April 27
Probably a one post thread for this month, given the date.
I have found an answer for how I can get the Armory/Archives online without breaking the ToU. It requires significant overhauls of the originally planned structures/data formats, but the result will be clean of any issues.
This process includes the removal of some intended/planned features, and might result in the Armory operating slightly more slowly, I won't know on that one until it is reassembled. The current build still uses data from the original draft of the v4 Armory, which is a no-go. The v2 Armory data is all safe and fine to use, but is hardly up to date. The data problem will take time.
I will update as I go about what features are being removed if I have previously mentioned them in a Dev Log or shown them off. So far, the ability to recolor icons will be removed, and the ability to fuse items will be removed.
The ability to recolor icons is being removed because even though I can do this with images I obtain while ingame normally, the process of deleting the background and etc would create something close enough to the original file in the client that I wouldn't want to use it for fear of the ToU. The new icons will not be gray like they were on v2. They will have color, it will just be pre-determined based on the most likely colors that gear would have when obtained ingame. Outfits will have their default colors. I can obtain these images with some sizable effort, via cropping and Photoshop, from the Simulation room.
The ability to fuse equipment is being removed due to a technical limitation of the new icon setup and to streamline the client-side code in general. Honestly, the approach I was using to handle fusion was messy anyway. It doesn't have a lot of value when you can't recolor the icons anyway; you can't make your gear look like it does ingame.
The logs for the next while will basically be me declaring victory over restoring functions to the Armory, or preparing to do so. I will not be going into detail on the old structure of the Armory when rebuilding it, or on the server-side work if I think it could reveal too much info to be a danger security-wise.
At any rate, this is the end of being stuck in a flip/flopping "Can I?"/"Can't I?" situation. The new approach is 100% allowed up until we are told we can't take images of the game for fan-site purposes anymore. Images weren't the sole reason I felt like there was no path for the Armory to go online, but it was a big one. The other absolutely massive one is the sheer amount of items. It is such a painful amount of work when it could be instantly done if we were allowed to, but I don't want to fall into another ToU rant.