Edit: Just to be clear, this is not currently functional for Wrath of the Lich King, so stop sending PMs asking me why you get errors when you try to run it. It will be updated at some point. I don't know when that will be. When it is, I'll let you know.

Astute readers of my assorted posts in the Rogue Gear Spreadsheet thread may have noticed me express a certain level of discontent regarding the spreadsheet format in terms of doing good rogue modeling. I've repeatedly expressed the sentiment that Rogue modeling would benefit by being done in an actual programming language. And it's this notion in particular I had in mind when I asserted that the Rogue Gear Sheet is not the framework I'd want to do expansion modeling in.

So, that said: I figured it was about time that I work on putting such a framework together, so over the past weekend I finished off the code I've been working on on and of for the last several months and now believe I have it to a point where it's worth letting you fine people take a look at it; hence, at the end of this post, you'll find RogueCalc v0.1.

Now, lets be clear: it's called 0.1 for a reason. Those of you that remember Rogue Gear Spreadsheet v0.1 will recall that it was a far cry from it's current incarnation... and the same thing applies here. This is not a finished product, and isn't as functional or fully-featured has the current spreadsheet. But, there's enough to give you the idea, so I figured I'd let people have a look.

At the moment, this is just a command-line damage calculator. Eventually, I want to get gear recommendations akin to the Rogue Gear Sheet's in here, but there's a few problems that need to be solved first - more on that later. It also needs a GUI, more cycle calculations, and the like... but that, too, comes later. For the moment, what this program does is simple: you enter your name and realm, plus choice of buffs; it fetches your gear + spec from the armory, applies the selected buffs, and gives you a sorted list of damage estimates for every cycle of the form XsYr. This will cover most SS and Hemo builds - for dagger-centric builds, this admittedly does not work so well - that's another one of those problems to be solved later.

I imagine a lot of this will become clearer once you have the chance to play with this a bit, so before I go any further I suppose I should tell you how to use this thing. I should warn you that in this early form this is a bit more complicated to use than the spreadsheets, so if you're looking only at doing some quick gear comparisons, I'd recommend that you not use this; however, for those of you that would like to help me debug this and turn it into a more useful tool for the masses, I'd love to have your feedback.

Usage
1) You will need Python to run this. Eventually, I have some ideas for removing this restriction... but for the moment, you'll need to download and install Python. To get it, stop by the python website, download your favorite package, and install it. For most of you, that will probably be the Windows Installer for 2.5.2.
2) Once you have Python installed, download and unzip the attached file. It will create a folder with two files in it, RogueCalc.py and RogueCalcConfig.txt. The first is the brains of the program, and the second is the equivalent of the front page of the existing spreadsheets. So, the first thing you're going to want to do is open up RogueCalcConfig.txt in your favorite text editor, and adjust the settings there as you see fit. Initially, this probably consists of just entering your character name and realm so it can pick up your stats; further down, there's options for your buffs, plus the ability to enter in different talent specs if you so desire. Make sure to read the explanations in the file for everything. If you do not enter values exactly as specified, there's a very good chance that the program won't work
3) Once you have the config file set up to your taste, open up a command-line prompt and navigate to the RogueCalc directory. Once in this directory, type the command line "python RogueCalc.py". At this point, it'll think for a second or two, and then spit out damage estimates for every possible XsYr cycle.

Notes
1) If you're specced daggers, it's not going to find your optimal cycle correctly, and you'll probably wind up with a damage recommendation somewhat below what the Gear Sheet comes up with for you.
2) Your DPS will probably be 1% or so higher than the Rogue Gear Sheet will tell you for the same gear and buffs. This is because this sheet models certain things - notably WF - more accurately than the spreadsheet can, and the effect of this turns out to be slightly higher DPS in general.
3) Pretty much everything that the Rogue Gear Sheet supports is supported here as well... and a whole bunch of other stuff besides. There are no new procs or set bonuses added, but if you are wearing gear with no such complications, the program should pick it up correctly. The only item I'm specifically aware of being missing is Might of the Scourge (and if you have Might of the Scourge on in your armory, please let me know so I can add it).

What I'm looking for
Mostly, what I'm hoping for at this stage is to have some assortment of you fine people out there run this against your armory, and perhaps the armory of any other rogues you happen to feel like trying it on. Yes, it's primitive, and yes, it's not very useful right now, but it's not going to get to the point where it is without testings. So if some of you out there would like to be guinea pigs and try running this with a range of buffs and abilities and try to find anything I might have done wrong, that would be great. If you run into a situation where you're getting answers significantly different the the Gear sheet (other than the above-mentioned notes), please let me know.

What to do if something doesn't work
This is a very early release of this project. As such, it contains bugs. Hence, sometimes when you run it, you may get answers that seem like nonsense. You may get not answers at all, simply a message asking you to tell me about it and a bunch of garbage. In either event, I would like to know about it. Post in this thread, or PM me about it, and send me the following 3 things:

1) Any and all output generated.
2) Your config file.
3) In whatever directory you ran RogueCalc from, there should be a log file called RogueCalc.log. Please send me this as well.

Next Steps
So, as noted, this is a very early version of the tool, and it needs quite a bit of work. If there are any of your out there with coding experience, I'd love to have your help on any part of this you feel like helping with - and believe me, I have a whole laundry list of things that I'd like to add. However, there's one thing - more than anything else - that is going to be needed for the tool to move forwards. And that one thing is the ability to scrub wowhead, wowdb, the armory, or some similar site to build an item database and store it in an easy-to-access format. I know some work has been done on this, but I couldn't find anything up-to-date and working. Item recommendations and the like cannot happen until we have an associated item database, so please, if you know how to do this and could help me out, that would be great.

Past that: if people would like to look through the code and tell me if things look sensible, that would be great. And anyone interested in helping with other parts of this, please let me know. While I do believe this is the better framework to be working with moving forwards, I also believe that there's a fair amount of work needed before we get everything working, so any help I can get with that would be great.

I was looking forward to this, but I didn't expect it to be coming so soon. I will fiddle with it now and edit this post if I can provide any feedback.

I'm curious what kind of model you used to implement this. Is this basically like a Python-ized version of the calculation style used in the Gear Sheet, or did you implement more of a simulation style of calculation? (edit) And on top of that, might there be any expectation of modeling things like Seal Fate using this program? Never know whether expansion talents/changes may make builds other than combat viable or optimal.

So, at the moment, it's mostly a Pythonized version of the Gear Sheet. Now, you can debate how useful that is by itself, but there's a few key things to keep in mind:

1) The Rogue Gear Sheet, in it's final incarnation, is about 3.6 MB. Part of that is just overhead for being an Excel Application, but part of it is that there was a lot of duplication of work - the same formulas had to be entered in in many many different places - even the simplest changes required updating 300 different cells. The structure of a programming language massively reduces the duplication of effort required, which is why the initial draft of this is roughly 100 times smaller than the spreadsheet was.
2) Programming languages allow you to do useful things for code clarity like assigning variable names, making it much much easier to look at a formula and tell what it's doing; hence it's easier to debug and maintain the codebase.

Basically: this isn't doing anything new... yet. It's just doing it in a vastly more intelligent, efficient, and easy-to-modify way. There are issues that we had with the spreadsheet that we can actually solve in this framework.

This additionally means that, down the line, adding things like SF and Mutilate cycles should be somewhat more manageable than it was in the spreadsheet. It's still work, and it's still not atop my list of priorities... but there's a better chance of it happening here than there ever was for the spreadsheet. Particularly if I can get some help with writing such things.

Check out my Armory for Might of the Scourge. Like Vulajin, I was hoping to eventually look at a programming language based DPS simulator, but had no idea or expectation of it being anywhere near this early. Welcome back to Roguecraft, Aldriana. I hope you enjoyed your break. I'll take some time to look at this tomorrow when I have some more time, get you some solid feedback hopefully.

The World of Warcraft Armory
permanentenchant="2717"

Glad to see you've decided to take this on, Aldriana. I'm looking forward to seeing what you have planned. Since I'm limited to dial-up internet until this weekend, I'm not sure of how much help I can be. However, If you or anyone else would like to use my armory for any additional testing, feel free.

The World of Warcraft Armory

Just wanted to hand over a cookie as i started to play around with it and looking at the source, a pity i have no clue of python.

Something for all those trying this under windows, i got errors trying to call the calc when it was not in the same directory as the python executable. e.g. i installed python to d:\python25 and created a subfolder named \RogueCalc where i placed the files from the zip, calling then "python d:\python25\RogueCalc\RogueCalc.py" from d:\python25 would result in this:
Moving the files from the subfolder to the pyhton25 root and calling "python RogueCalc.py" from there works just fine.

Seems my python installer failed then
Well no problem at all to have to put the RogueCalc files into the Python directory, lets see if i can add the path manually, would prefer the cleaner way...

That looks good so far ... but ...
(using the default config file)

Interesting, can't imagine what's causing that... particularly since that error is that it's having trouble fetching the info it needs from the armory, which shouldn't have anything to do with your path setup. It looks like one of the very early things I'll need to fix here is better error handling on armory fetches... plus possibly the way to manually download and store a profile so we're not utterly reliant on armory fetches for gear. Though admittedly those are the sort of features that tend to work better once you have a GUI... I'll have to think about how to set this up a bit.

Well the interesting thing is, Aldriana, that i can instantly switch back into the python install dir and it works with the default settings file. Little confusing, but i can handle having the project files in my python install dir. Dont put too much energy into tracking this.

I can run the calc just fine when I enter the full path for my python installation (don't have it added to the path).
E.g. f:\programs\python25\python.exe RogueCalc.py

However the program is having problems with special characters such as umlauts.
region = EU
character = Evil
realm = Festung der Stürme

region = EU
character = Fêanôr
realm = Wrathbringer

Those both are giving me the same error,

Apostrophes/inverted commas (what's the correct name for it in English? :x) in server names seem to work fine, but maybe you should handle ` and ´ instead of ' seperately, because those two seem to be frequently used instead by some individuals...

Anyway, I almost posted that you have a problem with apostrophes as well, since on my test with an apostrophe it took awfully long to process a request, up to the point where I CRTL-C out of it. Do you have some sort of max execution time or does it run until it has fetched the information from the armory?

Got an error with [Heartrazor's Gift] which get wrongly parsed by the getAP sub :

I suggest you check for
which is "Equiped" trigger instead of
which is chance on hit.


Great job btw

Edit :

Works with:
However calculations gives me a 3s/2r for my 41/20 Mut spec instead of the 1-3s/5-5r from the spreadsheet. I suppose mut isnt modeled yet.
I'd really like to be able to help on the dev ^^

I run the calc from my Python dir but have this error

Nice work!

You should probably mention that the config file has to be safed as utf-8 if the character name contains any kind of funny characters (like Lathár on EU-Die Todeskrallen). Otherwise I get the same exception as sp00n does.

I could be reading this incorrectly:

if race == 'human':
self.str += 3
self.agi -= 2
elif race == 'night_elf':
self.agi += 3
elif race == 'dwarf':
self.str += 5
self.agi -= 6
elif race == 'gnome':
self.str -= 2
self.agi += 1
elif race == 'troll':
self.str += 4
elif race == 'undead':
self.str += 2
self.agi -= 4

but it looks to me as though Orcs and Blood Elves are missing. Do they have no modifiers to str or agi and thus are not mentioned?

Okay, first off, folks, please, please *please* don't just link the error text when something goes wrong for you; if you don't tell me what you were doing and send me the relevant input files, there's no real chance of me being able to diagnose what's going wrong. For instance, the post from iamtabo above - I can tell that the xml parsing failed, but without knowing what caused this error, I have no chance of being able to fix it.

Going backwards through the rest of the recent comments:

Darlal: Immediately above that block you'll find the following two lines:

This sets the baseline stats to 92 str, 160 agi; hence, race-specific modifications are only needed for those races that have different strength or agility values - this is, for instance, why Night Elf only has an agility modifier - because there strength is already 92. The reason why orc and blood elf are missing is that there base stats (before vitality) are 92 and 160 (which is among the reasons I chose that baseline). Or at least, that's my recollection - that's one of the sections I wrote a long time ago. If those aren't the correct base stats, let me know and I'll fix it.

Chariu/Spoon: Yes, special characters will probably cause problems. For the initial release I just through some quick parsing in front of the underlying calculator - I didn't stop and think through all the special cases. I'll have to look into how the armory handles such characters.

Nilgambor: The config file needs to be in the directory that you're invoking things from. So if you move your config file to C:\Documents and Settings\God\, it should work.

Choumarin: Good call on Heartrazor - I'll work on fixing that. Regarding Mutilate: no, it's not supported yet. I started with the easy stuff and figured the more complicated stuff could be added later, and Mutilate is nothing if not complicated. It's admittedly a fair ways down on my list right now, but if someone would like to write a damage computation function for it, that would be great .

I've considered it. But on two separate occasions I looked at Rawr, it's features, it's pros and cons, and concluded that I'd probably be happier putting in the extra work to do it myself. It's certainly a decision I've second-guessed myself on a few times, but fundamentally the Rawr framework just doesn't do everything I'd like it to be able to do.

Sorry. All I've done is download the zip file, unpacked it, and ran "python RogueCalc.py". It immediately ends with those error messages. I've changed nothing in package.

I'm running Python 2.4.4.

That's probably because by default it points to my armory, and for some reason my armory has been down more or less continuously since I started this thread. Try pointing it at a different character and see if you have better luck.

Could you explain this a bit more? Having worked some with the code myself, I'm wondering what that could be?

Admittedly, it's been a while since I've looked at it, so some of this may have changed, but, as of the most recent time I looked at it:

1) There's no way of inputting talents. For some classes (feral druid) this is okay, since everyone specs the same way; but with no fewer than 5 fundamentally different raid-viable rogue specs in existence, there's just no way to write a rogue calculator without one.

2) No Zone filters. This was, quite possibly, the single best-liked feature of the Rogue Gear sheet, so it's definitely one I want to see carried over into code.

3) Lack of ability to give other sorts of feedback. Sure, it gives nice pretty graphs... but a lot of rogues want to know the cycle recommendation, theoretical damage output, EP weights for socketing, and any number of other things as well, and there just didn't seem to be a framework for presenting that sort of information.

Now, I'm sure all of these could be fixed in time. Some of them may already be fixed. And I'm not saying that Rawr might not eventually get to the point where it would be suitable for this. But the simple fact that it's doing so many other things also means that it's not ideally suited for our needs as rogues. So rather than writing a general tool that's going to be pretty good at a lot of things, my goal is to write a fairly specialized tool that does only one thing - model rogues - but does it really, really, well, and gives every option you would want and every scrap of information you could dream of. It's actually sort of the same reason the Gear Sheet came into being - the DPS sheet already existed, and already did a lot of good things... but it just couldn't handle the level of detail that I wanted, which is why we have a Gear sheet now. Same thing here. Sure, I could wait for Rawr to support everything I want supported and try to squeeze what I want into the modeling of that sheet... or I can start my own project and get it to do exactly what I want. I chose the second. It's not a knock against Rawr - it's certainly an amazing tool - it's just not the tool I want to write.

Note: I'm not trying to be a Rawr fanboy here, I can't tell you what to do. Whatever it is, I am sure it will be amazing!

Now, for 1) and 3), you may want to look at it again, especially the ProtWarr-Module has some nice form for talent input, and in Cat there is a chart for ep-style weighting, mage and moonkin have cycle recommendation, etc...

2) is still an issue, though.

Regarding options, all of the models now have an option tab that is individual for each of them (the healadin one has a switch for blessing of light and shadowpriest-mp5, etc., while cat/bear have target level settings, and so on).

Well, that's it, back to more interesting things