November 2019

November 6

I have been pulled into Qualify of Life updates/upgrades again. I have also been fixing longstanding small bugs that never warranted my attention before now. Lately, the sole benefactor of these upgrades has been the Item List tab, though I have more to do likely. I've also built a database for enemy selection since the last update, but I have nothing to show on that doing anything yet.

The first change I made was the organization of Outfitter slots. Previously, the items were split into two categories: Regular outfits, and Premium outfits. Those with 20 ATT per piece, and those with 70 ATT per piece. As of yesterday, they are now split into six groups, based on how many Outfit Points they give. Through this, you can more easily skim a section for the correct pieces.

I have also added a search box to the Item List tab, to quickly search for specific items. It performs the search in realtime as you type, and automatically expands all branches on the list for easier viewing. No worries on convenience though, when you clear out the search box, it will collapse back the branches you previously had closed before searching. It looks something like this:





Among general improvements to tables, I have fixed numerous scrolling issues and scrollbar sync issues. These caused the positioning of the table contents to look strange when changing from one slot to another. The scrollbar now also updates when collapsing/expanding branches in the table. While it doesn't yet do it in the GIF above, it will shortly be able to update itself during searches as well.

My next big goal to work on is still the module for selecting a boss to calculate stat caps from, but I am running into some tidiness issues on how to actually format the data in a sane and usable way. The data I have now works, but I had to do it in an inaccurate way, and this bothers me. I have not yet come upon a better way, so I am holding off.

November 12

I have figured out a solution to how to handle battle data that won't bother me as much as it was before. I will be rebuilding my data table into three tables. Currently, I have just the one table that holds a mishmash of data from the raid battle, and the raid boss. It treats them as the same thing, and this is what was bothering me. It's fine for raids, usually, but for literally anything else it is not workable.

The new plan is to move the extra columns off that table into a new table of battle data. This will leave me a table of battles, and a table of enemies. I will add a third table, to list what enemies are in each battle. When you go to select a battle, you will then be prompted to select an enemy in the battle. On the initial release of the v4 Armory, the only options will be raid battles, so this selection will be mostly pointless. Fortunately, it will default to the only entry in the list. I will have mockups to show of this once I get to designing the UI.

Today also marks the day I get the ball rolling on a change to my development setup. I've been developing site stuff on my main PC, the same one I play Vindictus on. Naturally, since Blackcipher is terrible, this is extremely dangerous to do on a PC that actually plays the game. Due to that, there is a whole list of precautions I have to do before logging in. It is very tedious, and reduces my willingness to actually work on the Armory to do small tasks.

Today, my new mouse arrived. This was the last piece I needed to setup a second computer near me, to offload all of the Armory stuff to. With this, it can host the virtual servers and everything else I need for the Armory. That will allow me to work on the Armory while in Vindictus, as I used to be able to many years ago. This should be a huge boon to actually making progress on things.

It will also allow me to verify data ingame while checking calculations on the Armory, which will finally let me test for 100% certainty that stat calculation is stable and accurate.

November 14

My second PC has been completely setup, and a test run of loading the Armory from it was successful. I can now do Armory work while ingame, safely.

Already, I have stumbled on a calculation error. Apparently, outfits are not applying their set bonuses. Honestly I should have noticed this sooner, their set bonus does not appear when hovering over them.

The current event spam ingame is taking up my time, but I should be able to fit patches like this in between finishing dailies on my two chars.

November 15

Thanks to the ability to use the Armory while ingame, I caught and have now fixed an issue where avatar items were not giving a set bonus. It turns out, these aren't a set bonus internally. No idea how the game handles it, but I've coded a separate path for those to be counted now.

Unfortunately, less than 24 hours after my successful test run of PC #2 hosting the Armory, the dream looks to be temporarily dead. It is too far away for me to setup a wired internet connection, and the wireless adapter it has is so terrible that it takes 4 seconds to get 90 kb of info from it. This is making debugging tortuously slow, and so I have gone back to doing the work on my main PC.

I really want to fix this, but I am not sure how. I don't know if this office PC I have been given can even have a PCI internet card added, and I don't know if it would help regardless.

November 16

The Primal Red Flame weapon event is eating my time, but a bug has been fixed, and a quality of life improvement has been implemented today.

The Profiles module will no longer overwrite save date timestamps with the shown date strings, which fixes an issue where all profile edits/updates caused the save date to become NaN.

The Item List module will now clear the contents of the Item List when selecting a slot, to make it more clear when the list has successfully loaded. For avatar items, the list does not visibly change, so if the list takes time to retrieve, it becomes unclear when it has actually been filled in with the new items.

I've also figured out what I plan to do about the Armory PC. There used to be an ethernet cable running along the walls of my house all the way to my room, until a negligent carpet installing company decided to cut it to save themselves five seconds of work tucking it in. I'm going to make an effort to fix this cable, and use a wired connection. I have decided against using a network switch for two reasons:
1 - It introduces another point of failure for things to go wrong.
2 - Though minor, it introduces more delay onto the connection for my main PC. Not a fun idea.

Hopefully the Armory PC will be operational again on Wednesday, once the tool I need arrives.

November 19

I have finished linking battle data together, drafted the Battles tab's design, and partially implemented it. Today has been a very productive today.

Here is where I currently am with the Battles tab:





Starting from the most obvious bit, only raids are being included for now. The raids present are divided into four categories: Lv.90 raids, Lv.95 raids, Lv.100 raids, and miscellaneous things such as Special Battles and Redeemers.

If you meet the Quick Battle requirements for the raid, the block will show you the ATT, Critical, and Counterforce caps for that raid. If you do not meet the requirements, you will be shown the QB Requirements, and the name will be marked in Red.

This is the extent of what currently works, though it works well. The list updates in real-time as your stats change.

To be implemented tomorrow, once you click on a battle, that battle will become selected. Once selected, it will switch views to show you all of the enemies that spawn in that battle. By default, the selected enemy will be the one with the highest stats (the raid boss, but this functionality exists for when I add normal battles later).

A toggle to switch between Normal and Hero mode will be added somewhere, exactly where is undecided. I also plan to sort the battles in descending order from highest QB reqs to lowest, and the same for enemies in that display mode.

I will be somewhat hype if I can have this module finished before Armory PC is operational again, but I am doubtful of that. I gave up doing today's dailies for the events to get this far in one shot.

November 22

Well, this was far more of an ordeal than it needed to be. My plans for the Armory PC went roughly like this:

Plan A: Use Wireless to have a secondary PC host the Armory locally to develop it while playing Vindictus. -> The connection was bogged down by the USB wireless adapter, and completely unusable.

Plan B: Buy couplers and re-use the old Cat 5 ethernet cable running to my room from across the house. -> The carpet installers cut the cable, making this impossible.

Plan C: Buy a crimper tool kit and repair the wire. -> Even after repair, the wire still doesn't work; it is completely dead. (It was not user error, as the other wire I made was fine, and the behavior this one gave when tested was wacky.)

Plan D: Buy a new ethernet cable, and route it under the house to my room. -> Complete.

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The Armory PC is now online again, and has been brought up to date with file changes I made on this PC. Development will now resume on there, and barring time consuming events, Vindictus won't stall the Armory's development as heavily as it has until now.

As far as progress on the Battles module from last update:

I have refactored the code for sending battle lists to the client, so that it can more easily retrieve a specific battle's data. A function has been created that logs a list of all enemies in the selected battle to the console, but does nothing further. A separate function has been made to change between battle lists and enemy lists.

From here I just need to fill in functionality, which is mostly HTML changes at this point. The Primal Red Flame weapons event is eating time though, so we will see how this goes for the rest of the month.