TalonGrayson

That is incredibly interesting, and I'm going to look into it; I have extremely limited C/C++ knowledge (read: I muck about with Arduino in my spare time, and usually it takes me an hour to figure out how to do very simple things). I'm also employed by someone who pays me money to not know what I'm doing spend all day on StackOverflow swear at failing tests deny it's my code that caused the error write software, so yeah, not hugely likely to be me who creates an API, either. But I guess if the software is open source I could take a look... maybe I could stream working on it just to really bore my already dwindling audience... not sure of the legality on that. Even with an API built, it would need pulling into the main codebase. I wonder if any of the HC devs could confirm/deny their interest in this as a roadmap item?

@The Philotic Knight To be honest, I don't know the extent of its publication, nor how open the Homecoming code is compared to other servers. An API would need to be Homecoming specific, too, since other flavours of CoH will have different things going on. But short answer, no... but I'd like to find out more (not that I'm likely to be able to contribute to building an API)!

Any API would have to be developed 'in-house' to keep the code private (or at least under NDA). The purpose of an API of this sort (read-only) is to expose endpoints which external devs can access to view data, ideally in a nice digestible format like JSON. Said devs can then display said data in a nice pretty format on a web page or in an app, for example. The data can also be used for analysis. Things like examining which enhancements are most popular on endgame Mind Controllers, for example. What I did with Tyto, my DCUO app, was provide users with the most efficient gear purchases for their current combat rating, based on cost, highest CR boost, etc. A similar algorithm is plausible in CoX, based on all the data you could fetch across the system. But I digress. A periodically updated shadow database, where only the changes since the last update are pushed, served separately from the game servers (e.g., every 15 minutes, the game servers would update the shadow) may mitigate lag concerns. I don't think anyone would expect second-by-second updates, nor would it be reasonable to do so. The API would then allow read-only, rate limited access to that shadow data. It's all pretty standard stuff, really. It just doesn't currently exist, for reasons over which we can only speculate!

Yup. I would say privacy can be worked around easily enough by making it an 'opt-in' platform. Dev time, noodle-voodle, and possibly other legal concerns around exposing NCSoft data to the public outside of a specific scope (i.e., the game itself) are all valid reasons not to have built an API... I want to say yet.

@PoisonousDwarf here (@TalonGrayon on Homecoming), previous member of Karma Police My mains were: PoisonousDwarf (spines/regen scrapper) Snickety (claws/wp scrapper) Genkaku (ill/kin controller) Hitokengu Uchimasu (SS/wp tank) Currently floating about on my grav/elec dom, Talon Grayson but I've started rolling a few of my old toons and unfinished concepts again. Although, someone on Excelsior has taken the name Snickety 😭 P.S. @Hamish How do? @mereman I remember Prof. Radburn, may he rest in peace. A few other names here I recognise, but live was a long time ago.

I'm a web developer by trade, and if Homecoming offers a public API, it is relatively trivial to build something which displays the data. I mean... *relatively* trivial. It's still a LOT of work, given the sheer quantity of content related to a single character, displaying it sensibly and efficiently/in a performant manner. And of course, any new content needs to be accounted for, etc. I would offer to get involved... I mean, I could submit the odd PR here and there, depending on the stack (I'm a RoR dev)... but I'm reluctant to. I once built a similar thing for DCUO (it was an Android app, but basically the exact same principle) and it worked so long as the devs kept their API content up to date... which slowly but surely they didn't, and I could no longer justify promoting an app which didn't work properly. I also don't have a massive amount of spare time, which is a massive blocker. But I would also like to see this become a thing again, so I'm not ruling my involvement out entirely, assuming anyone else is keen... Of course, there's no API as far as I'm aware, so... computer says no

Threw this together the moment I realise Propel swaps the usual models out for Christmas presents at the moment. If you've been good, you get a gift. If you've been bad, you get a gift to the face!