Lately, several of us have been working on The Shadow Odyssey questline. This involves going through a good bit of TSO zones to get updates. We've also been running WoE for a while and are working on getting our regular WoE raidforce full sets of T3 gear. Prior to this we were working on running zones to get people updates for their epic weapons, etc. All these are things that people want to/need to do in the game that is currently not all that easy to keep track of.

Continuing on with my history of doing hours and hours of programming work to save myself 20 seconds later (see Dethdlr's Weapon Emporium at www.eq2411.com), I'm thinking about trying to write a module for our website to track this type of stuff. I want to make it so that site admins can add new items to track, petty officers+ can edit anyone's status (to keep it up to date), and players can update their own character's status. I want it generic enough so that once I'm done with it, it can be used to track whatever the heck they throw at us in Sentinel's Fate that needs tracking.

I'm working through my design concept right now but thought I would share some of my ideas with the rest of you so you can chime in and tell me if there are features I'm missing, if I'm making it overly complicated, etc. I'm still trying to nail down a few things in my head myself at this point as well.

The structure would be a hierarchical list of Categories and Items that would allow things like this:

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Cat1 Item1 Item2 Item2a Item2b Item3 Cat2 Item4 Item5 Cat3 Cat4 Item6 Item7 Item7a Item7b Item8 Cat5 Item9 Item10

An example might be:

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Quests The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 1 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 2 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 3 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 4 NFP Kill The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 5 Crucible Najena's Hollow Tower Guk The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 6 Guk: First Quest Guk: Second Quest Guk: Third Quest The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 7 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 8 PoF Gear Shard Armor T3 Head Chest Shoulders Gloves Forearms Legs Boots

One idea I had was that if I put a flag for the items and track whether or not the step is a particular instance, then as long as I make sure the admins list each zone the same way each time, I should be able to produce a report that says for each needed zone, which characters need it. I seem to be getting wrapped around the axel a little bit on how to handle this though. For example, you have to do Chapter 1 before you can do Chapter 2. But you can do NHT before Crucible and vice versa. I'm not quite certain how I want to handle that yet. I thought I could just let people mark them however the heck they want but that would eliminate the ability to do that report since it would show that people need to kill Varsoon in PoF even though they haven't finished Chapter 5.

For each of the items that can be obtained/completed/etc. there would be a checkbox to indicate you have obtained/completed that step. Another idea I have is for each item/quest, allow people to say that they want to track it. That way, if I have no intention of doing The Shadow Odyssey questline on Dethdlr, he isn't clogging up the screens/reports with all the zones he still needs.

I've got another idea or two for this but I'm still in design mode at this point (not sure for how long, could be hours, could be months lol). Let me know if you have any ideas/suggestions/requests/etc.

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One idea I had was that if I put a flag for the items and track whether or not the step is a particular instance, then as long as I make sure the admins list each zone the same way each time, I should be able to produce a report that says for each needed zone, which characters need it. I seem to be getting wrapped around the axel a little bit on how to handle this though. For example, you have to do Chapter 1 before you can do Chapter 2. But you can do NHT before Crucible and vice versa. I'm not quite certain how I want to handle that yet. I thought I could just let people mark them however the heck they want but that would eliminate the ability to do that report since it would show that people need to kill Varsoon in PoF even though they haven't finished Chapter 5.

how about doing something simple, just add a 'notes' section to it?

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Quests The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 1 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 2 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 3 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 4 NFP Kill The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 5 Crucible Najena's Hollow Tower Guk

could look like this

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Quests The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 1 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 2 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 3 The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 4 NFP Kill The Shadow Odyssey: Chapter 5 (Notes Text Box with zones still needed)

Jaral wrote:

how about doing something simple, just add a 'notes' section to it?

Granted, I *DO* have a tendency to over-engineer things. The problem with doing the notes option is it eliminates the ability to do a query to find out who all needs a particular zone. I was hoping to be able to do a report something like this:

Needed Zones
Crucible - Olias, Elinore, Karteara, Efice, Ynnek

NHT - Ssslitthh, Olias, Suppi

Maidens Chaimber - Decimatr, Dethdlr


The info would be pulled from anywhere in the hierarchy whether it was for the shadow odyssey quest or for an epic weapon update, etc. It may end up too complicated to implement but I'm still hoping I can manage to pull it off.

you could always list every zone for the section, then add a drop down with a 'done' - 'not done' tag?

Jaral wrote:

you could always list every zone for the section, then add a drop down with a 'done' - 'not done' tag?

I think I figured it out between last night and today. My current thought is that when an item (quest step/item/whatever) gets put in by the site admin (primarily me on this site), they would specifiy that the item is a zone. Each character, for the items they have chosen to track, would then have a checkbox that says Ready, and a checkbox that says Complete. When I run the "Zone Report" I would simply collect up all the items that are zones, and all the characters who have said they are "Ready" for that zone.

For example (excuse the crude formatting):

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Character: Elinore Ready | Complete | O | O |The Shadow Odyssey Timeline O | X | The Shadow Odyssey, Chapter 2: The Gods Must Be Crazy O | X | Obelisk of Ahkzul O | X | The Shadow Odyssey, Chapter 4: History Repeating O | X | Obelisk of Lost Souls O | X | The Nasin Manor Library O | X | Obelisk of Lost Souls O | O | The Shadow Odyssey, Chapter 5: Breaking the Chains O | O | Gather the seven missing runes of the Staff of Theer X | O | Befallen: Necrotic Asylum O | X | Najena's Hollow Tower X | O | Veksar: The Sunken Theater O | X | Miragul's Phylactery: The Crucible O | O | Ravenscale Repository X | O | The Ruins of Guk: The Lower Corridors X | O | Emperor Atrebe's Laboratory: The Fabled City of Kor-sha O | O | Return to Firmroot Moot and talk to The Great Morsley O | O | Obelisk of Ahkzul O | O | Anchor of Bazzul O | O | The Shadow Odyssey, Chapter 6: The Guns of Brokenskull O | X | Heroes Honored O | X | The Ruins of Guk: Halls of the Fallen O | X | Legacy of the Curse O | X | The Ruins of Guk: The Lower Corridors X | O | The Stone of Legend X | O | The Ruins of Guk: The Outer Stronghold of Ykesha O | O |The White Dragonscale Cloak O | X | Miragul's Phylactery: Scion of Ice X | O | Befallen: Necrotic Asylum O | O | Ravenscale Repository

Using this information, when the Zone Report is run, it would return the following:

Befallen: Necrotic Asylum - Elinore
Veksar: The Sunken Theater -Elinore
The Ruins of Guk: The Lower Corridors - Elinore
Emperor Atrebe's Laboratory: The Fabled City of Kor-sha - Elinore
The Ruins of Guk: The Lower Corridors - Elinore
The Ruins of Guk: The Outer Stronghold of Ykesha - Elinore

In the above example, Elinore is ready for Outer Stronghold to complete the quest "The Stone of Legend" even though she hasn't finished Chapter 5. She needs Lower Corridors because when she did the quest "Legacy of the Curse" she wasn't on Chapter 5 yet. Also, since Elinore is working on The White Dragonscale Cloak as well and needs to do Befallen: Necrotic Asylum before Ravenscale for that quest, I've didn't check the Ready box for Ravenscale Repository under Chapter 5. That way, in the zone report, Ravenscale won't show up for me until after I've done Befallen: Necrotic Asylum and I've updated the checkboxes to say I'm ready for Ravenscale. Optionally I could have clicked Ready under Chapter 5 and it would have shown up. I just might end up having to do it again for The White Dragonscale Cloak.

The formatting is a bit flakey in my example above. It should look a lot better and be easier to see once it's actually implemented but the basic idea is there I think.

What I haven't decided yet is if I should put the "Ready" checkbox next to all the items or if it should just be for the ones that are zones. The up side of putting it on everything is it allows people to say that they want to work on something but aren't quite ready to do it yet. The down side is that it may clutter things a bit and have extra checkboxes where they aren't needed. I'm leaning towards putting next to everything. Just because you finished the previous step doesn't mean you're ready for the next one unless I add EVERY step. That's not the intention. Allowing people to say when they are ready for something keeps me from having to track all the solo steps that still need to be completed but that I don't really want to have to track with this tool. I'll probably decide one way or another once I get some of it coded and some sample info in there to see what it looks like.

The other part of this is where the players decide what they want to track on each character. That screen would look something like this:

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Item | Elinore | Decimatr | Dethdlr | ------------------------------------------------------------- The Shadow Odyssey Timeline | X | X | O | The White Dragonscale Cloak | X | O | O | -------------------------------------------------------------

With this info, when I go to Decimatr's page, I would only see the items listed for The Shadow Odyssey Timeline and not the ones for The White Dragonscale Cloak. Still working on some details but I'm getting closer.