Psst... wanna see something I've been working on?
 

Hint: If you're in this forum, then yes. You do. You really, really do.

http://youtu.be/z2EclMWCGyM

That actually seems really cool, I'd be interested to see the backside of that. Good work and good luck with that.

Side note: If I had one suggestion, being able to select multiple classes on the little selection thing would be nice, just to see what spells overlap in those classes.

Yeah. It's a primary goal to make the source code fully available. I may offer a hosted solution like Akka does for EOC, but it'll run a lot faster if you download and run it locally. It's just having a version of Windows with IIS (everything but the Home editions, basically), unzipping the files to your c:\inetpub\wwwroot folder, and running an included batch file to activate the application compilation.

Freely available .net source code also means anyone at all could update and maintain it if necessary, with the free Visual Studio or any text editor, really.

I'm thinking the most complicated editors to make will be Spells, Items, and NPCs with all their associated spawns, loot tables, merchant lists, yadda yadda. But there are a heck of a lot of smaller but very helpful editors/builders to put together, too.

It's gonna be a fun ride.

Is that an MVC app? I started writing a similar thing in MVC to learn it since I was primarily a WPF developer. I now just got a job doing MVC so I should improve... I just got completely bogged under by the MASSES of fields in the database lol.

Soon if not already you should be able to host it in OWIN/Katana without IIS, the only real issue is how funky Windows can be with allowing HTTP servers to run. In fact I run multiple web services at my current work without IIS.

And by the end of the year, not only will you not need IIS, you won't need Windows either.

Are you rocking ado.net or using some kind of ORM?? I tried EF and nhibernate but they didn't like our db schema...

I'm really interested in that, looks extremely simple and straight forward. Spell editing has always been a weak area for me (at one point turning several of my damaging abilities into heals lol).

vsab:

No MVC. Just asp.net web controls and some javascript. And yeah, I'm sorta counting on IIS and Windows no longer being required for hosting asp.net websites in the not-too-distant future. Didn't know the IIS requirement was already sorta taken care of! As for the db, it's just odbc with the official mysql connector.

Really looking forward to trying this out in the future. Looks solid and will make customization allot easier.

.aspx >_< >_< >_<

What can I say... it's what I know. Hahaha. :D

Besides, Microsoft's dev division seems to have really come around in regards to open source the last few years. I believe they've completely open sourced the .net framework and compilers. .net outside of Windows should only get better from here on!

Well you might come unstuck with the cross platform support, I think web forms stuff will still depend on System.Web. It's well worth cutting your teeth on MVC if you can, career-wise. The only web forms jobs I see these days are the shitty ones where you have to maintain someone elses codebase they wrote 10 years ago ;)

My stuff didn't have a spell editor, it was all NPC, merchant list manipulation, and items stuff. If I get time to run a server in the future I'd resurrect it.

Can confirm. Currently supporting MOSS2007 servers for a billion dollar company.

I'll have to take a look. I saw MVC in the VS project options and immediately thought of MFC from back in my VC++ days. It filled a role, but had its own whole set of complications, glitches, and inconsistencies. C# ended up being better for my hobbyist needs by far.

Your work on this so far looks great. All of the user capabilities are definitely on point with where I was heading with the EoC editor.

You mentioned EoC and the Spell Editor there, it is also not complete, especially the individual spell editing page, but it works.

There are tons of spell editors that I've seen over the course of the years and they all have their own ups and downs.

The biggest struggle I see is the availability of these tools, can they withstand schematic changes on their own and are they highly available (Open source/Hosted). Ultimately that is where they sink or swim, they could be a great tool but if they miss the boat on availability, they die. Examples (Ailia's Spell Editor, Null's Spell Editor, and all the other classic spell editors) and if I exit spell editors, the same for many other editors out there.

If you have the brain power to put together what you have in the video, you can easily work around the framework of EoC. It really isn't that complicated.

Another thing I see over and over again is duplication of platforms and tools when really there should be an effort to unify efforts. This has been done fairly successfully in the PEQ Editor. But at least with EOC it wraps the PEQ editor inside of it for availability, so if one native EoC tool isn't suitable then you can use one in the PEQ Editor, easily.

You can go ahead and make this tool and all and make it available for others, it just doesn't not make it very cross platform and open and makes it a stand alone setup that goes against what the end goal of EoC was supposed to be.

EoC was also meant to have far more tools than it does, but I am also just one person and have been going through some serious life events as of recent so project time is just not there.

Either way all of how to develop around the framework/platform is on the Github already:

https://github.com/Akkadius/EQEmuEOC

This is not meant to be a downer, because work like this keeps this community going forward. Getting excited about creation and contribution to the community is great, I'm just adding a little bit of perspective.

I anticipated that you'd be disappointed by a separate system, Akka. If I'd grown up learning my skills in open source platforms and languages, EOC would be a perfect framework for me to help flesh out, but it's just not how my personal timeline went.

Assuming I'm able to fulfill my goals with EQ Architect similar to the goals you have for EOC, it may be a division of development effort having two different database editing frameworks in place, but they also may end up filling different needs for people as well.

And I do plan to hit you up for some help figuring out github and such for source distribution and version control. Those are things I don't have experience with, being a small-shop and hobbyist dev and not familiar with the tools of working in teams. (Which is why I've been quite happy to offer code fixes on the forums for other people to merge into the source code, instead of trying to do it myself.)