Psst... wanna see something I've been working on?

[Shendare]

Hint: If you're in this forum, then yes. You do. You really, really do.

http://youtu.be/z2EclMWCGyM

[Kingly_Krab]

That actually seems really cool, I'd be interested to see the backside of that. Good work and good luck with that.

Side note: If I had one suggestion, being able to select multiple classes on the little selection thing would be nice, just to see what spells overlap in those classes.

[Shendare]

Yeah. It's a primary goal to make the source code fully available. I may offer a hosted solution like Akka does for EOC, but it'll run a lot faster if you download and run it locally. It's just having a version of Windows with IIS (everything but the Home editions, basically), unzipping the files to your c:\inetpub\wwwroot folder, and running an included batch file to activate the application compilation.

Freely available .net source code also means anyone at all could update and maintain it if necessary, with the free Visual Studio or any text editor, really.

I'm thinking the most complicated editors to make will be Spells, Items, and NPCs with all their associated spawns, loot tables, merchant lists, yadda yadda. But there are a heck of a lot of smaller but very helpful editors/builders to put together, too.

It's gonna be a fun ride.

[vsab]

Is that an MVC app? I started writing a similar thing in MVC to learn it since I was primarily a WPF developer. I now just got a job doing MVC so I should improve... I just got completely bogged under by the MASSES of fields in the database lol.

Soon if not already you should be able to host it in OWIN/Katana without IIS, the only real issue is how funky Windows can be with allowing HTTP servers to run. In fact I run multiple web services at my current work without IIS.

And by the end of the year, not only will you not need IIS, you won't need Windows either.

Are you rocking ado.net or using some kind of ORM?? I tried EF and nhibernate but they didn't like our db schema...

[chrsschb]

I'm really interested in that, looks extremely simple and straight forward. Spell editing has always been a weak area for me (at one point turning several of my damaging abilities into heals lol).

[Shendare]

vsab:

No MVC. Just asp.net web controls and some javascript. And yeah, I'm sorta counting on IIS and Windows no longer being required for hosting asp.net websites in the not-too-distant future. Didn't know the IIS requirement was already sorta taken care of! As for the db, it's just odbc with the official mysql connector.

[atrayas]

Really looking forward to trying this out in the future. Looks solid and will make customization allot easier.

[Tyen05]

.aspx >_< >_< >_<

[Shendare]

What can I say... it's what I know. Hahaha.

[Shendare]

Besides, Microsoft's dev division seems to have really come around in regards to open source the last few years. I believe they've completely open sourced the .net framework and compilers. .net outside of Windows should only get better from here on!

[vsab]

Well you might come unstuck with the cross platform support, I think web forms stuff will still depend on System.Web. It's well worth cutting your teeth on MVC if you can, career-wise. The only web forms jobs I see these days are the shitty ones where you have to maintain someone elses codebase they wrote 10 years ago

My stuff didn't have a spell editor, it was all NPC, merchant list manipulation, and items stuff. If I get time to run a server in the future I'd resurrect it.

[chrsschb]

Originally Posted by vsab

Well you might come unstuck with the cross platform support, I think web forms stuff will still depend on System.Web. It's well worth cutting your teeth on MVC if you can, career-wise. The only web forms jobs I see these days are the shitty ones where you have to maintain someone elses codebase they wrote 10 years ago ;0

Can confirm. Currently supporting MOSS2007 servers for a billion dollar company.

[Shendare]

I'll have to take a look. I saw MVC in the VS project options and immediately thought of MFC from back in my VC++ days. It filled a role, but had its own whole set of complications, glitches, and inconsistencies. C# ended up being better for my hobbyist needs by far.

[Akkadius]

Your work on this so far looks great. All of the user capabilities are definitely on point with where I was heading with the EoC editor.

You mentioned EoC and the Spell Editor there, it is also not complete, especially the individual spell editing page, but it works.

There are tons of spell editors that I've seen over the course of the years and they all have their own ups and downs.

The biggest struggle I see is the availability of these tools, can they withstand schematic changes on their own and are they highly available (Open source/Hosted). Ultimately that is where they sink or swim, they could be a great tool but if they miss the boat on availability, they die. Examples (Ailia's Spell Editor, Null's Spell Editor, and all the other classic spell editors) and if I exit spell editors, the same for many other editors out there.

If you have the brain power to put together what you have in the video, you can easily work around the framework of EoC. It really isn't that complicated.

Another thing I see over and over again is duplication of platforms and tools when really there should be an effort to unify efforts. This has been done fairly successfully in the PEQ Editor. But at least with EOC it wraps the PEQ editor inside of it for availability, so if one native EoC tool isn't suitable then you can use one in the PEQ Editor, easily.

You can go ahead and make this tool and all and make it available for others, it just doesn't not make it very cross platform and open and makes it a stand alone setup that goes against what the end goal of EoC was supposed to be.

EoC was also meant to have far more tools than it does, but I am also just one person and have been going through some serious life events as of recent so project time is just not there.

Either way all of how to develop around the framework/platform is on the Github already:

https://github.com/Akkadius/EQEmuEOC

This is not meant to be a downer, because work like this keeps this community going forward. Getting excited about creation and contribution to the community is great, I'm just adding a little bit of perspective.

[Shendare]

Alright. Let's see if I can address them directly. I want to start by saying I do totally get where you're coming from.

Originally Posted by Akkadius

Your work on this so far looks great. All of the user capabilities are definitely on point with where I was heading with the EoC editor.

Thanks. I can also see where you're headed with EOC, and can't wait to see its progression.

Originally Posted by Akkadius

You mentioned EoC and the Spell Editor there, it is also not complete, especially the individual spell editing page, but it works.

Yeah, it's quite clearly a work in progress. Functionality is concern #1, and it sounds as though you've got it able to save changes to anyone's db that's connected it to the EOC, which is certainly farther than I've gotten so far!

Originally Posted by Akkadius

There are tons of spell editors that I've seen over the course of the years and they all have their own ups and downs.

Truth. That'll be the case with any tool, and any combination of available tools.

Originally Posted by Akkadius

The biggest struggle I see is the availability of these tools, can they withstand schematic changes on their own and are they highly available (Open source/Hosted). Ultimately that is where they sink or swim, they could be a great tool but if they miss the boat on availability, they die. Examples (Ailia's Spell Editor, Null's Spell Editor, and all the other classic spell editors) and if I exit spell editors, the same for many other editors out there.

Totally and completely right. The plan is to have it on a free, globally available open source and version control platform, perhaps like github, assuming they support asp.net applications. As mentioned, I don't have any experience with source sharing and version control, primarily working out of single- or two-person dev teams in the past.

Originally Posted by Akkadius

If you have the brain power to put together what you have in the video, you can easily work around the framework of EoC. It really isn't that complicated.

Thanks! It's certainly true that I could try to pick it up and contribute work to the EOC, though I'd be working with technologies that I'm wholly unfamiliar with (namely php and jquery). While I could certainly learn them as I go, and it certainly wouldn't be detrimental to my usefulness to have those technologies in my repertoire, they are quite entirely outside of my experience and knowledge sphere at the moment.

Originally Posted by Akkadius

Another thing I see over and over again is duplication of platforms and tools when really there should be an effort to unify efforts. This has been done fairly successfully in the PEQ Editor. But at least with EOC it wraps the PEQ editor inside of it for availability, so if one native EoC tool isn't suitable then you can use one in the PEQ Editor, easily.

I agree, it would be best if there were a single, globally available and standardized EQEmu database/world editor platform, with multiple contributing devs keeping a single system up to date as code changes and database changes take place over time, and the EOC is a perfect candidate for that.

Originally Posted by Akkadius

You can go ahead and make this tool and all and make it available for others, it just doesn't not make it very cross platform and open and makes it a stand alone setup that goes against what the end goal of EoC was supposed to be.

Hopefully that isn't as true as it seems. With Microsoft making the .net framework open source, asp.net websites will hopefully be fully functional on Linux and OSX, as well as on Home editions of Windows, in the near future, so it could work on all platforms. In addition, once an asp.net application is fully functional, there is the option to put work into implementing a Windows .net app version of it as well, to have asp.net and regular .net working side-by-side, with as much shared UI, business logic, and code as possible, and regular .net apps already work on Linux thanks to Mono. I'm eager to see what they do with the open-sourcing of the .net Roslyn compiler.

Originally Posted by Akkadius

EoC was also meant to have far more tools than it does, but I am also just one person and have been going through some serious life events as of recent so project time is just not there.

I totally and completely understand. EOC already has a lot of functionality, and will only get better and more intuitive with time. More devs contributing their free time would help accelerate its development and improvement, so it doesn't have to be limited to the work of a single person with all the regular real life responsibilities and then some.

Originally Posted by Akkadius

Either way all of how to develop around the framework/platform is on the Github already:

https://github.com/Akkadius/EQEmuEOC

I'll have to see how github works with asp.net, and see if I'll have to use a different source platform, if it doesn't. Code sharing is a new experience for me!

Originally Posted by Akkadius

This is not meant to be a downer, because work like this keeps this community going forward. Getting excited about creation and contribution to the community is great, I'm just adding a little bit of perspective.

I don't take the statements as a downer at all. I see you as saying that it would be a heck of a lot better if all of the database-editing/world-building effort were being put into EOC, instead of a separate system that could be seen as a competitor or something.

I can totally see it and completely agree. If my dev knowledge weren't basically 100% in the Microsoft world, it would be a no-brainer. I'd be hopping in and helping EOC be the one and only flash-bang solution to all of an EQEmu server developer's needs.

Your feeling is that I should try to work with EOC anyway, for all of the aforementioned benefits and otherwise drawbacks... pick up php and jquery and such as I go and work within the EOC framework.

Unfortunately, at this point in my life's timeline, I feel much more comfortable and optimistic working within the frameworks that I know. The hope is that my editors and EOC's editors will complement each other. Maybe mine will work better for editing some things, and EOC's for others, and that sounds fine to me.

I totally get that EOC alone would be the most beneficial. It feels very unfortunate that my educational and experiential circumstances don't line up with that ideal.