L2J Server

I can not really edit the npc by shift + click? add drop, modify?

--

Yes, you can't anymore. The data was moved to XML, editing is complicated so it was dropped.

jurchiks wrote:Yes, you can't anymore. The data was moved to XML, editing is complicated so it was dropped.

these changes are becoming increasingly difficult to work with l2jserver

maneco2 wrote:

jurchiks wrote:Yes, you can't anymore. The data was moved to XML, editing is complicated so it was dropped.

these changes are becoming increasingly difficult to work with l2jserver

True, for example i dont think i can run my sql queries to make mass level changes (on siege guards, grand bosses etc.) or droplist changes anymore. Unless someone develops such a tool for xml.

The changes might be closer to how the official server files are but it takes away all the flexibilities l2j offered.
Dont forget that one thing l2j has over official files is how easy and freely you can change aspects of the game.

JMD wrote: True, for example i dont think i can run my sql queries to make mass level changes (on siege guards, grand bosses etc.) or droplist changes anymore. Unless someone develops such a tool for xml.

The changes might be closer to how the official server files are but it takes away all the flexibilities l2j offered.
Dont forget that one thing l2j has over official files is how easy and freely you can change aspects of the game.

when you use the revision of l2jserver, you always change everything before you open your server, now with XML will be much harder

JMD wrote:

maneco2 wrote:

jurchiks wrote:Yes, you can't anymore. The data was moved to XML, editing is complicated so it was dropped.

these changes are becoming increasingly difficult to work with l2jserver

True, for example i dont think i can run my sql queries to make mass level changes (on siege guards, grand bosses etc.) or droplist changes anymore. Unless someone develops such a tool for xml.

The changes might be closer to how the official server files are but it takes away all the flexibilities l2j offered.
Dont forget that one thing l2j has over official files is how easy and freely you can change aspects of the game.

What you want to use is an editor with XQuery or XPath or soemthing like that which allows you to modify the result.
http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/
http://www.w3schools.com/xquery/

Elgihs: Hopefully come back as before, because in my opinion, most think it was very bad

Portugues: Tomara que volte como antes, porque na minha opinião, a maioria acho que ficou muito ruim assim

I know it's hard to mass edit stuff at the moment.

I want to make a tool for it, maybe in some time I can share an alpha version

Zoey76 wrote:I know it's hard to mass edit stuff at the moment.

I want to make a tool for it, maybe in some time I can share an alpha version

is forecast for when this will be better organized?

Trunk still have the edit option>

Yes but take a look at the difference between the revision numbers.

The stable brunch is about 1 year older than the unstable branch.

As far as I know our server for example decided not to go to the latest beta at all, because the inability to mass edit things (using SQL) and the inability to edit things from inside the game is just too much - even though I personally think, that moving this static information to XML is a good idea.

Since there's no good tool to use XQuery (along with the XQuery Update interface), I don't think we will move to the upcoming revisions anytime soon. If at least the data would've been put in e.g. a BaseX-database... this way we could use BaseX XQuery (and XQuery Update) to achieve what we want. Even though using XQuery (Update) is imo more difficult than SQL, I'd still coup with it - but no such thing so far.

The only thing I can recommend to others missing all the functionality one used to have with NPCs (and their data) being in the database, is to merge selectively. This can be cumbersome, but I'd recommend to merge only certain features into your own server.

The stable branch however is pretty much outdated and probably lacks a lot of features.

Btw.: sometimes it's better to keep things in a more usable environment (e.g. database) for the sake of usability - even if XML is the better place for it. However I doubt that's an option now anymore.

For xml editing u don't need any tool other then notepad++.

He means ingame editing of character stats, obviously.

UnAfraid wrote:For xml editing u don't need any tool other then notepad++.

@UnAfraid - hate to say that, but this is simply not true . Why are there XMLEditors such as Oxygen at all if you don't need anything but Notepad++? You essentially don't need Eclipse either - could just use Notepad (not even ++) and compile on command-line, yet you certainly don't do it this way.
So while you certainly can do it using Notepad++, you'd be LIGHTYEARS faster if you were to have a proper editor, especially one, that validates the entered values against XSD. Besides: some XMLs don't even have a valid XSD attached to them, which is another problem for those, who don't have a programming background.

What you guys seem to be missing, is, that not everyone who develops server scripts etc. is necessarily also the one, who takes care of XML-realted work; instead - at least on our server - work is split amongst the staff. Some have the knowledge and time and hence program scripts, others manage the infrastructure, others create and edit events and manage the community and again others take care of the XMLs.

So I thought I'd use this thread, too, to say how cumbersome it is not to have a proper editor for the XMLs, which'd help with mass-editing, or not to have a proper XML-based database (e.g. BaseX). The latter would allow third-party tools, which'd make it possible to use SQL- or XUI-like CRUD operations on XML data.

So - and this was my conclusion - while I think it's great to have static data in XML files, editing them is a PITA, because no proper data source was used, but instead there are lose files, which are hard to mass-edit in any way. So it's disappointing to hear from other devs "well - noone (read: I) does really need mass-editing of ...", because this is pretty ignorant. About as ignorant as suggesting to use Notepad++ for all your XML editing needs.

Really - noone says you have to provide any kind of tool or something. I also heard Zoey is working on something related to this, which is great. But at least support some sort of taskforce, which would work on an editor for the files (even if you personally don't need such a thing).

It also is a bit annoying, that we lost ingame editing capabilities while essentially not gaining anything function-wise. Perhaps an abstraction layer for reading and writing data would've been a better solution? This way people could implement their own data access layer(s). I'd have helped with creating a SQL-layer, while Nos would've been able to concentrate on XML-related reading and writing. It should be simple, because files are read when server is loading and files should be written either on direct request by the application - or when the server is being shutdown. I mean: it's static data after all, not dynamic data where item-related things might have to be updated frequently and hence cause performance problems.

That's my uh.. 99cents.