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I'm sure this comes up every so often, but right now players use their own web portals for the Player Shops to view them Out-Of-Game and Out-Of-Character.
Strengths:
1. More people visit Simu's own web site:
a. people see offers for new games
b. people see new paid events
c. as simucoins expand, they can see these offers as well
2. It's the Economy Stupid.
Since its an out-of-game/out-of-character info portal, it would be nice to actually see item properties. This will help players sell items and the buyers make better informed choices. Getting an item both assessed and sung to sell is almost punitive. This information can still be hidden in game so that the immersion factor isn't ruined for anybody.
3. In modern RPG online games, people expect this sort of information to be provided offline. This is one of those things missing from the new player experience. I'm not suggesting that GS needs a WoW style armory, but at least helping the in-game economy with player shop dump/search would remove some of the "huh? what?"
-Grennon, author of Postal/Minimalist for WOW
If the powers that be ever wanted to do some sort of official playershop data access (other than through standard game mechanics) - what I think would be best would be a raw feed of the store data in a few different formats (JSON, XML, etc). Then let the players continue to have the actual shop sites with the searching and whatnot, and let them gather the data through the official API/feed instead of having to use lich scripts to inspect everything and then parse the log files.
"If I could go back and search I'd find you the GM(s) I was loosely quoting. I can't though :(" -- Farmer
If I have a pretty good idea of which Category/Topic it's likely to be in, I'll open up that Category as a "View All" (as opposed my normal "Only Unread"), Ctrl+click each Topic to spawn a new page for each of them, and in the search specification do
FROM <about 500-ish before the current number>
TO <the current number, or leave blank defaults to "99999">
BY the author "GS4%" <where "%" is the "any number of characters" wildcard>
That shows me only the game-staff posts (if need be, I go back for the "SIMU%" authors, too) in the Topic, and that can help me narrow down where I need to be looking.
If I have a pretty good idea of which Category/Topic it's likely to be in, I'll open up that Category as a "View All" (as opposed my normal "Only Unread"), Ctrl+click each Topic to spawn a new page for each of them, and in the search specification do
FROM <about 500-ish before the current number>
TO <the current number, or leave blank defaults to "99999">
BY the author "GS4%" <where "%" is the "any number of characters" wildcard>
That shows me only the game-staff posts (if need be, I go back for the "SIMU%" authors, too) in the Topic, and that can help me narrow down where I need to be looking.
Is the problem harvesting the information through Gemstone or harvesting it from the backend data store?
A long long time ago, I thought I was told by ... forget the GMs name, but I thought he divulged that much data was stored in a relational DB.
So I am guessing. That the problem is... what we see in game is data processed by GS4. The metadata stored in the backend is raw and unpresentable.
So to make a playershops website you probably have to:
a. do it the way players do and run a harvest bot in game (easy but lame)
b. try to make a GS4 item parser outside of the game engine to translate the raw data from backend (i can only imagine this is a nightmare)
Am I ballpark rightish?
-Grennon, author of Postal/Minimalist for WOW
A long long time ago, I thought I was told by ... forget the GMs name, but I thought he divulged that much data was stored in a relational DB.
So I am guessing. That the problem is... what we see in game is data processed by GS4. The metadata stored in the backend is raw and unpresentable.
So to make a playershops website you probably have to:
a. do it the way players do and run a harvest bot in game (easy but lame)
b. try to make a GS4 item parser outside of the game engine to translate the raw data from backend (i can only imagine this is a nightmare)
Am I ballpark rightish?
-Grennon, author of Postal/Minimalist for WOW
Bear in mind that I have no clue how you get the data from the database to whatever it is that you'd use to serve to us on the web, but FRAPI ( http://getfrapi.com ) is a pretty robust, free to use, well rounded API that will abstract away the data encoding (into XML, HTML, JSON, whatever) for you.
If you can get a PHP array of a shop's contents (in whatever arrangement, we'll sort it out), FRAPI will handle feeding that out in the requested format.
If you can get a PHP array of a shop's contents (in whatever arrangement, we'll sort it out), FRAPI will handle feeding that out in the requested format.
