatar skills for instance. That I do not see any issues with being updated from a separate site.

If the methods used to update the avatar skills across the different sites are implemented behind a username/apikey type of protection.

That is likely what we will do with avatar skills.
Something like a soap that looks like the following:
public void updateAvatarSkills(AvatarSkillSet SkillSet, string username, string apikey)


I would in the same sense not allow other sites to update the raw globals we have in our database, even though they can get to them via the soap.

Instead of writing it all up.. Here's a picture..
 
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To get a little back on track... you can now update your skills from Entropedia under "Avatar settings". :)
 
You can now also update your skills with CSV files...
 
is professional standing "skill1 / 1000 * skill1 effect" + "skill2 / 1000 * skill2 effect".. etc.. ?
 
I don't want to be a boar but what about my question about being able to keep the weapons in the combat setup so they don't have to be re-entered each ET is loaded ? At least tell if you will or will not.
Thanks
 
CozMoDan said:
I don't want to be a boar but what about my question about being able to keep the weapons in the combat setup so they don't have to be re-entered each ET is loaded ? At least tell if you will or will not.
Thanks
Click to expand...

Eventually yes, but its not planned right now.
 
Starfinder said:
is professional standing "skill1 / 1000 * skill1 effect" + "skill2 / 1000 * skill2 effect".. etc.. ?
Click to expand...

Sorry i missed your PM in game. You were off when i saw it. AFAIK the skill contributions in entropedia are correct, but there are a few of the new professions/skills that aren't fully known yet.

The percent contributions are the number of levels per 10k of the skill, so it's (skill1/10.000)*skill1_contrib + ...

In other words, if you have 10k in all the contributing skills to a profession, you have level 100 in the profession.
 
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