Aranesh wrote:Going back to the import/export business then.
Do I assume correctly that all options you posted are one suggestion just with different settings in them, depending on what information is actually present in the teams setup?
I have to say I do like it. There is not much to say because it is a very legible display and it's also among the most commonly used ways to display pets on the internet in my eyes.
Regarding the preferred pet level: I can't check at the moment but do you even offer a "at most level x" option? Maybe I'm missing something but I can't really think of a situation where that is actually necessary - as in what benefit does it have. Perhaps you don't even need it at all?
If it's required, how about... "Level pet Minimum level X and maximum level X" ?
Or you could phrase it depending on what information is available:
"Level Pet should be higher than level X"
"Level Pet should be lower than level X"
"Level Pet should be between level X and level X"
Just some ideas.
And one question: The export using IDs (team:123:456:789:0123:etc") - will it also include the notes and the level pet min/max instructions? Would make a big difference for the rematch strings generated on my page and I'd absolutely love to include that info!
Yeah the four examples posted are using the same export algorithm and the import would be able to create a team by lifting out elements of the text.
There is a maximum level preference. There's two common uses of a maximum level:
- To prevent wasting xp. If a tamer would give more than enough xp for a 24-level pet to hit 25, then that little extra xp is wasted. So if a team has a max level of 23.5, then it would prefer pets below level 23-and-50%-towards-24 so that the full xp from the tamer is given.
- To prefer low level pets. Ashlei, Mo'ruk, Thundering Pandaren Spirit and likely others are very good for level 1 pets because they don't take any damage. If you set a max level of say 5, then as you do your rounds it will prefer those low level pets from the queue so they'll be more durable when it comes their turn again to fight something that will inflict actual damage to the pet.
The next update will have a maximum health too, which I personally think is kind of wasteful. There's only one tamer where it matters (Lil' Oondasta) and that tamer typically isn't used to level pets. But it only took a few lines of code to add it so it's not a great burden to everyone who uses this addon and won't use the preference.
For cleaner parsing I was wanting to get the X within the text and not at the end ("something X"=bad "something X something"=good) due to the decimal business. ([%d%.]+ will capture "23.5" and "23.5." and the latter isn't a valid number.) But I've since realized this is an unnecessary consideration since the final period can be simply dropped or lifted out early.
For the "name of team
123:etc" business including notes and preferences also, maybe, maybe not. My hope is that plain-text imports will become more commonplace than the strings, which may or may not get encoded into a compressed format. This string format is changing too (to account for eventual inclusion of breeds) but the old format will continue to be supported on import.
Unfortunately as I suspected this part of the addon (including notes in that string for cross-client or multi-team purposes) is proving a lot more challenging than all other parts of the addon. There are some limitations that it has to contend with:
- Blizzard has removed file i/o from addons so every export/import has to be from the clipboard via copy/paste in an editbox.
- WoW editboxes are not meant to handle large amounts of text. The client literally locks up.
- You can't transmit long strings from one addon to another.
So some compression has to get involved. Especially when exporting a whole tab's worth of teams. And said compression must handle UTF-8+BOM (Rematch has always worked in all languages, even Russian and Chinese clients which don't use standard ASCII characters). I also worry that the plain-text localized patterns may not translate well, but that's a major reason the string format will still be supported. Unfortunately every localization effort has died off so I'm not going to stress over this one too much.
So...I may drastically scale back the intended plan. It may be that notes and preferences can only be exported/imported in plain text for single teams. And the "name of team
123:etc" format will
not include notes and preferences. So exporting a whole tab of teams or sending a team to another will drop notes/preferences. I may even drop the new string format and go back to the old while researching the problem areas (compression/UTF-8+BOM). Just to get this addon live and out of beta this month instead of several months from now.