New tool arriving soon

[GeorgeS]

I am completing a LARGE and pretty cool tool. What is does is create loottables and lootdrops from http://everquest.allakhazam.com's website.

Basically we know many existing zones have npc's, but drop nothing or very little. This tool will load in your zone from allakhazam.com and compare it against's your PEQ database, and then creates the necessary drops. It's very good and can create an entire zone in a few minutes. I have it about 90% debugged and it works so well, that I am enjoying zones which previously had nothing drop,and now all sorts of stuff drops. I suppose with ambition, you could do every zone in a day. Doing this by hand was impossible before.

You can see the results in the npc&loot editor right away. I am adding in some features so I should have a beta release imminently. This tool need good documentation, still to be made, and that will be done before release.

As an addendum, I also modified the npc&loot editor to handle large amounts of lootdrops, as before it would handle one at a time. That release will come later.


GeorgeS

[Akkadius]

George,

You're going to hate my guts for this, but last week I wrote a web crawler to parse Magelo's data based on drop rates and we're working on merging it into PEQ right now. PEQ is running a test code that will be submitted to the SVN that changed the loot schematic to reflect changes necessary to make loot as accurate as possible. This will most likely break your tool and your NPC Editor tool for loot as well.

I have generated 678,898 loot entries from all the zones through VoA and they will be dumped into PEQ's databse here relatively soon.

So that this is somewhere else besides the coders channel in IRC I will also mention the below:

Not only have I crawled Loot data but I've also got spawn points and Merchantlists as well from all zones.

I will be also dumping Tradeskills here relatively soon as well all the way through VoA.


After the previous I will be working on a way to parse all of the quests and tasks from Allakhazam so we can automatically generate a baseline of all the tasks in the game.

We also have started making automating efforts to collect NPC factions from NPC's so that we can tie that info with what is observed on Allakhazam as well.

I hope you can forgive me :(

[GeorgeS]

Well I think your work is excellent, and I only wrote the tool so I could at least be current with the online Sony database. Your merging of all tradeskills and spawns is admirable! I cannot wait.

GeorgeS

[Akkadius]

Well I think your work is excellent, and I only wrote the tool so I could at least be current with the online Sony database. Your merging of all tradeskills and spawns is admirable! I cannot wait.

GeorgeS

Yeah I just felt so bad after you had posted this hoping that you don't feel like you wasted a bunch of time. Your efforts on creating tools in this community has helped many many people.

Creating these parsers/web crawlers is not something that I had premeditated as it started as a brief discussion in coders with Cavedude and I about Magelo data and the intentions of ever using it. It has since then evolved into trying other methods of getting current. Hopefully this can inspire a movement to help drive PEQ forward.

Once again I hope I don't come off the wrong way I just felt I should probably let you know before it all gets submitted and ultimately I felt bad. I don't know how much time and effort you put into it.

[Rabbit9179]

Thanks so much for all of you guys hard work. Love seeing EQEMU moving forward. Can't wait to see all this released. Wish I could help with all this but due to an injury in Iraq its very hard for me to remember and hold stuff I learn in :mad: but thanks again.

[sorvani]

since GeorgeS tools will compare against ZAM and PEQ (well whatever your personal DB is I would guess) this will actually be a nice tool since PEQ will have everything populated from Magelo. Will basically give users the MAgelo data and a way to quickly compare with ZAM.

[cavedude]

You may want to hold off on making changes to your tools regarding loot. As Akkadius mentioned, I had to overhaul the loot system in EQEmu to accommodate his parsed data (plus, I admit I HATED the old system!) It's on PEQ now, and will be merged into EQEmu SVN soon.

[GeorgeS]

Ok sounds fine. Can you send the new loot schema to me so I can have a pre-emptive look?

GeorgeS

[Noport]

Thank you George & Akkadius your work is vary much appreciated

[chrsschb]

How will this affect custom quests, items, npcs, spawns, etc?

[GeorgeS]

How will this affect custom quests, items, npcs, spawns, etc?

If you mean the new loottables? Yeah I think a translator will need to be coded, otherwise it's going to affect everyone with custom content.

GeorgeS

[chrsschb]

If you mean the new loottables? Yeah I think a translator will need to be coded, otherwise it's going to affect everyone with custom content.

GeorgeS

Exactly, will we be prompted to keep/merge modified content, or will it just be overwritten.

[Akkadius]

When I create the data dumper script I should be using ranges that don't affect PEQ or custom tables as I will be trying to use a higher range that can be deleted and regenerated as new data is pulled in at a later time.

[namini]

If a new schema could be released preemptively for all, I'd be appreciative as well. Doesn't have to be a pretty chart (albeit an update to http://eqemu.psend.com/schema.html wouldn't garner any complaints from me), just something to familiarize myself with the new loot system now so I can plan on how to get to customizing later (just did a new x64 build but am holding off customizing until this release -- unless we're looking at weeks until release?).

Appreciate the hard work. I've just begun diving into figuring out the loot system (old system) and my head exploded. This was before I was directed to the page that had that schema chart by Akkadius though.. helped out tremendously to visualize it all.

[kaos00723]

Awesome news and great work from all ends, can't wait!

[cavedude]

I've outlined the new loot system here: http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=35770 and will commit it today.

[GeorgeS]

The new tool is done and works very nice. Some larger zones take about 5 minutes to load. A help video tut is being done and that should make it easier to use.

I'm excited about this because it pulls data from Ala, and works very well.Nice to have new updated loot for those missing zones.

I will upload this either tonight or mon nite

GeorgeS

[GeorgeS]

I finished the extracting tool and also created a youtube video of about 30 min in length.
I'll link the vid within the program also show it here.
I will upload the new version mon nite.

George

[GeorgeS]

Uploaded the tools today. They only work with PEQ-2214+, so don't ask for the backward compat.

Also, youtube tuts are up and are about 30 min each. Pls note I have a heavy accent (ZA), so be gentle on me.

My NPC&LOOT EDITOR for databases rev2214+ is at:

NPC TUT (http://youtu.be/ntrmVVG1PkA)


All loot extractor by ZONE tutorial

ALLA zone loot tool (http://youtu.be/PPLjW7YvReM)

*edited links to new vids with higher quality and sound.*

Also, if you want more tuts, just let me know what you need.
I am planning a spawngoup and spawning npc tut
and a merchant editor tool..


GeorgeS

[Akkadius]

Uploaded the tools today. They only work with PEQ-2214+, so don't ask for the backward compat.

Also, youtube tuts are up and are about 30 min each. Pls note I have a heavy accent (ZA), so be gentle on me.

My NPC&LOOT EDITOR for databases rev2214+ is at:

NPC TUT (http://youtu.be/70NIdSO1F1s)


All loot extractor by ZONE tutorial

ALLA zone loot tool (http://youtu.be/X0XtQW2-6_0)

Also, if you want more tuts, just let me know what you need.
I am planning a spawngoup and spawning npc tut
and a merchant editor tool..


GeorgeS

GeorgeS, REALLY hard to hear these videos, otherwise this is looking pretty neat.

EDIT: I popped headphones in and I can hear a bit better but it is pretty quiet.

[GeorgeS]

No problem, I will reupload the originals tonight as the conversion with vdub lost some volume. Easy fix, just try again tomorrow. It's a 400MB upload:)

*edited links to new vids with higher quality and sound.*
New tools have links as well to these tools. Just updated these as well


GeorgeS

[Akkadius]

No problem, I will reupload the originals tonight as the conversion with vdub lost some volume. Easy fix, just try again tomorrow. It's a 400MB upload:)

GeorgeS

I love your accent man :)

[trevius]

I love your accent man :)

Reminds me of Flight of the Conchords, who claim to be from New Zealand. Though, there is a hint of something different that I can't quite put my finger on.

Back to the main subject; Looks like the tool updates are pretty sweet. Watching the video now and will definitely have to play around with the tool later.

[sehall]

George,

While trying to run the zam_zone_parser, it asked for two OCX files that you did not have in the resource directory

MSHFLXGD.OCX and MSINET.OCX. I was able to get them, just letting you know.

[GeorgeS]

Thanks, these are now in the latest zip.

[sehall]

Thanks, these are now in the latest zip.

I like the loot tool, it makes populating loot for zones that don't have any much easier. I did come across one issue when trying to get the loot for the Steppes though. Everything worked until it was getting the loot from allah on line 83 then I get the following:

Runtime error 5
Invalid procedure call or argument.

The application then closes.

I reloaded everything to the point where I get the loot from allah then went down and looked at line 83. It is populated with the following NPC

From Allah: Hemmet, Master Shureshot
NPCTypes: Hemmet,_Master_Shureshot - NPCID 399084

The only difference with this vs others that I see is the comma. Could it be causing a problem?

[GeorgeS]

Good diagnostic work. Yes commas are bad. I will put a check for that and look at that zone too.

GeorgeS

[prickle]

I gotta give you some major kudos for these new tools GerogeS. I just used the zone parser tool to populate loot in Stone Hive, Goru`Kar Mesa, and Blackfeather Roost tonight. This was after I hand populated Blightfire Moors a couple of weeks ago. Being able to populate loot in a zone in a matter of minutes makes the process almost fun.

The only downside to the populated loot that i could see was the drop rates on some items seemed inflated... like defiant gear. I got 3 pieces off 1 mob. Though, I half way expected that to happen. I may go back in and add my own defiant gear tables and remove the existing defiant loot drop entries.

Also, while I find these tools (the zone parser and the NPC editor) to be very handy, I did also notice that while the tools appear to fit on your screen comfortably, they don't do so well on lower resolution screens. I work and play from a laptop that has a max resolution of 1330x768, and the NPC editor in particular does not play nice at this res. With the window sized to fit my screen it won't show the last 10 or so items at the bottom of the big scroll list. I can select the last visible and use keyboard arrows to scroll down and see the last few, but having visible horizontal and vertical scroll bars here would be immensely helpful.

Thanks again for your hard efforts to bring us awesome-tastic tools!

[ghanja]

MSHFLXGD.OCX
MSINET.OCX


I think they got re-excluded from your archive George?

Grabbed the VB6 run-times, just saying though.