GOA Please expose the titles Data in the XML.

[Xajorkith]

The “Roll of Honour” has fallen foul of many new versions of DAoC, it’s probably fair to say that it has been down or producing incorrect results a large chunk of the time. Meanwhile the Mythic version which is arguably less pretty remains much more stable.

The Mythic version also shows stats that are not available on the Goa site, solo kills, tower takes, Dragon kills, basically all the stuff in ones title screen.

To me (feel free to disagree) but producing stats of this ilk will cause some competitiveness amongst the players, thus giving a new lease of life to the old horse, I’m sure most stealthers would love to fight amongst themselves for the coveted “most solo kills honour”, and who has slain the dragon the most times?

Basically I’m saying please give us something else to play for, RPs is not everything but the current Goa stats certainly portray it that way! So please expose the “Title” stats in some form of XML, even if you don’t make it pretty on the RoH, I’m sure other web sites will take on the challenge to present the data to the players.

 

[Flimgoblin]

good suggestion send it to RightNow though I imagine the GMs will read it here eventually.

 

[Minau]

kickass idea imo, givf

 

[Alan]

It would be interesting to know how many hits the flashy XML displays on the GoA official site get.

I would expect more people look at sites like duskwave for information over the flashy ones.

Is there alot of time being spent making something that people dont use ?

 

[MadsKaizer]

I prefer any other stat site than goa, its just too heavy, slow and too much graphic, stats are about numbers not sliding stuff etc, better spend the time on keeping the xml up and running

and would be nice with all information in the stats, great surgestion to goa

 

[Bluevixen]

Also use Duskwave. Tried the GOA site and it all doesn't fit on my screen so most of the information is missing. Alas I CBA working out how it all works. However, it looks nice!

 

[Bahumat]

i like your idea, hope GOA do as well

 

[MadsKaizer]

or just enable fan sites to use the information from /title, that way goa can keep the time spend to a minimum, which they like

 

[Chilly]

i like your idea, hope GOA do as well

boosh.

 

[GReaper]

Whilst on the subject of XML, theres two other issues, one which needs solving and the other which would be nice.

Slightly inaccurate clocks are the main problem. The 4(?) webservers are slightly inaccurate when replying to requests for files:

HEAD /herald/servers/Prydwen/guilds/10.xml HTTP/1.0
Host: camelot-europe.goa.com

...

Last-Modified: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:51:16 GMT
ETag: "98082-1968-440c5a74"

Last-Modified: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:51:02 GMT
ETag: "2bc076-1968-440c5a66"

Last-Modified: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:51:11 GMT
ETag: "98082-1968-440c5a6f"

Last-Modified: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:50:57 GMT
ETag: "15007d-1968-440c5a61"

My XML downloader uses the If-Modified-Since header, if the server hosting the XML is slightly inaccurate then it'll end up trying to redownload the file.

Also, if the inode of a file is different on each server, change FileETag so that the webserver gives the same ETag reply, so that clients/caches can use If-Match effectively. "FileETag -INode" should be sufficient for this, however it'll still rely on an accurate clock to account for modification time!


Gzip compression is the one thing I'd like, and which other people might appreciate. mod_deflate can do this easily for Apache. A quick example of Salisbury's Tir na Nog Adventurers reduces a 873kB file to just 124kB. This could result in reduction to just 15-20% of the original file size.


Excuse the techie waffling, but these are two similarly important issues which are related to the XML files!

 

[Ryuno]

Just get your downloader to check a difference of more than 1 minute or so. That would stop it trying to redownload the file all the time. It doesn't need to be accurate by the second. Every minute-5 minutes is ok imo.

Great idea btw, would definetly like to see titles stuff in the xml.

 

[GReaper]

Just get your downloader to check a difference of more than 1 minute or so. That would stop it trying to redownload the file all the time. It doesn't need to be accurate by the second. Every minute-5 minutes is ok imo.

It's what I do currently, though it's more of a hack than a solution to the real problem. It still doesn't solve the ETag problem either.

 

[Bahumat]

boosh.

Im the moon, everyone loves the moon, half moons not bad he gets people talk about him...no one gives a sh1t about 3/4 moon

 

[Belorfyn]

Gzip compression is the one thing I'd like, and which other people might appreciate. mod_deflate can do this easily for Apache. A quick example of Salisbury's Tir na Nog Adventurers reduces a 873kB file to just 124kB. This could result in reduction to just 15-20% of the original file size.

Aye, that'd be cool. It only uses gzip encoding for agents that announce support for it, anyway.
I use it on my site too. Long time ago, it got disabled for while during server maintenance and I was kinda wondering why the daily bandwidth usage went up to 2GB or something from more usual 200MB. My site is text only

And transmitting less data saves energy and helps reduce global warming

 

[Ozilia]

Hehe.. comparing Mythic's and GOA's xml sites is really quite embarrasing for GOA.

But yea at least they could let fan pages get all the /stats info, even though they choose not to show it on their official site.

 

[GReaper]

Getting a bit offtopic, but it would be nice if Mythic did the following:

• Gzip compression, for the same reasons as above.
• Add something similar to guilds_[alb|hib|mid].xml. The only way of getting all active guilds is to scan from 10 onwards, this is hardly efficient.
• Enable Keep-Alive on guilds.camelotherald.com. This really would improve the speed of downloading XML files, having to open a new socket for each file slows down the downloads badly.

I'd love to add all the US servers to Frip (the bot), but downloading the XML takes far too long. The larger EU servers take up to 2 minutes to download (but could be faster with gzip compression!), the US servers take way too long.

 

[Belorfyn]

Getting a bit offtopic, but it would be nice if Mythic did the following:

• Add something similar to guilds_[alb|hib|mid].xml. The only way of getting all active guilds is to scan from 10 onwards, this is hardly efficient.

What do you mean? I use daoc.goa.com/herald/servers/[server]/guilds/guilds_[alb/hib/mid].xml for getting guilds lists. What's missing from them?

 

[GReaper]

What do you mean? I use daoc.goa.com/herald/servers/[server]/guilds/guilds_[alb/hib/mid].xml for getting guilds lists. What's missing from them?

Mythic's XML on camelotherald.com, not GOA!

 

[Belorfyn]

Mythic's XML on camelotherald.com, not GOA!

Oh

I thought you meant that you hoped that mythic did, like generally for both goa and mythic and not just for mythic. Guess their xml tools are GOA and mythic specific. Anyway, weird if they don't have such file then over there. Oh well, glad I never went for US servers then

 

[Belorfyn]

Guess it's getting way offtopic but I got idea. You could save the list of missing guild files as you check every file from 10 onwards and then skip those files next time. Recheck them every 2 days or so to make sure they haven't been reused. Actually it's likely the new guilds always get next ID anyway and the old ones never get reused but you could check them every 2-5 days just in case they start using the spare id's Maybe that speeds up the process a bit.
For faster downloads without keepalive you could use multiple threads too but you've probably thought of that already anyway.

 

[MadsKaizer]

requiel havent been by yet