devski wrote:

You can now view outpost owners, attackers, and time of the attack.

The real time or the bugged one ? :D
btw, viewing the round level would also be great.

for item stats... well yeah, even tho server keeps postcraft percent(iirc) in character save files, listing those with api would be better than nothing.. i suppose.

it has been said in the past, that outpost status is not in the api because that would take away incentive to actually log into game and check it themselves.
ring scenarios has not come up before, but thats same as outpost status.

server motd.... put 'Welcome to Ryzom' and it's close enough ;-)

--

I'll get occupation progress example out asap. Its possible with the info we have now.

Displaying user occupations with current api would be something like this:
http://ballisticmystix.net/temp/commit-3122900

Yeah! Thanky you for this Update^^

I like it :)

Nice nimetu, id like to see that on them armory site.

nimetu wrote:

it has been said in the past, that outpost status is not in the api because that would take away incentive to actually log into game and check it themselves.

I thought the purpose of the API was to give the possibility to access data without having to log into the game. By respecting this point of view you should remove the ability to see inventories from characters/mektoubs/apartments/guild hall, remove the web access to web apps, and maybe remove the whole API. Please be logic with yourself, open access to all those suggested information or remove everything, but don't use such a nonsense to freeze the actual system.

kirlack wrote:

nimetu wrote:

it has been said in the past, that outpost status is not in the api because that would take away incentive to actually log into game and check it themselves.

I thought the purpose of the API was to give the possibility to access data without having to log into the game.

http://dev.ryzom.com/boards/10/topics/430?r=591#message-591
this is the post I'm referring to.

In Arispotle, one outpost battle was missed because guild owner could not / forgot to check outpost status. They only noticed it ~30min before battle. API giving out outpost battle info would only be for this kind of situations.

Dont get me wrong.... Being information junkie I would love such info myself and I could display 'real time' outpost status on maps, but for gameplay it would be bad.

It has been a really long time now, so I make this last attempt to get back some attention to the API:

At first I'd like to say, that creating the API was a very good idea since it offers a great deal of information to work with. The Armory is a nice example of what you can do, but there are also other excellent projects.

If I recall that correctly, the API was featured with the coding contest (which I sadly missed by a few months) and at that time it spawned quite a lot of cool tools. Sadly most of them vanished again shortly after the contest. Actually getting players to use those tools seems to be the hard part, but anyway, that's another story.

There has not been much change since the release of the API and now (except for some minor fixes). The API still has the flaws it had back then and if you look at the dates on which the last post on this forums was made... well...
I think you see where I'm going when I say that it looks like the API is an abandoned child.

Don't get me wrong, I know that it is more like a miracle than anything else, that Ryzom sill exists and continues to be and I understand the fact that there is not a 100+ men and women team working on it like on WoW or other games. Manpower is limited.

Still, I do have the hope that there might be some time to get back to the API and change a few things...

I've come up with a list of things that in my opinion would need attention, but please feel free to comment and add other ideas too:¶

Character List (new):¶

I'd really suggest to add an API to list all characters that exists. I see no point in hiding a character's existance as well as his or her basic information that would be obvious when encountering the character ingame. That includes: Name, Title, Gender, Race, Guild and the RP profile.

Guild List (guilds.php):¶

The guild list is very good as it is. I'd just suggest to add outpost ownership information if a guild owns one or more outposts. The outpost's id (eg: fyros_outpost_13) would do.

Character Data (character.php):¶

Character data offers really nice information. Sadly some features that were added to the game later do not show up. That includes RP profiles and occupations. Please add that info.
Also the character's appartment is a problem since there is only an ID given. Please add at least the info in which city it is in.

Items¶

One big issue are the items. Appart from the .sitem id being hard to resolve (and yes, the Armory has about 200.000 items in the database which may be filtered by various criteria - anyhow that's not the point here) there is a lack of many informations. Depending on the item's type, there are several stats missing which are often quite essential to the item. Please add them. If wanted, I'll make a list of all missing stats.
And PLEASE add a unique ID to every item. We can't tell if an item is the same as ist was an hour ago without that. Even comparing all the stats won't change that since that's no valid primary key. Purging a character's items from the database just to newly write them into the DB ist not the best way...

Guild Data (guild.php):¶

Also the guild data is nice as it is, but the <building /> does not offer much useful information. There could be some more information on the building itself like the city it is in. Also, one might want to seperate the guild's members to an extra xml in case the character list mentioned above was implemented and already showing guild affiliation (note that the character list would only report the guild id and no further information).

Ryzom Ring (new):¶

Most players probably don't even know about the Ring. There'd have to be many changes to help with that, but that's once again another topic too. Anyway, an API that lists the Ring scenarios currently run on a shard would be cool. Just include the same info like those shown in the Ring browser ingame and we'd be fine.

In General:¶

I am aware, that the API data gets refreshed once every hour (guild and character data). From what I noticed, there is simply one cronjob running and extracting data from the save files to xml. I might be biased on that topic since maintaining the Armory requires constant reloading data from the API, but I'd change that mechanic a little bit. My assumtion is based on the suggestion to add a new "all characters" API. It would make sense to refresh character data only when the character logs out, instead of every hour. When the last update was could be included in the general list and eg. the Armory would not reload data even if it was the same as before, but just when there has been change.

• a) at random characters are reported to be "not found" even if they exist.
• b) at random the API reports "bad key" errors, even if the key is right.

Both errors lead the Armory to reload data for at least 5 times until accepting the error. We had a few banning issues due to that, though that's resolved. Anyhow, it is buggy and should be fixed.

I guess that's enough for now... some feedback (also from the Devs) would be nice :)

Yours Cotare

nimetu wrote:

In Arispotle, one outpost battle was missed because guild owner could not / forgot to check outpost status. They only noticed it ~30min before battle. API giving out outpost battle info would only be for this kind of situations.

Dont get me wrong.... Being information junkie I would love such info myself and I could display 'real time' outpost status on maps, but for gameplay it would be bad.

You have no reason to fear that if you display only the current owner, not the detailed stats. With only the owner information, an attacked guid would be aware of the attack 24h after the defense phase, when the attacker take the full control of the outpost. What's wrong with that ?

SirCotare wrote:

Additionally there are still two bugs that originate from the API updates:

• a) at random characters are reported to be "not found" even if they exist.
• b) at random the API reports "bad key" errors, even if the key is right.

Both errors lead the Armory to reload data for at least 5 times until accepting the error. We had a few banning issues due to that, though that's resolved. Anyhow, it is buggy and should be fixed.

I agree with you, something is wrong with the remote API and very often we cannot access anything during 30s/1min. It is very annoying to have such "downtimes".