PenUltima Online

SpawnView is a quick proof-of-concept to see if other people would find it useful. I've done more programming than I have actual server administration so I tend to think of weird ideas that might not be useful and I didn't want to spend time working on something no one would want to use.

As of now, all it does is load spawn regions from a local config file, draw them on a map and shows their labels. You can also draw in regions, but they are not saved, and you can hold control and scroll around the map with arrow keys. In the future I planned for SpawnView to be able to communicate with POL to get live data, and to be able to edit/create/add regions on the fly while POL was running.

There are two other tools I made like this called WebView and PlayerView that I planned to expand upon and combine with SpawnView and give it a cool edgy name like "Insight" or "Mantis".

WebView was a package for POL's webserver where players could see other players/regions drawn on a map, like with PlayerView or SpawnView but it was all done via a website.

PlayerView is like SpawnView but it actually communicates with the POL server and displays the location of all players online. I invisioned something that would allow me to view and modify objects and realms in game. It's a lot easier to draw spawn regions on map then it is to actually teleport around and get the cordinates, and even then it doesn't give you a clear understanding of where the region is in relation with everything else. I wanted to be able to see all PCs online and click each one and view their account/character information and possibly modifiy it or start a script on POL with their character as a paramater. Or give it to my GMs so they can setup spawn regions and groups easily. Or find the physical location of every item with a specific CProp, and then delete some or all of them with a click or two. The possibilities are many, which is why I'm posting this on the forums. So people can give feedback, people that actually Admin/GM servers long enough to know what would be useful and what would just be neat.

PlayerView also required a valid login, and kept track of what data actually changed and only sent the changed data. This kept POL from sending the same data over and over again, wasting resources.


Please post feedback on this so I know if it's a waste of time or not.

I guess it's so madly useful everyone is so busy using it that they are not posting anything about it. Really. If people think it's a bad idea I'd like to know...

it's a good idea, but we've transformed the idea into php and we're flooding it by an automated process using the spawnnet (latest step is coded, but not activated, because this needs a server restart first):

http://www.welt-pergon.de/index.php?modus=main&id=140

to show an example of some sample runes, just choose mapid=019 (it's on the right hand side of the desert).

Shinigami

Wow, nice work people. Definitely something to be proud of.

I like how you have split up the map into separate sections. How did you do that?

I wrote some PHP scripts that showed spawn regions, though not as cool. It was all 1 big image. I wanted to turn SpawnView into a tool for GMs so they could add/delete spawn regions, modify spawn groups, delete items, etc... I figured the over-head perspective would be easier than doing it all in game.

ImageMagick
Saved the map per InsideUO with the "convert -crop" cmd splited into 500x500 pieces and then "resize 200%" for the detailpics and "resize 10%" for the small ones.

Thanks.

np
Hopefully the resolution of 200% is enough to see single spawnrunes and not only one graphicmess

...waiting and hoping...need...restart....cant....wait.....

Definitely a nice setup. Would love to see something like this as downloadable project. Combine this with tek's, and you are looking at the top 2 "tools" on the board for web/information. Again, kudos on your work guys, great.

Alright well Muad thinks it's useful and Shini has something like it so I'm not the only one who thinks it's a good idea. That's enough for me to continue working on it.

it was Turley's idea... not mine

Shinigami

And I gave all my rights ,time and my personal being to you when I subscribed as a scripter
Live sucks if you cant script it.

I think teks work is the only thing that you can really call "work" or tool. My thing is pretty easy nothing that everyone could do. One small escript function with a loop through all the 500x500 blocks saving the rune information in a logfile every x hours. Then a simple phpfunction that reads the xmllogfile and creates the layout, nothing special imagemaps for the tipwindows absolute coords for the pins. This was the first time ever I did something with php and I finished it in a few hours.
So I think everbody can do it and even better. Just give yourself a little push

Tek, if I wasn't gay... I mean was gay, I'd do ya.

Props. Can't wait to see future versions.

Reminds me of my old PHP vendor system for php-nuke. used auxsvc to list player vendor info on the site (cached in log files on the webserver once every hour if viewed), gave location on the map, vendor inventory, etc. :/

for performance reasons we use aux here only for sync. an external application asks pol via aux to generate the ready-to-use xml file. pol creates it and than the external app moves it via scp to the webserver where the php-script is just waiting for. that's all.

we use this method to auto-generate forum-accounts, transfer player-data, house-data, online-data, etc... online-data will be transfered every minute, all other stuff every 12 hours

Shinigami

Aye, same as mine. Cept the page got it once an hour, then saved it to a file one the webserver on it's own. At the time, my host did not support crontab so I couldn't automate it any better than that. Didn't want another app involved myself (I was still green with scripting when i made it )

the external app doesn't use crontab... it's developed in Delphi, compiled in Kylix and still running on the Pergon-linux-server-box. Pol store the data as xml in files and the kylix-app put'em via scp to the webserver...

anyway, our SpawnNet-overview is fullfilled with some data now.

Shinigami