_NOPE_

@roleki, @Bopper, I just updated the Powers Checker to speed up the load time substantially to a fraction of what it was. See my post here: http://www.cityofplayers.com/2020/02/03/pks-powers-checker-upgrade/

That's my Powers Checker app, and you can find it on my tools page: http://www.cityofplayers.com/pks-tools/ It comes with an Excel spreadsheet that's basically the raw dump of my Def File Parser program's output. If you take that spreadsheet and see the relationships between the sheets, you should be able to figure it out. I just created a basic UI that lets people browse that spreadsheet in a "user friendly" way and export the data into sub-sheets, but feel free to do what you want with that data, just know that it's surely out of date. As to the .DEF files themselves, I got mine from the leaks a while back, I don't recall which leak specifically, but you can take a crack at looking at Ourodev's leak archive to see if you can find the original raw file again. As per HC policy, I can't link directly to Ourodev, but if you google it you can find it, or if you send me a PM, I can PM your the URL to their archives (I think you have to create an account to access it though).

@Replacement they DID! Frankly, trying to parse those .DEF files... it was basically the programmer version of Old English: http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/hel/cant-pro.html

@roleki, see above. That app provides the raw data directly from the server side .DEF files (at least, the ones that were leaked). I wouldn't be able to give anything more up to date than that data from about a year ago, unless the HC Devs decided to released their Powers.def file to everyone, or provide an API where I could query that data. Now, this is the RAW data that I've provided in a fairly easy to view format (rather than having to browse through the .DEF file itself). As to what the attributes actually MEAN, I haven't spent the time to investigate them, look at the code behind the scenes to see how it uses the data, and bring it all together. For example, the Scale that I have highlighted is the scale that damage of that power uses.. I'm assuming it's multiplied by some base value somewhere, but I'd have to dig further to figure that out, and that would take quite some time.

OH! You mean like this @Bopper? Speaking of which, now that I have async figured out, I should go back and fix this so that the "database" doesn't take five minutes to load. I think that'll be my next mini-project until I decide the next big one to tackle!

What is that again? Remind me, the name is familiar, but I don't know that I ever used it.

Yup, I'll go ahead and plop this down here, though it looks like you might be already aware of it. I think it's good to have a reminder every once in a while. Virtually ANYTHING is possible in code, the question is if the juice is worth the squeeze, so to speak:

Oh, yeah, well it's not so much that I don't want people to take my code. I give it away freely most of the time. It's just that if it's on my website, or inside of my program, I kinda want it to be mostly my code. I'm kind of selfish that way.

Alright, now with @Carnifax's tip, I've gotten the page load cut in half AGAIN, down to 14 seconds: I think that's about as good as it's going to get folks, considering that I'm screen-scraping and processing a few dozen pages, all at the same time! I also learned a valuable lesson - you can't turn a method that returns void into a Task<>, because, DUH, it's a void method. If you make an async method void, the code won't care when the hell it runs, so you can't very well use a Task.WaitAll() on it. You have to EXPLICITLY declare the method as a Task<something> so that the compiler knows that it will return a value to wait on. I spent four HOURS figuring that one out. Rookie mistake. I also went ahead and updated the source code, so that anyone that wants to can see and take my nasty code, and maybe make it better.

Sounds like you know exactly what to do... why don't you tackle that one, since you seem already very knowledgeable on it?

Wow really? I guess I had no clue because frankly I never used build planners. Well, I suppose I could make a web based one. It'd be a good way for me to grow my ASP.NET skills. I could start with a basic one that ONLY has the powers themselves listed without the numbers (because the only numbers I'd have access to would be the ones from Leandro's original leak, which I'm sure are out of date). And then maybe some day we can get HC proper to provide an API to obtain power data...

There used to be one called... I think... Sucker Punch?

I'm... not following. How do you copy and paste from a phone to a PC? Is that some functionality that I'm not aware of? Is there an app for that™?

Yeah, I'd thought about that, but... With the game being PC Only, how would you get the build from the phone to the PC?

That's EXACTLY what I needed, thanks! I'll implement that when I get home tonight!

Eh, not really. While I like the idea of open source code, I don't think I could ever bring myself into really getting into that type of community. Part of me needs the "attaboys" as motivation to keep me going, and the open source model doesn't fill my needs in that way for a pat on the head, frankly. Because everyone's work all mushes together, and it's hard to really know who did what at some point, which makes it GREAT for getting things done more quickly, but doesn't give me the warm fuzzies that I need to keep going. Just being honest here. I'll give credit where credit's due, and if someone offers suggestions and advice, I'll thank them for it and give them credit in any public displays of my code (because I'm ALL about credit and making sure it gets to the right places). But I also strongly believe in ownership of things, I can't really live in the world where I don't "own" my own work... if that makes any sense. I usually release MY source code publicly for people to take, but I have a hard time directly implementing large chunks of OTHER people's work into my own. I'll take tiny snippets, but I kind of like to take ideas and make them my own... does that make sense?

Now that I've got the Dev Tracker about as good as I think I can get it, I'm looking for a new side project to work on. With HC proper being tied up in the negotiations and not taking any code submissions, I think the best place where I can help is to make some more ancillary tools for the community. Here's some ideas that I had or others suggested, but I wanted to get all of your opinions, because what I think might be useful and interesting might not be what you all think is, and I'd hate to waste my time working on something that only *I* will end up using: Bring back Project Spelunker and see it to fruition. An offline Mission Architect Mission Builder, where you can create and edit mission files through a basic non-pretty (I'm not a graphic artist, so I really can't make things pretty) user interface (UI). An application with a UI that allows you to, in a fairly easy way, silence or replace specific game sounds. ??? Profit! Or what other ideas do you have? Please note my limitations as a programmer, I can't make things look pretty, I can only make them functional. I'm no artist.

I FINALLY figured out asynchronous processing in C#! What that means for you is that the Dev Tracker (http://www.cityofplayers.com/DevTracker/) is now substantially faster. From my tests of the non-async version vs. the async version, there was a change from about 60 seconds for page load to 30 seconds for page load! Still super long, but it's about as good as I can do I think, unless a programmer smarter than me has a better idea than what I'm doing. Here's my process: Go to the Staff page (https://forums.homecomingservers.com/staff/) and screen-scrape it for all staff member usernames and IDs - Takes just about 2ish seconds Go through each staff member synchronously and start the following process on each staff member asynchronously: Start a Do...While loop using an increasing integer to check every possible one of the staff member's pages from 1 to infinity until it can't find a new valid URL. Basically, until I pass a URL such as https://forums.homecomingservers.com/profile/5-cipher/content/page/99999999/?all_activity=1 into the server to process, and if it sends me back a response URL of https://forums.homecomingservers.com/profile/5-cipher/content/page/7/?all_activity=1, which is not what I was expecting, then I know I must be at the end of the list of possible URLs. This is what takes the longest, because I don't know ahead of time how many pages of activities there are! If I knew ahead of time how many pages each staff member had, I could start them all asynchronously without testing and seeking out the pages. This step takes about 24 seconds. Process the data into dynamic HTML and built the list of posts to present - about 2 seconds. Anyone smarter than me have any better ideas?

Only if that's the only perspective you want to see, then yes. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

This is a great idea. I'm already coding it in my head in C#. Of course, the code doesn't use C#... Mostly... 😢

You can also try alternate builds with those "extra" components. Try different powers out, and different associated playstyles. You can even make it a challenge if you want to get EVERY possible incarnate power... HOLY CRAP that would be a challenge.

@Oubliette_Red with all this talk, I now kinda want to make a desktop app with a user interface that can do all of the work for you... what do you think?

You can depigg the sound files, put them through a sound manipulation program like audacity, and then put the replacement file in the "right" place and the game will pick that file up and use it instead, as I've done here, to humorous effect:

It looks like you need to just read a little bit more: etc. etc. Nobody ever said it was an easy process to modify the client. It's not. But it's possible.

Information is provided in that thread that shows you how to find the information for yourself. And, worst case scenario, you can start digging through the code to find it: https://ourowiki.ouro-comdev.com/index.php?title=Main_Page