The return of the return of the msknight dropcalc

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msknight
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The return of the return of the msknight dropcalc

Post by msknight »

Hi All,

Well, what do I say?

The dropcalc relied heavily on L2J being SQL based. When it changed to XML I didn't have any experience of accessing XML through PHP.

My thoughts ran... "PHP has 60 seconds of run time before the server kills the script, and people running on hosted systems don't have access to the config to change that number. With the amount of work I'm offloading to SQL, how am I going to soak that up in PHP reading XML files? Also, to make alterations the web server will need to be able to write to the XML area... that's a security risk."

At roughly the same time, PHP went up a version and did a major change to how PHP references SQL queries. For... what is it... 20,000 lines of code... that's a chunk of work to swallow. So along with someone else copying the code and ripping out the statements at the top (presumably passing the dropcalc off as their own... who knows) ... well... I just got disheartened and dropped the project.

But I'm getting ready to give it another shot.

All this time I've still been running a private server for one friend, for whom L2J has played a major part in saving his mental health. It's been a game he's taken to and the ability to kill some monsters after a rough day and explore the world has helped him stay sane in a rough life.

We sat down the other day and it's clear I need to be able to support him in game, better than the plasters I put over the dropcalc to keep it running after the XML change. I know that the rest of 2021 is already written off. I've got some projects to put to bed and my job has changed. But come 2022 I intend to kick start things again.

The next few months will see me find another piece of hardware to run the system on, alongside the old server... and get familiar with the datapack and accessing XML through PHP. I mean, web servers can do a lot more in 60 seconds than they used to... right?

So... if I can learn to do in XML what I used to hand off to SQL... I should be able to bring the dropcalc back to life. It'll likely be the tail end of 2022 before I've got something stable enough for people to use, but... hey.

Here's hoping.
My friend is a paranoid schizophrenic ... she'll take over the world, as long as nobody minds.
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Zoey76
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Re: The return of the return of the msknight dropcalc

Post by Zoey76 »

As I said on Discord, welcome back!
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