FFXIDB Development Discussion

Does it send the lvl even on NM's? cause battlemod only shows the lvl on normal mobs.

The /check packet does not send NM levels, but the Wide Scan packet shows the level of every mob I have tried it on so far. That doesn't help Battlemod but it would help us for FFXIDB, since we can just emulate sending wide scan packets and intercepting them before the client receives them, that way we could process entire zones in bulk.

Also I'm using Vim on Cygwin with no issues, I've frequently used it on JP text as well.

Those are probably the elemental icons, we map them to U+E000-U+E007.

 

It doesn't really matter what SE thinks. You can accurately determine the level of any mob that gives EXP, and for mobs that don't (are there any more of those now?...) there are ways to figure it out. The /check packet is just the easiest way to figure it out, because SE sends the mob's level along with the EP/DC/T/VT message.

Ah ok thanks.

And for Level ? Holy just being an odd leveled mob drops the accuracy rate to very low levels.  Only 1 and a small percentage of 3 and 5 rolls will trigger holy... and for some levels it's a magic number.  Like level 60 and 120 have 100% accuracy.  It's something you'd want to know before fighting the mob and if I understand correctly mob levels have small ranges on spawns in most areas and even most NMs.

The /check packet does not send NM levels, but the Wide Scan packet shows the level of every mob I have tried it on so far. That doesn't help Battlemod but it would help us for FFXIDB, since we can just emulate sending wide scan packets and intercepting them before the client receives them, that way we could process entire zones in bulk.

 

Also I'm using Vim on Cygwin with no issues, I've frequently used it on JP text as well.

It must be something with my windows setup then.  And the fact that I've never had to mess with UTF editing in my life :/  The most I had to do for that was convert a mysql db to accept utf8.

I haven't worked on it much yet.  Definitely in feb when I get my vaction from this 7 day a week madness.  Been getting a few hours a night to myself and random breaks in the day but if I use them to program more i'll have to sacrifice my sanity.

You should hop on IRC (server: ffochat.com; channel: #windower) when you get some free time. You sound like you're really interested in working on this.

I'll definitely do that thank you Iryoku.  Sorry for delays I said the beginning of Feb but unfortunately my longest client of 6+ years has insisted I do things for him before I can take a vacation, that he needs it done so badly he'd even hire temp help if I can't do it.  So outside of trying to get myself into a place I can do that by playing some ffxi and chatting on ffxiah and spending time with my gf I have to focus on this until it's done.  Shouldn't be more than a week or two more tho.  I hate not living up to something I said but nothing I can do about this.

K I can work on it some today.  And I wondered if you were all volunteers or some of you actually found  a way to make a living off developing 3rd party tools for ffxi.  I know that there was a scandal over mis-spending funds for the wikia ffxi wiki.  Which is part of what the bg one was started.  I don't know who has ads and who doesn't cuz I have used adblock for 15 years.

Anyway, you guys do this a lot for volunteers pretty amazing

It's pretty simple really, we have more fun figuring out how the game works than we do playing it. I think the only person on the Windower dev team who actually plays still is JoshK6656.

And Byrth, who, while not an official plugin dev, is still pretty much part of the Windower dev team as a whole at this point.

We are all volunteers, Windower is actually costing me over 50 bucks a month

Ah, that's cool you guys do it though it's appreciated.  The joke when I first posted I should quit my day job and work for you full time threw me for a loop though.

I think I'll try to use lua so no one has to rewrite my regex.  Seems there's a standard lib for regex and a non standard one that's lighter.  I'd rather use the full featured one since this isn't gonna be run in game.

Lua only provides a very limited regular expression grammar (the Lua documentation calls them "patterns"). It is missing some important features such as alternation (i.e. foo|bar). But, it is still a fairly useful feature, and we shouldn't have any trouble porting it, if you want to use it. On the other hand, Windower provides a wrapper around Boost.Regex, which is a fully compliant ECMA-262 regex engine, with a PCRE grammar, and all the bells and whistles.

One problem you may run into is that both the standard Lua and Windower APIs are woefully unaware of Unicode. Thankfully UTF-8 is very well designed, and all of our resources contain only valid UTF-8 strings. This means that things like \S (or %S in the Lua syntax) should just work, and you can use a construct like [\xC0-\xFD][\x80-\xBF]+ to match any Unicode character outside of the 7-bit ASCII range.

Alrighty thanks.  Also been on the IRC chan 2 days now with no one chatting #windower channel.  Should I chat there or in the dev channel?

I have to admit all this unicode stuff is gibberish to me it shouldn't be hard to figure out though.  The most I've dealt with it is to make sure my POST and GET data isn't hacked using it.

I did read there is "pattern matching" in Lua but not regular expressions.  I thought there'd be at least one library for raw regex.  As I have used bash, vim, sed, perl, python, php heck I'm sure even c and c++ have regex libraries.   Would be really weird to not have it.  I've even seen regex used in file renaming programs.

The reason I wish to use Lua is to save other people work, but also myself.  If I use the libraries you guys have for the names of things, it will take a lot of the guess work out of my regex I think.  But it's gonna be more complex than a few regex expressions obviously I'll need arrays of things.  Not sure if I should build huge long (item1|item2) things and that'd break a computer or I can think of a better way. 

Alternatively I could write the script to convert the lua data files to php/python and have that part of the process.  I don't really wish to use lua if I can't use strict regex.  It seems a waste of skill I have acquired.

As I mentioned in the channel, we do expose the boost::regex library under windower.regex. For example, to match a regex pattern, you can use:

print(T(windower.regex.match('hello world', '\\w{3}')))
-- Results in: {"hel", "wor"}
 
print(windower.regex.replace('hello world', '\\s', '_'))
-- Results in: hello_world

Thank you Arcon.

Unfortunately I have some bad news which may not surprise some of you as this hasn't had much progress in 3 months or so.  Due to recent treatment by the community, the fact my gf doesn't really wish to play anymore, and due to the fact I have to keep juggling two very needy clients I can't find the time or passion to finish this out.  In that order of priority is the reason.  I sincerely regret wasting either of your time, you're very nice giving people.  My hope is that this info will be here if anyone else ever wishes to pick up the flag and carry it on, so that maybe it won't have wasted everyone's time after all.  Thanks again for the info and interest in the topic and especially your time.

What’s the worst thing I’ve stolen? Probably little pieces of other people’s lives. Where I’ve either wasted their time or hurt them in some way. That’s the worst thing you can steal, the time of other people. You just can’t get that back.
- Chester Bennington

That's fine, you haven't wasted any time, I wouldn't be doing any of this if it wasn't fun to me. Just a shame that you're gone, but if you ever do decide to come back this will be here and so will we