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?
The spawn times for those books are random. They are estimated to be between 2-4 hours. Not all books will spawn at the same time, as they are random. On top of that, books only exist for 3 minutes from the time the first person touched it. Mods that use a data exchange channel (i.e a chat channel) are also exceedingly difficult to write, debug, control spam and channel numbers.
All these factors prevent any reasonable addon to be written for them.
The only thing consistent about the books is that a book will always spawn on a server restart/server crash, so if Dalaran/Northrend crashes due to Wintergrasp, or you have a rolling restart, you should hearth immediately and check all 8 spawn points (within 3 minutes obviously).
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.
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.
Just search wowhead for the Dalaran zone, and see the list of "objects" in it.
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
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.
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?
The data passing is easy, there's nothing complicated about using the data channel itself.
The complicated part is the data you're trying to predict. Guild craftsman addons don't have a 3+ hour random delay in what they do. Even gatherer-type addons don't try to predict when nodes will spawn; they only track where previous nodes have spawned.
The data passing is easy, there's nothing complicated about using the data channel itself.
Using SendAddOnMessage is easy - The hard one is using a PUBLIC chat channel to do the communication because addon ones can only do GUILD/BATTLEGROUND/RAID/PARTY/WHISPER which is not what the original poster wants.
Enh, I don't consider that to be very different. The only additional consideration is whether the public channel is also supposed to be human-readable. If it isn't -- the OP didn't say but it seems a reasonable assumption -- then make certain the channel's not added to any of the chat frames' filters, and (depending on the addon) consider throttling big message dumps. Listening for messages means registering for a slightly different event set, but after that it's largely the same.
It's not like the addon community wasn't already doing exactly this before the hidden addon channel came along, after all.
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.
The amount of effort to code in public channels support is about 5 pages of code, and then hiding that channels from all chat frames, and its prone to other addons doing the same thing and causing unpredictable channel number shifts.
Remember how people always used to complain about an Ace channel being channel 1? Or that the first person on the server that logs in goes and add a password to the channel resulting in password required spam?
It's not that it cannot be done, but the sheer tediousness of writing the code for it for 10 different situations makes me (and most authors) not even want to try.
Unless and until somebody volunteers to write the addon, this is all just forum noise anyhow. I don't think (personally) that an addon would be better than people just joining a channel for the purpose and communicating using English.
I've done searches but can't find anything like this. Have I missed one?
All these factors prevent any reasonable addon to be written for them.
The only thing consistent about the books is that a book will always spawn on a server restart/server crash, so if Dalaran/Northrend crashes due to Wintergrasp, or you have a rolling restart, you should hearth immediately and check all 8 spawn points (within 3 minutes obviously).
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.
Just search wowhead for the Dalaran zone, and see the list of "objects" in it.
Except that there is no timer. The spawn times are random.
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.
The complicated part is the data you're trying to predict. Guild craftsman addons don't have a 3+ hour random delay in what they do. Even gatherer-type addons don't try to predict when nodes will spawn; they only track where previous nodes have spawned.
Using SendAddOnMessage is easy - The hard one is using a PUBLIC chat channel to do the communication because addon ones can only do GUILD/BATTLEGROUND/RAID/PARTY/WHISPER which is not what the original poster wants.
It's not like the addon community wasn't already doing exactly this before the hidden addon channel came along, after all.
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.
Until you try coding it. It's totally different.
The amount of effort to code in public channels support is about 5 pages of code, and then hiding that channels from all chat frames, and its prone to other addons doing the same thing and causing unpredictable channel number shifts.
Remember how people always used to complain about an Ace channel being channel 1? Or that the first person on the server that logs in goes and add a password to the channel resulting in password required spam?
It's not that it cannot be done, but the sheer tediousness of writing the code for it for 10 different situations makes me (and most authors) not even want to try.
I have coded it before. *shrug*
Unless and until somebody volunteers to write the addon, this is all just forum noise anyhow. I don't think (personally) that an addon would be better than people just joining a channel for the purpose and communicating using English.
"I just opened (book) at (location)"
:P
There's a mod on CF that's called Higher Learning which helps you track when they'll spawn, etc.