Premium Services gone LiveFollow

Well, as you see, the premium services for FFXI went live today. As with anything that goes from being internal to live, it might have some problems when it hits the stress of everyone using it at once, especially since I've turned demo mode on. So, if you have any problems, tell me. Also, if you find any exploits for the searches (able to search for all items with the letter E in them from level 1 to 50 for example), or any searches that take forever every time (certain flag sets that cause issues, or whatever), tell me here or email me at danalog@allakhazam.com.

Also, tell me if there are any problems with the weapon skillchain generator. It was made using an out of date chart, Haggan is working on putting in the updated data. Also, I had multiple charts I was using and none of them agreed, so I did it by the facts that multiple ones agreed on. Also, I'm planning on improving the recursion on it. Also, I might have gotten the mechanics of the multilevel skillchains wrong, as I personally have never played a high level melee character, so please give me input into that if you find any problems.

If you have problems with the profiling system though, bug Ag in the appropriate thread, and as usual, data issues go to Pikko or Haggan. All new code issues with the Premium stuff though, lay it on me, folks.

Edited, Fri Apr 23 14:57:57 2004 by Danalog

Edited, Mon Jun 7 22:55:51 2004 by Danalog

We all need cookies and large pints on some kind of brew after this.

Pints sound really good right now =P

Hey man,

I would pay premium in a second if you would just add a full text search of your forums! There's so much great info in there and it's largely useless since it can't be searched.

I'll even tell you how to do it! (I've done this to 2 web sites.. one of which serves 500 reqs/sec and the other which has lower traffic, but huge.. 20 GB, millions of pages.. indexes).

If you are using Java in the backend, you are golden. Got get the Lucene SDK (it's a Jakarta project and free). Write a small class that pulls your forums threads as 'pages' from the DB. Insert them into the index. Dump the index to a staging directory. When it's done building, swap it into a production directory. Have your website use the production index live on your site. Hopefully, you're using shared storage across your 10 servers.. in which case this is a total no brainer. Otherwise, you can still sync it up using rsync or something. Cron it to run once per day. Then all you gotta do is write a search landing page and a search result page. Done. Seriously, you can do this inside of a week.

If you don't have Java, there are other similiar projects out there for free.. I think MySQL (which you are likely using as your DB) has built in free text searching! You could easily use that. Oracle of course supports the same thing.

Nice work guys!

How will the new features be accessed? Is there a plan to add them to the main menu?

How far left? =p

Just kidding. Found em all. The Bestiary one threw me off. I didn't expect to find the general search under "By Area". Course, this is the first one I looked for.

Yeah, I just sort of added the new pages willy-nilly, Allakhazam is redoing it now as we speak (post?)

Whoops, yeah, when I moved the bestiary over I didn't change all the internal links. I'll look at the other bugs after I fix that one. That page was actually finished a while ago, and we've had some database changes since them, so some things are bound to be a bit wacky.

yeah, post them here please

Ok, it's returning the Notorious Monsters now, no problems on that end. Once I click on them though, it just links to:
--------
Vana'diel Bestiary:

Family:
Flags:
Not Aggro
Not Linking
Appears

Drops:
Crystal

--------

And then I get the posts on it again.

But I am only getting the info I ask for in the fields. So that's good.

not getting data is bizarre. I got that too once, but it worked once I refreshed. could have been some sort of database hiccup

I'll see about sorts. The bestiary code is actually written by Illia, so I'm having to learn it as I go, somewhat. Probably won't be too hard though. I'm thinking that the only things people will really want to sort by are name and level, neh? Things are in so many areas usually that sorting by that really isn't feasable.

good call on family sort, that should be easy too

Probably won't go in until tomorrow, I'm beat today, got up way too early and been working most of the day on this and the Lineage 2 site. Will look at it again tomorrow when I'm less braindead.

time for a few pints and a cookie, methinks =)