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| Current Version: 17.7.1 live Last Updated: 12.14.2007 |
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As this site has received more mainstream usage, most of its origin and roots of contribution are rather unknown to many of you visitors out there... Back when it was mostly used by the HackersQuest forums, this wasn't an issue--everyone knew who MORB, Debug, and Timber were...and what they had contributed to the project. Since this is no longer the case, I would like to give a little background here to make sure everyone knows about the people who have helped give life to this site.
The impetus to create this site was mostly brought on by my curiosity regarding the DB. I was a regular user of Auno's site, and has always had an eye for gauging statistics and whatnot... My main quip with AG, however, was that it seemed to not give the whole picture of the data...and I was curious at how to get at more of it.
One thing led to another, and I ended up over at the HackersQuest forums. Luckily for me, MORB has recently released his program AODBDump v1.0, which is what got me active in the project initially. As I was later to find out, AODBDump was the conglomerate work of MORB, Timber, and Debug, and they certainly all deserve a lot of credit for creating the bulk of a highly-accurate DB extractor.
At first, I was mostly interested in toying with the data...and maybe helping people by making it available in an accessible format. MORB's LUA interface provided for text-based output, so I decided to emulate Mkkath's XML format, and make a compatible output. After many weeks of solid work, I had a complete output of the entire DB in XML. It was at this point that I was starting to get a better grasp of the DB, and its formatting...and was very interested in actually utilizing the data for a project or two. I eventually made a converter that would take the raw XML and convert it to an arbitrary database format...but it was rather slow, as large XML files have a lot of overhead.
Through the previous process, I consulted with Debug quite a bit in attempting to hash out many of the remaining unknown Function, Attribute, and Event names. Without his help throughout the process, my final output would not have been nearly as accurate... Through the process, I found out that Debug had been working on his own converter along with Timber--written in VB and outputting to a SQL database. This piqued my interested right away, as VB is one of my 'native' languages, unlike MORB's LUA. Not only would using Debug's converter allow me to speed to process by writing directly to DB sources instead of using XML as a bridge, it would let me actively participate in the extractor code itself.
Debug was kind enough to eventually allow me to get a copy of his parser source, and edit it for my project. Debug's parser was already extremely accurate, and picked up on a lot of things that I did not previously have available to me using MORB's interface. Likewise, Debug now had a 'tester' for his converter, and we worked quite a bit together in the following month to hash out some various inconsistencies that cropped up. During this process, Debug and Timber were kind enough to tutor my noobness in the ways of the DB, and within a couple weeks I found myself with the frightening ability to even make sense of the DB in HEX form.
After a month and some change, Debug and I managed to take his already very accurate extractor and revamp a few aspects to make them a bit more so. After a final patch of changes, his converter was then parsing every single byte of the DB data. While some data is ignored, the parser does not skip anything in there, and correctly parses 100% of the data provided to it. This was a huge leap over what I had access to before, and really laid the groundwork for this site becoming a useful tool.
Once the parser logic was basically finished, Debug and I fleshed out a few of the mission functions and made some slight changes to the wording of various Functions. Now that I had finally written a shell to his parser that wrote to my database format, my attention turned back to the development of this site--which then received all of my efforts. Many new features were added, including the Mesh/Texture viewer that was facilitated by Timber's texture extractor and Debug's mesh reader.
Right now, I'm still working on phasing new features into the site, and am glad that people are finding it a useful tool.
The bottom line, however, is that many people have contributed vastly to the framework which runs the site aside from myself. Without MORB's extractor, I wouldn't have had the idea for the site at all... And without Debug's hours of work on his extractor, the site wouldn't exist in its current form. Many things came from the collaboration of MORB, Debug, Timber, and eventually myself...and probably others along the way as well.
Also of note, Debug has a site of his own as well, based on similar extraction code as mine. (We pass updates back and forth as we find stuff...) The URL is: http://www.aordb.cjb.net, and I would encourage people to stop by there as well. We both have some different features here and there, depending on what we've had time to do...so use whichever one suits your purposes best.
Again, many thanks to Debug, MORB, and Timber...without you guys, the site wouldn't exist--and it's possible I wouldn't even still be playing AO at all. =)
-Jayde |
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