Utility: Spells & Items browser

[ese-aSH]

Hi folks,

I open this thread to share with you a little tool I made, hereby know as "Spells & Items browser".

A Screenshot :



What is this?
A little java application that allows to parse dominions 3 spells and items data more easily than what the game offers.
It contains spells & items data from the unofficial wiki, and offer the possibility to sort, filter, parse spells & items data.


What is it for?
I found myself in need of such a tool. I consider myself neither as a noob nor a veteran. I know most of the game mechanisms, but I did not spend time on each nation to get the best strategies. I dont know the complete list of spells and items, and before each game I start I spend hours reading the manuel in order to figure my strategic goals (which spell do I want, which item will I be able to forge, what are my mages strenght...).
This tool makes these things easier.


How should I use it?
Choose a nation you dont know, and try to establish strategy for it. You can use the tool to see accurate capacities of each mage, to determine your research priority, it can also help setting the pretender magic path if you see a spell/item beyond the reach of your nationnal mages that would fit the strategy.
Keep the manual close, you will still need it.


What is it not?
Its not 'great', its not 'awesome', it wont do miracles. Its just a limited database with simplified access and some presentation effort.


Troubleshooting
- To run on non windows OS, get java and run "java -jar com.ap.d3.jar" command in the unzipped directory.
- Look & feel is platform dependant. Sorry for that if it does not look cool on your computer.
- Be aware that nationnal spells are not filtered by any mean


Thanks
- Lch for his comments, help and advices
- All contributors to the unofficial wiki that gathered all data


Closing
This tool could be improved, a lot. Yet I wont probably spend much time on it.
- If major issues are found, I will try to fix it
- If some people want to provide a CBM version of the spells and items data, have a look into the files "spells.xml" and "items.xml" ; its pretty easy and anyone should be able to modify the data here. If someone does that, I will add a way to switch data on the fly in the application.
- If some people want the source files to go further, I can provide it. One can imagine adding units and nations data for instance.


I hope some of you will try it, and hopefully find it usefull

[Edi]

This is useful, all right. Great work and thank you!

[WraithLord]

nice

Thank you for the effort.

[Foodstamp]

very cool

[Quitti]

While the idea is great, I'd still be wanting to see the stats of the items (like the damage/att/def/len of weapons, possible onebattlespells or castable spells with the item or such, prot/def/enc of armor and so on), the damage/effects of battlefield spells and the already mentioned chance to swap between CBM and vanilla mode - I don't really have time to do those myself

Also, some sort of distinguishing between national and non-national spells might be useful (color of the text? some sort of tag in the spell description?) - while I can remember most national spells when I see them, other people might not.

Still, an excellent tool for quick reference.

Edit: in the items, the misc itemtype is "Miscanelous" when it should be "Miscellaneous"

[lch]

I see that you have improved the filtering options further and incorporated some of my suggestions, very nice. The program isn't platform independent, though, although it is built using Java the libs that it uses are Windows-specific. I tried to compile the new program for Linux systems, but the new image loading/caching mechanism makes troubles with the icon filenames now. In case you manage to get ahold of a Linux system (you could e.g. boot into an Ubuntu live system for this, I think) it would be nice if you could provide an alternate version for Linux systems.

Thanks for the effort, again.

[Sombre]

Yeah the weapon values would be nice to see.

[ese-aSH]

about having more info on spells (specially summons) and items, the point is valid yet my main issue is "where to found data ?".
I mean I wont spend hours to look in the manual and type it by hand.
If some of you know where I can get those, I may have a look. But this look likes quite long work to make a model that would fit all units, spells, effects, ...
(and once this is done I would be close from having a full dominions 3 in java ^^ - exageration)


Nationnal spells informations is available, but I found no way to exploit it simply (and the main goal was to be simple) :
- I cannot change font color in the list
- If I list the nations in the spell details it sometimes looks horrible (some spells have 9 nations attached to them, which is quite a long text to display).
- I could add a nation list and allow filters on it, this is 'almost done' already.

About items, I also retrieve the 'effects' information from the wiki, yet I found it hard to use. The list is quite long, some effects are not that clear. I already made a filter on effects too, which is not visible here.
Effects need some clarification in their classification, which is not as easy as it seems.

About linux support: I dont know why the latest change cause issues (I should have waited for your last answer Lch...). I'll have a look for it.

[Sombre]

You can grab all the weapon info from edi's db - found in his sig.

[Gandalf Parker]

I was abit surprised that you didnt use Edi's spreadsheet as a backend to this.
It would make it kindof auto-updating. And many people would appreciate the gui front end to that file.

Its kindof the opposite direction from where Id like things to go but others would like it.