NullTrading.com is open for business

Discussion in 'Player Created Resources' started by OxNull, Jul 26, 2018.

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  1. OxNull

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    Null Trading is open for business. Come try a New Shroud of the Avatar Trading Website: https://nulltrading.com

    At Null Trading, you are able to create multiple vendors that hold your different items. You upload your items by cropping the desired selection from a screenshot. Follow the guides and align the crop selection to the first and last item you want to upload. You can make selections from multiple different screenshots. If there is an error in the cropping you can undo your crop and start over, or delete your entire vendor if your are unsatisfied with it.

    Once you have a Vendor and items available for the market, you can scan your items to allow for easier searching from buyers. The scanning is not perfect and you are free to correct the errors and apply the changes to all other items that have the same errors.

    Another benefit of scanning is now buyers are able to search for items based on prices; also increasing the chances of making a sell.

    You can add tooltips to items, but due to the massive amounts of items and variations it could be a tedious task. I try to remedy that with the current implementation, but for right now it is best to only use tooltips for items that require them because they would help with the increase of the sale. ie, custom + 20 armor, weapons or rares. Wood scrap, clay blocks, coal, and ore could probably go without a tooltip. This is only temporary, there will be solutions to where every item can have a tooltip with the user able to save their sanity soon™

    Messages can be left on items to alert the vendor owner of an inquiry. Messages are 1:1, one message to one reply. To communicate you edit your message or reply. Keep track of your item inquires in the Item Messages page. If you are the vendor owner, you can get message notification from your user profile page.

    Where I hope Null Trading can be useful:
    - Items that often sit waiting for a specific buyer. Having your inventory accessed through the web allows for greater odds that you can find a buyer if you have what they are looking for.
    - Custom Crafted Gear: an artisan can share a link to their Null Trading Vendors (nulltading.com/[artisan's name]) and potential buyers can shop and browse your wares; even when not limited to the world of Novia.

    Improvements working on now are
    -Message Hub First version in place
    -Better Tooltip Assignment First version in place temporarily disabled.
    -On going improvement to the user interface and functions that go with them.
    -Training server for more accurate results from scans. Usually 100% correct if cropped properly

    Alas, Null Trading is just for connecting the links between buyer and seller. Happy Trading
    - Ox Null
     
    Last edited: May 23, 2019
  2. OxNull

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  3. Spungwa

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    I see you have now put most, if not all, the crown merchants on to the site.
    This is very useful, can now search for what can be bought for COTOs easily.

    Spung
     
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  4. Alioth

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    Wow - I absolutely love having Crown vendors with searchable pricing! Thanks! The search for vendors you have already added seems to work great. Overall the tool looks really cool and like it could be incredibly useful.

    A few quick comments / points of confusion after trying it out as a vendor: Is the intention to do OCR on the screen grabs? Or does it all need to be manually edited by user? I uploaded the first three screens of one of my vendors to test it out (takes 6 screen grabs for my vendors who are usually full). None of the items were automatically searchable. I tried editing the names of a few like "pure black dye" to see if it would stick, but it didn't seem to save my results. Other things came up, like when I searched for 'dye' I was presented the following, none of which actually contains dye.
    [​IMG]

    So maybe needs more testing, or maybe I am doing something wrong? Either way wanted to let you know.
    Thanks for your efforts on this, excited to see it grow and develop.

    Alioth
     
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  5. OxNull

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    Thanks spungwa for the original idea of adding the COTO merchants to Null Trading for easier reference. It does seem like a nice resource to access when curious about obsidian goods.
    And yes, from what I discovered this could be all the items available on COTO vendors. There could be some odd one likes the wall art merchant, but from running around those seem to be it.

    I do have to do some tweaking on the performance of loading over 1,000 item images to not bog down the user experiance. So right now if you go to the home and deeds merch, it might take a little bit to load everything. That one is my test case for peromance and what not. All the others seem to load decently.

    Thanks again Spungwa for the valuable feedback!
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
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  6. OxNull

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    Alioth, thank you for testing out the site! The intention is for the owner of the vendors to do as little work as possible. The site does use OCR, but it defiantly needs tweaking and due to the size of items i am scanning there are a few conditions to get the best results. The higher the resolution the better. I have been uploading my items with resolution 1920x1200. Anything 1080 and above should have good results on most items if cropped cleanly.

    I noticed your vendor items are a bit blurry, that happens when they are being stretch to fit the vendor. What is the resolution that you were uploading at?

    EDIT also @Alioth due to the new UI changes and the added transparency to windows, you have to have the items on a dark background. So either move your skill tree window, the emplty black right side (if you click crafting) and move that behind your items, or look down into a dark corner. That will interfere with the scanning.

    compare this background and text crispness. This is 300dpi
    [​IMG]

    to this one

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
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  7. Alioth

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    All good thoughts - OK I uploaded cleaner shots, higher DPI, these are directly from 1920x1080 screenshot. Couldnt figure out how to turn off transparency within the game UI, so I got the cleanest, darkest shot I could. Still no evidence of OCR being done that I can see, perhaps it takes a while to process for search? Example, I have belt of ox listed on my vendor. When I search belt, I do get a nice belt listing off your vendor (different belt), but nothing from mine. Same with other items I tested.
     
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  8. OxNull

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    did you initiate the scan process under the vendor edit button? You will see when you click the edit vendor button on the left side it will have a dropdown menu with things you are able to do with the vendor. And while the OCR is implmented there is tweaking and training still needed to be had. I wanted to get a sample size of items so I can catch the most obvious patterns. You will notice 0's supposed to be c's and 6's supposed to be e's I have to run more training simulations.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
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  9. Alioth

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    nope, figured it would be automatic. didnt see that. trying now.

    EDIT: worked great! found my belt of the ox first time.
    that said, a lot of stuff does not show up still, and a lot of stuff does.
    recipes pulls up a lot of them
    dyes does not
    clock does not find my clock
    greenhouse does not find mine
    scroll finds my teleport scrolls but not my recall scrolls
    when is search "band" it finds my maple band, but when i search "maple" it does not

    Still - I love this! I just have no idea how to tell what will be searchable and not at this point.

    Used a somewhat similar tool for elite dangerous that OCR'd vendor prices, have been longing for one for this game.

    Can't wait til this is functioning closer to 90-95% of my search items.

    I will upload scans of vendors all day long, let me know what you need for training this thing. :D
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
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  10. OxNull

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    If you click on each individual item you can correct the name and price and that will be searchable.

    Again, thank you for testing it out. getting user feedback helps me make the site better.

    Edit: also you can actually add a link to your lot location in place of directions in the descriton by clicking on the little pin next to the vendor town/location field.

    [​IMG]

    Just copy and paste the link from your SotA map location and users will be able to find it from there. You can still use the description area for direction too.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
  11. Alioth

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    Got it, OK. Will the edits become universally applied to future items?

    Edit: Phew, going to take a while to teach it, but I will certainly help if it improves system wide. Otherwise no way I can edit each of these by hand.

    [​IMG]
    shows as: ")mbu6d Elv6n Bow String Of Sp66d"

    most others have similar probs.

    Good news is when I updated these, it updated for all the ones I have listed. So, is it universal now for all vendors, or just on this vendor?
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
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  12. OxNull

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    hehe, yeah you dont have to do that. there are specific patterns that get picked up I can train out of it. In that example a lot of 6's are in place of e's. So wait until later versions. I do Have the apply to all with similar name function. So for bulk items it works well. If you are uploading a lot of items that say )mbu6d Elv6n Bow String Of Sp66d, click the apply to all button and it will apply to all those items. Its a temporary fix. I am going to be doing hard training on it tomorrow. Also I edited my post above for on information on providing a sota map link

    but for right now, I just want to test the stability of the site and just if it worked. I do not expect users to use this site seriously without bumps/frustration.

    uploading the items and seeing the wrong variations does help in the end. So even if it does get it wrong, uploading atm still helps. Just dont put the effort into correcting everything.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
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  13. Alioth

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    will do - thank you :)

    also very cool, didn't realize this - updated, easy to do.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
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  14. Alioth

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    anyway to drop www. as required for visiting domain?
     
  15. OxNull

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    yes, it is not required anymore.
     
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  16. Matt Harris

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    A nice tool. The "Apply to all with same scan name" isn't that precise. About 1/4 of the ones on the vendor I uploaded it thought were "The Bear and the Bees".
     
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  17. OxNull

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    Matt Harris, thank you for giving Null Trading a try. It is much appreciated. Some functions in their current state are not too smart. It does exactly that, it applies to all with same scan name. So if your image scan comes up blank, and 1/4 of your other images turn up blank its going to think it has the same scan name, which is nothing. Its dumb and needs more tuning. I hope to make it smarter soon.
    Also to get best results from the scans you will need to have the background of your inventory as dark as possible.

    compare

    [​IMG]

    with

    [​IMG]

    if there is a lot of background noise there will not be a good result in a scan.

    A good trick is to either point your avatar into a dark corner or move the right half of your blank skill tree behind your inventory window.
     
  18. OxNull

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    I did another round of tuning the scanning and am getting better results. Would be nice to see if things improved at all on your side Alioth. There are still more adjustments, but I think its a step in the right direction.
     
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  19. OxNull

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    I did a pretty big update to where after scanning over 2000 items at Null Trading they were all correct.

    I added Public Vendors to a reoccurring resource I will provide. Monday/Thur I will update the public vendors at www.nulltrading.com/publicvendors
    If you would like to have a public vendor added to the list just let me know the location. I am starting out with Owls Head, Ardoris, and Resolute since those seem to be the ones that get the most traffic. You might find some good deals, as well as helping out some new players.

    @Alioth and @Matt Harris I had to delete your vendors due to this update because I did more image processing to improve the scans and since your vendors were already created they wouldn't be updated and still get poor scans. It would be nice if you gave creating a vendor and scanning another try. I do not like deleting other vendors unnecessarily, so hopefully there wont be a need for me to delete other vendors again. Even this scan with the noisy background with the new image processing, I got 100% scan http://www.nulltrading.com/vendor/48 Just try to align your cuts as good as you can, and try to overshoot on the last item by a little bit to make sure it doesn't get dropped off.

    So this is pretty big on the items and scanning front. I am going to improve the tooltips now so that users can start showing off their custom made gear.

    Safe Travels.
    Ox
     
    Last edited: Aug 6, 2018
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  20. Alioth

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    :D Can’t wait to try it out! Exciting news

    EDIT - just uploaded a vendor, OCR worked 100% of items I checked. Outstanding!
     
    Last edited: Aug 6, 2018
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