The Forum Export

[RonHiler]

Hey guys,

I'm going to spend a little bit of time updating the enhancement data code. But I don't think that will really take all that long. I already did the feats, so I have that as a template to use. Plus, the enhancements are far far more straight forward than the feats are.

Once I finish that, I'm going to tackle what has been, to date, our biggest complaint. The forum export.

What I want to do is set up a system such that the user can essentially "Program" their own forum export format, however they want to do it.

What I'm thinking right now is that we will give them a set of building blocks, and they can peice together themselves how they want the export to look. Sort of like legos, heh. The tags we would give them would be something like this:

{Name}
{Race}
{Class}
{Feats(ALL)}
{Feats{Selected)}
{Enhancements(min, max)}
{Spells(min, max)}
{Equipment(??)}
{CommentText(SomeText)}

and so on. Then they could take those tags and order them in whatever way they want. They could save that template and call it up when they go to do their forum export.

Of course, we would give a couple of default templates (probaby mimic what we have right now). These could serve as examples that people could use to make their own (or even just starting points).

If you guys have thoughts on this, let me know. This will be a major overhaul of that part of the planner, and I imagine it will take some time to implement and to get right.

[Dragonstar]

Sounds great too me. I'll reserve my comments until I see how we are doing this so I can get a better understanding of what the users may want versus what we can do .

Are you going to start doing this before mod3 or wait until after mod3 release. I only ask because Tolero hinted at it being released on the Third of Feb.?

[RonHiler]

After. I'll be doing good to get the enhancement overhaul done before U3 goes live, heh. So I'll have to do what I did with the feats, and keep both systems working for a while, changing the functions over gradually.

I think we should do today's release, then start inputting the U3 stuff for the next release and put that out whenever it's ready (I think we could do that at any time, I don't believe the devs will change much of anything from the last set of release notes at this point, so if we are early, then we win DDO!).

After we get out the U3 release, we should have a bit of time before we have to start worrying about U4, so that would be a good time to start thinking about the forum export overhaul.

[heizoS]

Hey, I tried to get a hold of someone on the DDO forums, but no one replied.

I'm making a database for characters for easy search etc...incredibly sweet if people are looking for builds...I only have one problem, importing characters is a manual process at the moment, and it would be cool if that wasn't the case.

I was wondering if its at all possible while you are doing this rewrite, to include some type of CVS export, or something for MySQL db import... could promote some easy web dev for this product.

MySQL can work with CSV, CSV for Excel, Excel 2000, and open document files I believe. Wondering if you would be interested at all in this? If not let me know so I can try and find an alternative way to import.

Thanks for your time!

[RonHiler]

We could do that. It may be a while though. The planner is kind of in a lull in development at the moment. I still need to finish the export rewrite, but I'm pretty busy with Enzyme at the moment. And I think Dragon is doing other stuff as well right now.

But yeah, we'll get back to it, especially once something in DDO changes that requires me to get back into the code (like, say, for instance, half orcs ).

Once I come back, my first priority (once we do any needed updates to get back in sync with DDO) will be to finish the new export routines. Then I'll start thinking about a database export. Shouldn't be very hard, I wouldn't think.

[Hordo]

I hate to say it...this is over my head LOL!

But, I think that anything that gets more folks from the Forums to use the planner is a good thing.