Thankless and arduous task I need done for patch 0.3
Still on for releasing patch 0.3 to you all this coming Friday. Unfortunately Trade won't be making it into the cut this time as there are a great deal of other things that still need my attention. Promise you it's coming soon after, definitely before the game releases anyways.
Due to the enormous amounts of data we're about to populate the DB with (namely Skills and Monsters), I'm having to think outside the box a bit with how the contributions for these categories will work, and how all of this is going to come together technically.
In order for my plan to work, there's one task that I know will take me around 5-6 hours to complete, but that's time I really don't have and so I'd like to ask if anyone here wants to volunteer to do it for me.
Brief is below. If you do decide to do this, please make a post here so that others know and won't do the work twice
Every skill has 1-13 'properties' such as Mana Cost, % Damage etc. but typically most skills have around 3-5 'properties'. Thanks to the hard work of @SudoDragon , @Tavron , and @ Stormlash , we were able to collate all of the figures for each of these properties, for every skill in the game, for every level between 1 and 60, in one spreadsheet for contributors to use.
That's a lot of data - organising it all on the database I have to juggle performance, presentation, organisation etc. and with these high numbers of variables it gets complicated. I could just add another 1600+ columns to my SQL table to account for all of them, but that would make the site ridiculously slow and interpreting the data would also be difficult.
So to alleviate this, all Monster and Skill entries will be made in two stages. A 'base contribution' with the Key stuff that doesn't change, and 'auxiliary contributions' for every 'property' in a skill, or 'variant' of a monster.
For example, the skill Power Strike has three 'properties' - 'Mana Cost', 'Attack +%', and 'Lightning Damage'. All three of them have different values for skill levels 1 to 60. The contributions would go like this:
Or if it was the monster ' Fallen'. It has five variants: ' Fallen', 'Carver', 'Devilkin', 'Dark One', 'Warped One'. All five of them have different values for normal, nightmare, and hell difficulty. The contributions would go like this:
- Base contribution made for Power Strike
- Auxiliary contribution made for 'Mana Cost'
- Auxiliary contribution made for 'Attack +%'
- Auxiliary contribution made for 'Lightning Damage'
In order to do that, I need to know how many 'property' rows there are for each Skill, or how many 'variant' rows there are for each Monster. This will allow me to make invisible entries elsewhere that tie into their master entries when the auxiliary contributions are made.
- Base contribution made for Fallen
- Auxiliary contribution made for ' Fallen'
- Auxiliary contribution made for 'Carver'
- Auxiliary contribution made for 'Devilkin'
- Auxiliary contribution made for 'Dark One'
- Auxiliary contribution made 'Warped One'
Furthermore, the way in which this should be formatted (one property per line, in a .txt file) is important, as it allows me to mass create the 'slots' that the data will be contributed into. I've already done it for all skills in the game (695 lines!), and you'll find that attached below as an example of what needs to be done for Monsters.
Let's look at the monster ' Fallen' again. We know it has five variants - on Arreat you'll see them as 'rows' in the table. Therefore I'd enter text like this into the .txt file, one line at a time:
Seeing as there are usually 5 variants of each monster, and there are 140 or so monster 'types', that equals almost 700 lines to go into this txt file. If someone wants to do this for me, I'd be very grateful! Just Monsters.
Lenvaldier
Mastah99
Teebling
6882Admin