Some feature that could be implemented on the website - Better My Items and My Skills

[CozMoDan]

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I know how to do that and I can do that. Anyone can. This is not the point.
We are in 2020 and web went a long way since EU (PE) started. A decent grid is a minimum you can ask for on ui.
Also, the skill value is not displayed anywhere on the web. I know you can access them in various ways. I feel that it is a shame that I need third party tools for some basic things that are that easy to implement.

Also, those feature that are so easy to implement I do not see how they can break any of the existing systems. They pose no risk.
They get the data from database anyway. They just need to make an endpoint to expose it in json.
You can go wild and make an amazing display with tree view and all, or simply have a grid with simple features developed on the frontend.

Black you have been a long time and I actually I am a bit surprised. Do you not watch the releases ? I can't remember what it was on the last patch but it was to fix something (to lazy to look) But I noticed something that had changed something that had nothing to do with the patch. My point is when ever MA does anything about any little thing someone else is doing something also and can screw something else up. Case in point: the old cave mission, MA did patch or release and it was almost a year before it was playable again and the patch had nothing to do with the cave mission.

Not saying your idea is bad just saying I am always scared when MA does anything to anything.

I did post this to offend just voicing a concern.

[BlackHawk]

The changes in the game are different from the changes on the website.
The concerns are different. Whenever you make a change in the game itself, unrelated features from the point of view of the player could break, because I suppose they are coupled in code in a way they should not be. Have in mind the fact that the game is old and some parts of the code are poorly designed. Probably have dependencies they should not have and no one wants to change any of that. If it works, leave it like that.

From what I see, the team made significant progress. It pushed lots of changes and lots of features that worked rather well. That tells me that they have more experience. The code is decoupled. They probably have isolated logic in the newer parts of the code. Dealing with old code is always hard.

In order to do what I ask for, you need to change very little. Is nothing you can break, unless you do something stupid and query the database 100 times/request to display items and skills. Considering that the data on website is not critical, they could just display the state it was few minutes ago and serve a cached version. Touch the database only if you have to and only if you do not have fresh data in cache. Database is the only thing that could impact the game. If something else will, then the company has serious problems. I expect it to have a reasonable design.

The website looks like it is put together by a backend dev. Is just not a frontend oriented company. That is fine. However, to display a grid that no one cares how it looks, just that it works, it is not such an absurd task. There are frameworks on the client created for people who do not want to hear about frontend. I hate those, but they do exist and are great. Try ExtJS

[BlackHawk]

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Some time ago I implemented some of these suggestions in the form of firefox plugin. You can take a look at another thread: http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/fo...racking-plugin
Version described is bit old (total value at the bottom for example, now it's at the top) but you'll have the idea.

I will have to test this thing. It looks great. However, the skills can't be implemented by you without a connection to the actual client. I know jdegre did a great job. But it is not something the community should do. Skills are an asset. We should be able to check our assets.

It is like you have a bank account. You go in the app and check your status, but the bank never shows the interest. It is yours! Show it!

[CozMoDan]

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The changes in the game are different from the changes on the website.
The concerns are different. Whenever you make a change in the game itself, unrelated features from the point of view of the player could break, because I suppose they are coupled in code in a way they should not be. Have in mind the fact that the game is old and some parts of the code are poorly designed. Probably have dependencies they should not have and no one wants to change any of that. If it works, leave it like that.

From what I see, the team made significant progress. It pushed lots of changes and lots of features that worked rather well. That tells me that they have more experience. The code is decoupled. They probably have isolated logic in the newer parts of the code. Dealing with old code is always hard.

In order to do what I ask for, you need to change very little. Is nothing you can break, unless you do something stupid and query the database 100 times/request to display items and skills. Considering that the data on website is not critical, they could just display the state it was few minutes ago and serve a cached version. Touch the database only if you have to and only if you do not have fresh data in cache. Database is the only thing that could impact the game. If something else will, then the company has serious problems. I expect it to have a reasonable design.

The website looks like it is put together by a backend dev. Is just not a frontend oriented company. That is fine. However, to display a grid that no one cares how it looks, just that it works, it is not such an absurd task. There are frameworks on the client created for people who do not want to hear about frontend. I hate those, but they do exist and are great. Try ExtJS

The red ones above are key words Sorry just had to that

I am wondering though why would you want all that info ? Is there something that one could gain from know these things ? As long as you have played I would certainly think your levels are in the 100's. There are things set in the game (like you are going to miss around 10% of the time) that you can not get around no matter what no matter how hard you study the stats IMO.
I am not saying these things to get at you,I really do want to know your thoughts.
Thanks.

I just thought of something, you mentioned they do not touch the DB but how do they(MA) get the info for the skills list (K hot key) in game ? I have two computers and play on both and if all your info is not server side then you could not retrieve that info if you changed computers.

Anyway no big deal, just a good discussion.

[BlackHawk]

I was talking about caching server side.
There is the DB with the game info, where probably all skills are. In order to get skill info, you do have to call that DB. If a user calls the grid multiple times really fast, you do not need to call the db for each request. You can just call it the first time, and for all the other requests you serve the same data that you already got the first time.
I am not talking about how things are implemented inside the game. Just for those grids.

More advanced things could also be implemented, such as saving all changes from the ingame skills/items in another database on updates using queues and/or microservices so the data will be almost true on cache all the time. On website you do not need things to be as exact as they are in game.

The red text in there is not a real concern. Even if it would break things, it is easy to fix. If you start by thinking that people are incompetent, you may as well quit the game. In reality they have a complex system that behaves reasonably well, so they do a good job.

In any system ever made there are bugs. This is a fact of life. Some of the bugs are just not obvious and they do not present themselves unless there are some special circumstances. But they are there... To expect them to make a system with no bugs is not a reasonable request. You can ask for a quality management that has a way to deal with the problems as they are discovered.

[CozMoDan]

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I was talking about caching server side.
There is the DB with the game info, where probably all skills are. In order to get skill info, you do have to call that DB. If a user calls the grid multiple times really fast, you do not need to call the db for each request. You can just call it the first time, and for all the other requests you serve the same data that you already got the first time.
I am not talking about how things are implemented inside the game. Just for those grids.

More advanced things could also be implemented, such as saving all changes from the ingame skills/items in another database on updates using queues and/or microservices so the data will be almost true on cache all the time. On website you do not need things to be as exact as they are in game.

The red text in there is not a real concern. Even if it would break things, it is easy to fix. If you start by thinking that people are incompetent, you may as well quit the game. In reality they have a complex system that behaves reasonably well, so they do a good job.

In any system ever made there are bugs. This is a fact of life. Some of the bugs are just not obvious and they do not present themselves unless there are some special circumstances. But they are there... To expect them to make a system with no bugs is not a reasonable request. You can ask for a quality management that has a way to deal with the problems as they are discovered.

I don't really understand all that you saying about the DB but I do agree and disagree with some of the other things you have said.

My comment from my post above "Case in point: the old cave mission, MA did patch or release and it was almost a year before it was playable again and the patch had nothing to do with the cave mission." That was a while ago and I do agree with your statement about them being much better now and this Ver. is proof of that. Having said that, I am not sure things that are broken in a patch or VU are not always easy to fix IMO.

I totally disagree about the no bug statement. I was a senior programmer for many years and our QA dept was very, very good. After my retirement I kept in contact with several of my friends still working and how it was going. One of my close friend said he was about to move on because there was nothing to do and the only thing he did was sit around or wait for an order for an enhancement. The software was medical HMO management and very exacting and had over 200 SQL DBs and some 1M lines of code written by around 25-30 programmer over a 8 year period.

Anyway don't mean to argue with you sorry. But you never did say why you wanted all this info. Did you not say so because it gives you an advantage over other players ? That's fine with me if you do the work you should reap the rewards.

[Detritus]

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I don't really understand all that you saying about the DB but I do agree and disagree with some of the other things you have said.

I totally disagree about the no bug statement. I was a senior programmer for many years and our QA dept was very, very good. After my retirement I kept in contact with several of my friends still working and how it was going. One of my close friend said he was about to move on because there was nothing to do and the only thing he did was sit around or wait for an order for an enhancement. The software was medical HMO management and very exacting and had over 200 SQL DBs and some 1M lines of code written by around 25-30 programmer over a 8 year period.

I'm sorry, I just can't let this go, and this may seem mean-spirited but I think you are either trolling or just bullshitting.

Your posts are constantly demonstrating a total lack of any technical knowledge, much less programming knowledge, it's just hard for me to believe they come from a former senior engineer. Even in this very post you don't understand how data lakes work, even though you allegedly worked in an industry segment that very heavily relies on them (I happen to work in healthcare myself). And I don't think your software had over 200 dbs, that doesn't make any sense, unless you are just giving the counts on your customers' individual warehouses which is stupid. Sorry, none of what you say adds up, imo.

[CozMoDan]

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I'm sorry, I just can't let this go, and this may seem mean-spirited but I think you are either trolling or just bullshitting.

Your posts are constantly demonstrating a total lack of any technical knowledge, much less programming knowledge, it's just hard for me to believe they come from a former senior engineer. Even in this very post you don't understand how data lakes work, even though you allegedly worked in an industry segment that very heavily relies on them (I happen to work in healthcare myself). And I don't think your software had over 200 dbs, that doesn't make any sense, unless you are just giving the counts on your customers' individual warehouses which is stupid. Sorry, none of what you say adds up, imo.

I don't think you are being mean. Ok, I programmed in VB6 and was a little versed in SQL server to do simple query's etc. and I retired in 2004. Much has changed in programming so I appear dumb and am dumb with all the web apps etc. that is common place now. The company I worked for was started in 1994 and I was its first employee, a few years latter we had over 200 employees. It was sold in 2006. Here is a link to that sale.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/ho...e-Quality-Care

Not bad for a company that stared with 1 employee who worked for free for 3 months because there was not enough money in the bank .

Being out of touch in computer software for many years makes one appear a fool but in the day I assure you I was not. Yes we did have over Tables in one DB, sorry meant to say tables in the first place. It was the best job I ever had. No matter what people say when you hit 73 in age things are a lot easier to forget

[Detritus]

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I retired in 2004.

Yes we did have over Tables in one DB, sorry meant to say tables in the first place. It was the best job I ever had. No matter what people say when you hit 73 in age things are a lot easier to forget

Fair enough, the industry definitely has changed a lot in 15 years. 200 tables makes a lot more sense.

Don't worry, if I even make it to 73 I will probably need to be spoon fed.

[CozMoDan]

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Fair enough, the industry definitely has changed a lot in 15 years. 200 tables makes a lot more sense.

Don't worry, if I even make it to 73 I will probably need to be spoon fed.

I never did game play programming. They were just starting to have game creating programs (guess they are called engines now) where one could click on an object and add to the screen. I was not creative enough for that.

BTW it makes a big difference who is holding the spoon