Xander Hunt
Minmatar
Dead Rats Tell No Tales
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Posted - 2011.09.01 02:03:00 -
[1]
*GRUDGE*
So I'm really confused about this whole thing....
CCP hasn't said anything more aside from the "The $99 `is coming` for using our information to protect our IP" yet, the developers go to the players for useful information? Sounds to me like they're trying to put out more and more tools (Useful or not) to make that cost seem more worth while. I'm not paying $99 when I ask for nothing back, or, a small in-game currency donation.
Don't you guys have accountants that sit in development meetings to see how much more can be milked out of your players? Couldn't you just take them aside and say "Hey, what would you find useful in a historical price dump?" then shove it down our throats like pretty much everything else that has been dumped into this game over the past year or so COMPLETELY unannounced?
The data you get from eve-central alone, including the archived data, can be derived into what CCP is "willing" to offer, not to mention E-Cs data is more "real time" and has a hell of a lot more history, however not 100% accurate and up to date on all infrequently used items since its user supplied data, but I'm sure there are regular updates to at least the basic ores. The data from E-C can be massaged into different manners to suit what is required for the job.
The *ONLY* issue I have with E-Cs data, and its not their fault really, is that you're never told when 100% of an order is sold out. Aside from that, I cannot fathom how this additional tool from CCP is going to be any better than what is already derived out there.
That $99 thing really freak'n blows, and this kinda thing doesn't sweeten the pot any.
*DEV*
Even with the above mentioned, I'm still going to give my dev advice.
As for the commentary about CSVs... International or otherwise, since you're working purely with numbers, and two delimeters, if you're space and download size conscious, you can work the data into 4-bit fields and still have room for delimiters. But, since nothing will easily read a 4-bit character file, 8-bit characters will do, its standard, and its been around since the first 8-bit computers were made. Forget uni-code, forget double-character notation, deal with CHR(0) to CHR(255), one byte per character, and you eliminate problems converting to and from chinese, russian, english, french, spanish and every other different character type notation.
Stay away from using SQL structured language as the primary dump source. Any recent DBMS will easily read in the delimited file, and drop it into a table. Hell, even regular programming languages can deal with the file, line by line, split up the data due to the delimiters, and process the data accordingly. There shouldn't be any question about this.
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