New tool arriving soon
 

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

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 :(

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

GeorgeS

Thank you George & Akkadius your work is vary much appreciated

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

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

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.

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.

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