Data Dump Files

We've seen fan sites come and go. I think a big factor in the high turnover, is that we're often in a position where we're having to manually scrape data... which can be both difficult and exhausting to obtain accurately, and keeps changing.

I tried my hand at this... trying to create a scene suggestion tool. You supply your AL, size of party, what you're interested in, etc, and it'd provide a list of suggested zones. I was doing things like hand-writing my XP pool size before and after a kill to try to figure out how much XP a skeleton was worth... or exploring every nook and cranny of a zone to figure what spawns. Extremely tedious.

I've dabbled enough with Unity to guess how Unity development has probably naturally proceeded. Things like monster spawners are dragged-and-dropped into the scene, baked into the scene itself. It's not (as far as I can speculate) database driven... some parts can be inferred through the API, but there's a lot of information locked into the game files themselves.

But, I do know it's possible that, when starting a scene, to pull up object lists that are tagged, grab their properties... and maybe dump them into a JSON/XML file? It could be something that happens every time a dev runs a scene automatically.

It wouldn't have to be delivered through the API. These files could be just packaged with the game files in a subfolder. We'd handle the rest.

SotA benefits from fan sites... but the environment isn't really facilitating this well. The easier it is for the fan site devs, the more likely they'll stick around, and not surround the game with half-finished abandoned sites, that make the game look worse.

So if Portalarium wants to help with this, this may be a good middle ground for the non-database content. We could use full data dumps for:

• List of all scenes and their meta data.
• Individual scene data, with spawn information (monster, nodes, etc), and their properties.
• Complete dump of all quest tree/data.
• Others?

Or maybe gives us a chat command like /exportscene, which does this and dumps into our data folder?

*waves goodbye to another idea inevitably drifts into the black hole*

 

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