08.27.05
Working on my parser
It’s been a while but I spent some time working on my parser for Everquest 2. Fixed up a few bugs that were annoying me and added the ability to view log files, which Keldoth has been asking about for a while now. Rather than keep the entire log in memory, I store the byte offsets within the file where each event takes place and can quickly move through a file taking the lines of interest and dumping them into a text box for the user to see.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the niche this parser seems to be sitting in. Although I have no illusions that many people are actually using it, I am happy that my guildies find it useful for analyzing stuff after raids. Naturally I think it blows the other parsers (combatstats and statalyzer) out of the water with the plots, detailed analysis and presentation of actual useful data for improving raids rather than flashy in-game stuff that disappears all too quickly. I’m probably just biased though.
.NET 2.0 really is fun to work with. It’s a mile ahead of .NET 1.1 and the ease with which I can mess around with an XML schema (in a .xsd file) and then actually use that within code directly is amazing. Seeing classes created in realtime as I edit the schema and having every thing just link up without any effort is really, really nice.