User talk:Nomadikhan

My background and how my little skill tracker got started

I came from Final Fantasy XI Online, where equipment and stats were the bread and butter of the game, and what you had determined your worth. Every piece of equipment or magic spell affected your effectiveness in combat.

The game relied on a player driven Auction House system to fuel the economy and several players with software development experience took it upon themselves to create an entire website devoted to keeping track of up to the minute auctions. This saved players literally hours of travel each week by allowing them to see if an item was up for auction and in what town it had been listed. In time the website expanded to add a robust community and forums, character pages with your equipment, stats, guilds/clans (Linkshells), and other useful information.

Coming from this background, I like to keep track of my stats and skills, it's fun to compare them to other players. You can see who's skilled in digging and know exactly what skill they have. Pretty useful for hiring a worker I'd say. Once I found out about this wiki and obtained an account, and subsequently a character page, I realized I had the opportunity to create a skill tracker! And so I did.

Skill Tracker Basics

So what this does is basically when ran,

• launches Wurm
• sits idle in the background
• In Wurm when you 'dump skills' it listens for the file to be created
• It parses that skills dump and renders a .png image using the layout specified in layout.txt
• if ftp settings are used, it connects to your site and uploads the image
• then goes back to idling in the background until the next skills dump
• If Wurm Online or the launcher closes it will close itself as well.

config.txt

This is the overall configuration file for the tracker. I have included explanations of each setting in the file itself. (Note: Don't change any lines in the file except for the setting's values themselves, as it will throw off reading the file on start-up.. which will cause it to fail.)

skill list.txt

Upon parsing a skills dump from Wurm, it creates a file named 'skill list.txt'. The sole purpose of this file is to list all the skills your character has learned/gained in the order that it was dumped. This is then used to let you customize the 'layout.txt' to show what skills you want generated on the .png image. (Note: as you learn skills, the skill list will be updated and you may have to re-configure your layout.txt as the order will shift due to new skills being added.)

layout.txt

The purpose of this file is to allow you to customize what skills you want shown on the .png image and in what order.

• #<text here> - This will insert the text you specified on the line instead of a skill. Useful for adding organization or a header.
• / - inserts a blank line, letting you separate skills, or proceed to the next column if used enough times.
• 1+ - Using a number, found in the skill list.txt file, will let you display a skill name and it's value

Example:

#Skills of Focus
28
21
59
69
/
/
/
#Cooking
36
34
35
8
/
/
/
#Combat
37
16
11
/
/
/
/
#Tools
51
50
52
48
53
45
19

That layout would render this image:

Download and other information

This is a primitive app and is far from finished. It probably could use more error messages for the ftp side of things and more messages for what it's doing as it does them. Since this game uses java, it IS possible to read process ID's so this won't need manual window name settings (for detecting if Wurm is running and to terminate itself if it's not.) but since the Wurm launcher and the Wurm game are two different apps essentially, it makes reading ID's a pain. Between updates to the game, the window ID/name will always remain the same. And when it changes, you can edit the config and it'll work again.

A download will be available once I'm sure I've worked out most the issues that are important.