Zee

So in doing dkp for my guild for 18 months, I always wanted a better way of recording everything. It took me until the pre-2.0 weeks to get it working, and then ofc it broke with the 2.0 patch. I've finally got myself to 70, and have been thinking about making it work with TBC.

Anyway, it's designed to run with the system we used, which borrowed a lot from the EJ way. We used "council" decided loot values, with a limited set of upgrades, and null dkp.

There's two parts to it, a recording mod and a "listening" mod that silently reports drops and also shows tooltip dkp values. The idea is that several (or all, if desired) people in the raid run the reporting mod, and one or two run the recording mod.

The reporting mod is there so that loot out of range of the people recording, still gets entered. It's set up with BWL and AQ40 bosses to auto record rollcalls on boss deaths, and will autorecord all epics (except defined ones like ele ore).

In the end I was able to have it recording everything with a very small amount of input while I was raiding, and simply dump it to xml for eqdkp (I also hacked up an import script for eqdkp, which allowed previewing of the raid before submitting to the eqdkp db). After doing it the hard way for 18 months, it seriously was a joy to watch it all being done automatically. All I had to do was list dkp for people interested in a drop.

One shot of the interface

Hacked up interface for viewing/submitting raids

Example parsed raid

I guess my question is - if I spent some time tidying it up, would others want to use it? Adding your own item values and bosses is simple for anyone familiar with a regex and excel.

Or is there a better mod out there now? I made this one because I could never find a mod that suited our system.

 

◊ Praetorian

Yes yes yes yes yes.

 

Brando

I'd definately be interested. Trying to setup EQDKP the way you want it and figure out the mods to use with no prior experience is quite a headache unless you have a lot of time on your hands, which I unfortunately don't. I'm sure there are a decent amount of people like myself that are running new formed guilds as of TBC that are trying to piece this part of the puzzle toghether. Would be a big help

 

threat

A long time member in my guild created a RaidAttendance tracker along with a WaitList integrated with it. ( AddOns ) It strictly only records attendance and not loot, but from there it's easy to parse and enter in.

This leads to me remembering to manually write down the Item/Value for each raid, so I'd love that part of it!

 

Hutchy

"In the end I was able to have it recording everything with a very small amount of input while I was raiding, and simply dump it to xml for eqdkp (I also hacked up an import script for eqdkp, which allowed previewing of the raid before submitting to the eqdkp db)."

Seriously interested in this.

Having a mod that wasn't as bloated as CT Raidtracker supporting a zero sum based system, but still exporting in a eqdkp / ctraidtracker xml format for eqdkp would be a god send.

 

◊ Praetorian

Basically -- EQDKP annoys me, but I'd be happy with a non-bloated UI mod that:

1) Records all drops and who looted them
2) Records attendance at the time of each boss kill (including the people in a user-specified chat channel as a waitlist)
3) Exports smoothing to EQDKP

By late Naxx, CT_RT was so frustrating, missing seemingly every other boss kill, not correctly attributing some items to the right bosses, messing up join/leave info so that everyone who was ever in the raid group got added to some boss kills, and so forth. I'd almost rather do it by hand than deal with that again.

 

◊ Anias

EQDKP is awful. Once I realized how awful I started looking for alternatives.


I found, and enjoy:

Immortality's Raid Management Suite. It uses the standardized EQDKP output from addon strings, and does all kinds of nice other stuff. So it might even be compatible with this (apparently superior) addon for exporting. Of course it also has a sensible "copy paste" option for just using something like raid attendance to grab the list of who is here, then typing the name of the items into blanks if you prefer.

There's a project ongoing to mount it on SMF forums if you prefer them to phpbb. If you're reasonably competent with sql/php you could easily migrate it to a different forum integration.

It's worlds better in terms of sql table layout than eqdkp.

Current maintainer while Hulex (the creator) is on hiatus is machus/zai - his site is at:

http://zai.stuff.googlepages.com/rms-updates

It has far too many features for me to list, but the big ones are smooth integration from game to web, sensible backups, good sql back end, coherent handling of alts/mains, very customizable for your prefered methods of dealing with rgp and/or incentives/floors/ceilings etc.

 

Proeliata

So out of curiosity, and sorry if the answer to this is completely obvious--I'm a total newb when it comes to writing addons--is it possible to write an addon that will log in to your site and update your databases with the correct values as you go along? Are there some sort of security sandboxes that prevent you from doing that from in-game? Or is there simply no readily available support for SQL queries/creating a connection to a non-local database?

I'm sorry but as regards to the size and listenership of my fansite the term mistaken would in itself be, mistaken.

 

• Apate

WoW does basically operate in a sandbox. You write to the SavedVariables on a log, exit, or a UI reload. Typcially, another utility is then used to extract data from the SV file and do something with it.

See you, auntie.
"lol" is not a period lol
You don't need a machine to make a rainbow. For rainbows are made of happy thoughts, and dreams, and chocolate unicorns, and gumdrops, and licorice sunsets, and fuzzy gumdrop bears, and sugar-coated chocolate gumdrop land.

Originally Posted by DeeNogger I am coming for you Apate.

 

• Abbi

You can cheat by using a certain API call that has the ability to call URLs; obviously it's possible to pass arbitrary information to a web server that way. But I sort of expect that heavy use of that would cause the API call to go away.

 

Proeliata

Got it, thanks guys.

I'm sorry but as regards to the size and listenership of my fansite the term mistaken would in itself be, mistaken.

 

• Apate

Ah, that still works. Ok, there's that then, but I agree that one wouldn't be wise to rely on it.

See you, auntie.
"lol" is not a period lol
You don't need a machine to make a rainbow. For rainbows are made of happy thoughts, and dreams, and chocolate unicorns, and gumdrops, and licorice sunsets, and fuzzy gumdrop bears, and sugar-coated chocolate gumdrop land.

Originally Posted by DeeNogger I am coming for you Apate.

 

◊ Shalas

You'd have to use a HOSTS file to redirect www.worldofwarcraft.com to your site, though, as it only allows URLs pointing to WoW's site.

 

Zee

What I've written is quite limited in it's functionality; it was only ever intended to make my life easier, for our loot system. It's not very flexible.

Basically, when a purple drops, it compares the looter and item name to the last known drop in it's system. If either one differs, it records a new drop. If the "trash" flag is set, it records a new "raid" with a new attendance rollcall (a rollcalll simply records all the people in the raid, and their location - you can't see their location in the mod, only when you upload - useful for catching late people still on the windrider when the first boss is downed).

People don't get credit for drops within the mod; you start the night's runs with what the website exports, and you get deducted for what you '"buy". Your dkp will go up by the next night (or upload, process & import).

The export to eqdkp is done cut'n'paste style from within the mod; you hit export, it gives you a textbox with everything in it's system in one xml string (the intention is that you would be updating after the end of each night). Alt-tab, paste into my hacked up xml parser. It's not meant to store every raid, only a small number.

The xml format is something I've just knocked together; it doesn't conform to any ctrt format/method.

If I made it available for others to use, I'm happy for people to make changes, but I'd rather they rename the mod, as I'd like to keep it as simple as possible, for our use. However, if someone designed a nice ajax interface for tweaking uploaded data before you add it to eqdkp, I'd be stoked. At the moment it's simply add or discard; you have to dump the xml into a text editor and tweak it by hand, and resubmit (hence in the screenshots you can see "processed" and "discarded").

 

Zee

Also the typical disclaimer about not being familiar with lua, my code is so embarrassing, yadda yadda yadda. I thought about ACE'ing it, looked at the ace libraries, couldn't really see much point.

I should get time over Easter to make the minor changes needed for tbc.

 

Brando

Gurg, in regards to the smoothing principle that you are referencing. Is this where the total points earned for a particular boss is divided by the amount of times that boss has been killed and then each raid member gets points based on how many kills they were involved in?? If that sounds about right do you have to setup the back-end (eqDKP) to handle this as well or can the front-end solely handle this?? I want to implement this same feature in my guilds loot system that I'm trying to piece toghether as we're getting ready to start 25 man raids and I just need some help with being pointed in the right direction.

 

◊ Praetorian

I'm not sure I follow you.

All I have in mind is, let's say there are 25 in a raid and 7 on-call in a chat channel, and we kill a boss that drops 100 DKP worth of loot, a mod should record that 100 DKP worth of loot was looted, 32 people were "present" and each got 100/32 DKP.

If two people log off and we now have 25 in the raid and 5 on-call, and kill another boss that drops 150 DKP worth of loot, the mod should have the same information for this new kill, and should assign 150/30 = 5 DKP to each of the 30 people who were "present."

In my experience, the EQDKP-modded CT_RT messes this up a lot, attributing random pieces of loot to trash mobs, listing people as attending a kill when they logged off an hour before that kill, etc. It's stupidly time-intensive and generally annoying.

 

Brando

Ah, yes I was just confused then.

I was talking about "smoothed earnings" where you total all the dkp for one particular boss over the lifetime of kills and average out the points awarded so that one kill doesn't end up being worth more than a kill the following week just because of the loot that dropped.

My main issue is that I'm a banker with no php/sql skills and as far as I can tell there is nobody in my guild that has them either. We want to use a particular loot system that includes the "smoothed earnings" I just described but I can't seem to find a way to configure EQDKP the way I want without changing the code myself as I'm just clueless, let alone make a mod to export the xml the way it would be needed. Looks like we're just going to have to do it by hand or just scrap the loot system and work with something more limited. Sigh.......

 

• Michad

Does anyone know what the addon is that Nihilium uses? I saw it in their Voidreaver video and im very curious about what it is.

Zee i think alot of us would be interested in such a thing.

 

◊ Praetorian

I'd actually meant to ask about this as well. You can see the "Would you like to take attendance?" dialogue pop up when the boss dies, right at the end of the video. What is that?

 

◊ Malan

got a screenshot of it?

 

aborby

its NRT, an Ace2 mod.

announces loot to guild on ML
records attendance/loot per boss kill (thats the prompt) or manually

no real export function yet, basically just gives you the lists and lets you do what you will with them. its really good and lightweight compared to CTRT as long as you don't mind manually inputting data into EQDKP rather than using a string, IF you use EQDKP. if you use a nonstandard loot distribution/attendance system then its perfect.

files.wowace.com btw~

 

Brando

You wouldn't have used it yourself Aborby? I downloaded it last night to play around with it while in Karazhan and I couldn't even get a list to populate or anything. Rabbit doesn't have a thread started or any other documentation for it as far as I can tell. I'm obviously missing something or the current SVN version is broken.

 

Xerxes

It basicly works like this:

If you kill a boss you get a popup asking if you want to take attendency. If you answer yes to this there'll be broadcasted a message to a channel of your choice and/or guild channel saying that people that isn't in the raid but available should whisper you with their mains name. From this it populates a list with the people in the raid + those whispers.

If you wanna take manual attendency you have to click the "Take attendency now" button (I use fubar and got it in the bar, don't know if you dont have that installed) and it'll once again send a message to the channel of your choice plus add the people currently in the raid.

Besides this it tracks when epics are looted and relays that info to guild channel.

After you taken attendency you populate a list that can be clicked on and you get a copy paste window with the full list of people that can be pasted into EQDKP or whatever you use.

There'