RFC: Dom3 DB

[B0rsuk]

Horst F. JENS said:
Well, i'm on it whatever the data-format is. I can make DB-Front-Ends in M$-Access, and maybe this project will finally motivate me to do something with a Linux-DB.
Important points:
1.) it should be relative easy to implement changes from patches or mods
2.) The whole thing must work offline;
i want to merge it with a not-yet-existing spell and item list and need an easy-to-export data format (like the plain text files from BOrsuk) to make wiki pages out of it (see below).

Sounds like sqlite, doesn't it ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sqlite

I just added all common Enchantment spells to the necronomicon file, but it's not uploaded yet. The file is still incomplete anyway.
I need some ideas for next columns. As I said, at the moment there are common spells only. What single column would you add for national spells ? Some national spells are available to two or more nations, I hear, and this makes things trickier.
What other columns to add ? My ideas:
- underwater/surface/anywhere
- purpose (assasination, summon, artillery, travel, paratroopers... that would be for rituals)

[Edi]

The way you could do the national spells is simply add more columns to the spell DB, namely something like nation1 and nation2 up until you have enough and then put the first nation to have the spell in the first column and the second to nation2 and so forth. If there was one thing I learned from the Dom2DB, it was that it's a safer bet to put in a few more columns even if they don't get used much than it is to try and squeeze too much information into too few columns. Especially if we're going to turn this into a comprehensive DB.

There should be one column for spell type, which could use categories such as

• global enchantment
• local (province) enchantment (e.g. domes, rain of toads, hurricane)
• ritual summon
• combat summon
• combat offensive (lightning bolt, fire darts etc)
• combat augmentation (quickness, fire shield etc)
• overland movement (teleport, cloud trapeze etc)
• overland attack (earth attack, seeking arrow, ghost riders etc)

In general, we want to keep the categories simple and avoid having too many. Hence the above listing groups things targeting a single province in one category, regardless of effect. Spells that summon usable things, like black hawks, angelic host and so forth that can be dropped on an enemy should be classed as ritual summons because you get to keep the things, while ghost riders would obviously be overland attack since they vanish afterward. That's my two cents on that anyway.

My project is already well on its way as far as the layout is concerned, I've added all the forts to the DB and I'm currently making a brand new magic site database. It's going to be preliminary until I get the unit DB side fleshed out so I can add everything the way I want it done.

This project is also great at unearthing some minor bugs and a lot of in-game typos, so I'm going to add those into a list as I go along.

Edi

[B0rsuk]

At the moment, I packed both age and nation into same column, and think it's probably a good idea. Even Machaka, which only exists in middle era, is Machaka2. Should probably be 2Machaka...

For spells, I suggest categorizing them by their purpose. Later, when I grep things, I'll want to filter spells which let me devastate enemy provinces, buff my provinces, etc. I don't like idea of having both Forest Dome and Seeking Arrow in same category.
rituals:
- assasination (targets an enemy commander)
- artillery (targets enemy province - fires from afar or ghost riders)
- travel/movement
- paratroopers (separate cattegory, because this may allow you to take control of a province)
- summon
- global enchantment
- local,(beneficial) enchantment (Domes, Watcher, Three Red Seconds)
- other
----
battle:
- selfbuffs
- army buffs
- weakening spells (False Fetters, Numbness, Slime...)
- offensive (various damage dealers)
- sniper spells (single target offensive spells)
- symmetric (Darkness, Storm, Rain of Blood, Heat from Hell, Acid Rain)
- reinforcements (Raise Skeleton, Mists of Deception, Howl)

[Agrajag]

B0rsuk said:
battle:
- selfbuffs
- army buffs
- reinforcements (Raise Skeleton, Mists of Deception, Howl)

Why seperate selfbuffs from army buffs? You could just search for "buffs" and then check for a Range of "self".
Making a secondary search by Range seems to make more sense to me, since there are always those confusing spells like Body Etheral.
Also, why call them "reinforcements" when battle summons would do it? Merely cosmetic, I know, but just wondering.

[Gandalf Parker]

Its definetly a DB type of project. But please dont limit it by MSing it.

[Agrajag]

Gandalf Parker said:
Its definetly a DB type of project. But please dont limit it by MSing it.

I wouldn't know about what exactly he has in mind, but I suspect that a "port" from ms-bound to "free" would be fairly easy.
Since accessing an access database is still done via simple SQL querys AFAIK, it shouldn't mean much work to just switch to another database type.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have much experience :X

[Edi]

Gandalf Parker said:
Its definetly a DB type of project. But please dont limit it by MSing it.

I've never intended it to be MS only. In fact, I'm doing my stuff natively in Open Office and trying to make it so that the data will be readable straight into a SQL database. So most of this will be usable to you in any case.

Edi

[Gandalf Parker]

I understand that an MS file can be read non-MS programs but Im not sure if that holds true on non-MS machines.