Authors CurseForge

I would appreciate some enterprising coder to take up the challenge of writing a mod that would track the book spawning times for the Higher Learning achievement. This would involve the following:

• Mod should broadcast spawn times and book titles to others players that are using the mod via a data exchange channel.
• Mod should create entries that could update a guild calendaring utility.
• Mod should be able to throw timer bars and scrolling text detailing upcoming spawns and alerting when achievement books show up as opposed to placeholder items.

I've done searches but can't find anything like this. Have I missed one?

Quote from Xinhuan

On top of that, books only exist for 3 minutes from the time the first person touched it.

Which really sucks taunka balls. I was reading one of the "placeholder" books and didn't get to complete it because it despawned. Since it wasn't one of the achievement books, I couldn't go look it up online as I didn't remember the title.

Bastards.

Yea I found em, they were labeled as "quest" and not as "book".. fuckers. There's some good ones there, especially the rules and regulations of being a mage

We use a custom channel in my server ( bookclub ) and normaly is the people who tracks the books you just need to ask in the channel for the timer =).

As best I know the respawn timer is 3h, followed by chance of actual spawn. Hence knowing when the last book was read does cut down the camp time. In my experience you have to camp up to 1h after the minimal respawn time.

An addon can help keep track of this respawn timer basically. Without that you can be stuck with camping for 3h longer than actually needed (you just missed a despawn without knowing).

Announcing this 3h gap is basically what the bookclub channels do. Works well on my server.

*runs*

So if the data passing channel stuff is so hard, how do the guild craft, gatherer, etc. addons do it? Is there an ACE library that will handle those routines for you?

Perhaps it should be thought of as an event broadcast. With a publish/subscribe pattern applied to it. For example, if someone who is running this yet-to-be-written mod, opens a book (or placeholder equivalent), the mod would toss it out a common channel between all individuals running this mod. If you run the mod, you subscribe to the event channel. The data it would publish would incorporate the book name/location and a date/time stamp associated with the event of opening the book.

Based on that event, it could be predicted within a reasonable timeframe, when the book would respawn. Since it is a random spawn time within a well defined range (say 3.5 hours +/- .5 hour) a cooldown bar could be used to visualize the countdown.

If the events were logged, offline analysis could be done to see if the spawn times could be better predicted and thus the mod could be dialed in better to the events.

I'm just throwing ideas on the wall to see if they would help some clever coder solve the problem.

It wouldn't be beter, but an addon could do that automatically for people....

"I just opened (book) at (location)"