SotaLore news

Hey All.

I've made a few updates (hopefully improvements) to SotaLore, and specifically the farming section.

In response to this wishlist thread, I have added an ability to either download or copy a link to the farming calculator. This will let you add a "calendar" to whatever calendar app you use, and setup alarms for the second and third waterings.

https://www.sotalore.com/farming



To be honest, I'm a little doubtful this is going to be very useful. It's a bit clunky to import this data in to your own calendar. Maybe there's a way to improve on that, and I'll keep looking for a way to do this.

I'm also seriously considering setting up email notifications right from sotalore itself, although that will take quite a bit more work.

Please feel free to provide any feedback into this thread. (even if it has nothing to do with the farming tools )

Thanks,
Gravidy

 

I will give it a go in the next cycle! Thanks!

 

Greetings Gravidy
Would it be possible to create a file as an .ics? I am not sure how data can be exported as a file to download. If it can be the user would just dbl click on the file and it would import into what ever calendar program they are using. If not it could output as text message so the user could copy and paste then save it as an ics file.

Instructions copied from https://devguide.calconnect.org/Data-Model/Simple-Event/

Spoiler: Saving as an ics File

Creating Simple Events
On this page we describe creating a simple non-recurring event. We will show the contents of an ics file that represents the event. An ics file is a representation of calendar events in the standard format with a filename that ends with “.ics”.

An ics file contains a VCALENDAR object which contains one or more events.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//ABC Corporation//NONSGML My Product//EN
events go here
END:VCALENDAR

Then BEGIN and END of the VCALENDAR object are required and there should be only one VCALENDAR object per file.

The VERSION property is required and currently always has the value 2.0. The PRODID should have a value that identifies your organization.

As an example we will create an event describing a period in time - a 1 hour lunch meeting. This event has the following properties:

• start - the date, time and timezone identifier
• duration
• a uid
• a summary - the title for the event

We will add further properties later. For now this event added to the ics file will look like:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//ABC Corporation//NONSGML My Product//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Lunchtime meeting
UID:ff808181-1fd7389e-011f-d7389ef9-00000003
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20160420T120000
DURATIONT1H
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Note that the order of properties within a component is irrelevant.

SUMMARY
SUMMARY:Lunchtime meeting

The summary property provides a title for the event. It should be brief but descriptive.

UID
UID:ff808181-1fd7389e-011f-d7389ef9-00000003

This is a globally unique identifier for the event. It must not change if the event is altered or republished. This property is used by clients to identify the event. Events with a different UID are different events - even if they are at the same time.

The value should be guaranteed to be unique and should follow the rules of RFC 4122 A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) URN Namespace. A uuid generator can do this. (Some reference to a UID generator?)

DTSTART
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20160420T120000

This defines the start of the event. In this case it is shown as a local time of 12:00:00, that is midday. Additionally there is a timezone parameter which shows that the time must be interpreted as being in that timezone. (Need a reference to a place of identify timezone)

The date and time part has the form

date T time

where

date is year month day in numeric form with no delimiters
time is hours minutes seconds in numeric form with no delimiters

DURATION
DURATIONT1H

The duration property takes a value which has the form

P [days] [T [hours][minutes]]

where

days is a number
hours is a number followed by "H"
minutes is a number followed by "M"

Going further - where?
While the above is sufficient for many cases it may not be enough. Where are we having our lunch meeting? For this we have the LOCATION property.

This property has a simple text value - make sure the value has enough information for all users of the event. For example, the value “Room 123” may not be enough for those who don’t know which building.

For our example we assume it’s in a downtown establishment:

LOCATION:Mo's bar - back room

The full ics file now looks like:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//ABC Corporation//NONSGML My Product//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Lunchtime meeting
UID:ff808181-1fd7389e-011f-d7389ef9-00000003
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20160420T120000
DURATIONT1H
LOCATION:Mo's bar - back room
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Going further - why?
We know when the meeting takes place, and now we know where. But why are we meeting? For this we have the DESCRIPTION property. This property can take a (very) long description of the event. There are some rules that must be followed.

• Line feeds MUST be represented as “\n”
• Continuation lines MUST start with a space (true for any property)

So the description might be something like:

DESCRIPTION: We'll continue with the unfinished business from last time,\n
in particular:\n
Can names start with a number?\n
What if they are all numeric?\n
Reuse of names - is it valid\n
I remind the attendees we have spent 3 months on these subjects. We need
closure!!!

So now our full ics file looks like:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//ABC Corporation//NONSGML My Product//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Lunchtime meeting
UID:ff808181-1fd7389e-011f-d7389ef9-00000003
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20160420T120000
DURATIONT1H
DESCRIPTION: We'll continue with the unfinished business from last time,\n
in particular:\n
Can names start with a number?\n
What if they are all numeric?\n
Reuse of names - is it valid\n
I remind the attendees we have spent 3 months on these subjects. We need
closure!!!
LOCATION:Mo's bar - back room
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

 

It does download as a ".ics" file. The response header for "content-disposition" looks like: "attachment; filename="SOTA Farm Watering.ics"; filename*=UTF-8''SOTA%20Farm%20Watering.ics"

(note the filename starts with whatever is in the input field to the left of download)

Is there something unexpected happening (or not happening)? I certainly may have missed some specific detail.

 

I just tested this feature out and it worked seamlessly. I downloaded it and dragged it to my online calendar, easy.

A couple thoughts...

Firstly, I use the calendar to get the email notifications for the events. The "Harvest" event is missing. It would be good to have a 30 min event for that.

Second, and really not important, the events do not need to be the full window time because the goal is just to be notified by email. So 30 min would be fine. Plus that makes it easier for people to manage if they want to shift it around on their calendar to avoid notifications in the middle of the night or whatever. This is really not a big deal though.

 

In any case, the work is appreciated, SotALore is a great tool, both for agriculture and for many other aspects of the game.
I've been using it for a long time to keep track of watering time and find out where seeds are sold and recently discovered that I can find out how much XP I need to level up skills.
Thank you very much for developing this tool.

 

I've added an event (and alarm) for the Harvest.

Good feedback. I've reduced the size of all events to 30 minutes, so they can be easily moved around in whatever calendar you use.

I've also changed the calendar data to use UTC, instead of trying to figure out "local time". Hopefully this will work with most calendaring software.

I did notice that google calendar works fine when importing the downloaded ICS file. However, it doesn't work very well when "subscribing" to the calendar URL. I'm not sure if a different data format is needed for that, but if it is a problem I can look into it.

 

Thank you!

 

@Gravidy I used the latest calendar download just now and it is obsoletely perfect! Thank you!

 

Your work is amazing, @Gravidy !
Thank you very much for sharing it with us