The Clan Lord Sentinel

The bestiary has been updated with approximate numbers for defense, attack, health, and damage of every creature*.

http://bestiary.puddleby.net/beast.php


*Except some of the Darshak and all of the lyfelidae. I could use help on those sections, and on the slimes in uncategorized.


Notable other changes:
1. "Old" creature pictures are gone. I do not plan on bringing them back.
2. Layout redesign.
3. Live sketches are still in, but if you use Safari, it will not be obvious which creatures have them and which do not. I probably won't fix this.
3b. About 50 live sketches added (≈25% of all creatures have them now), thanks DragonHawk for many of those.
4. Orga are no longer animated.
5. There is now a search feature available

http://bestiary.puddleby.net/search.php

but it is still in uh.. pre-alpha. Only the "family" search works (none of the other fields do anything), and it doesn't work for "all". I'll make this work better, and I will announce the bestiary as an official "2.0" on many channels when it works.


Future changes:
1. Make the search fully work.
2. Add more live sketches.
3. Allow user preferences, so people can turn off seeing secret monsters and numbers, if they do not want to see them. Since only 1 person out of the 20-something who voted voted for "no numbers," default will probably be "yes numbers, no secret monsters." However, both are in at the moment.



-Org du Lac

For those who want to send in live sketches, here is a list of creatures that do not have them:

http://www.bestiary.puddleby.net/beast/ ... etches.php

It is immediately updated when I add a sketch, so you don't have to double-check to make sure.

You can now search the bestiary:

http://bestiary.puddleby.net/search.php

This will create a dynamic page, and it should load very quickly (< 1 second).

All of the selections shown should work, but there is a limit of 50 matches per search at the moment (I'll probably increase it to 75-100). All of the fields work on the "AND" premise.

1. I intend to allow the user to select <= or >= for the five statistical searches. Right now they all are "greater than or equal to the number you put in." I'll republish the bestiary and put in a koppi message and such when I get that done.

2. There is no way to SORT the results; they are ordered by their placement in the database. I'll allow the user to sort results to his/her will at some point soonish.


If you have any other requests besides those two, or if you notice any significant areas or information not listed, please let me know. (For the 'areas,' a lot of them are merged together because having "foothills, slate caves, pitch caves" as separate entries is just clutter. Additionally, there is no information field for "charges straight ahead and attacks," which I don't intend to add.)

Please let me know if any searches are non-functional or if you notice I'm missing a creature that should fit in somewhere. (Incredibly common creatures, like the Co'acha, Carrion Arachne, and Rat, will not show up in area searches.)

-Org du Lac

PS: If you hit "enter"/"return" it will reload the page rather than pressing the search button. I don't know why this is, so if someone has any idea, that'd be helpful. Google hasn't really turned anything up, but it's a small enough of an issue that I haven't spent a ton of time on fixing it.

Wow, that's great. Thank you so much.

Org du Lac wrote:PS: If you hit "enter"/"return" it will reload the page rather than pressing the search button. I don't know why this is, so if someone has any idea, that'd be helpful. Google hasn't really turned anything up, but it's a small enough of an issue that I haven't spent a ton of time on fixing it.

It's because your button is an <input type="button"> instead of <input type="submit"> -- most browser won't automatically trips a button if it's not a submit. If you make it a submit and change your AJAX function to return false at the end (so a normal POST submit doesn't occur after your AJAX) you should be okay in most well-behaved browsers.

There'll still probably be some IE version that fail to work properly, of course. To get full compatibility you'd want to put on onkeypress handler on every text field that filters out the return character and triggers your AJAX call. My personal opinion is that if people use IE they deserve having to manually click the button, though.

Skirwan wrote: It's because your button is an <input type="button"> instead of <input type="submit"> -- most browser won't automatically trips a button if it's not a submit. If you make it a submit and change your AJAX function to return false at the end (so a normal POST submit doesn't occur after your AJAX) you should be okay in most well-behaved browsers.

Ah! Excellent. I hadn't figured out why just 'submit' alone made it not work at all. Anyway, it should behave as expected now, instead of reloading the page. Thanks.

This feature requires IE6+, Safarai 1.3+, and FireFox 1.0+, if anyone here reading is still using an older browser for some reason.

I'll put up a little 'help' menu soon.

Org du Lac wrote:If you have any other requests besides those two, or if you notice any significant areas or information not listed, please let me know. (For the 'areas,' a lot of them are merged together because having "foothills, slate caves, pitch caves" as separate entries is just clutter. Additionally, there is no information field for "charges straight ahead and attacks," which I don't intend to add.)

Search by rarity would also be useful.

So with all the changes, I could look for "common" creatures that need "<= 50" atkus to hit, if I were a newbie looking for things to hunt.

You can now search for >= or <=. I'll have to redo a bit of the writing in the bestiary to accommodate Xepel's change, but I'll do that soon.

Does anyone care that you can't search for creatures between, say, 350 and 400 Atkus required to hit? I guess this would be useful if you're wondering "if I train 50 Atkus, what do I get?" maybe.

Org du Lac wrote:You can now search for >= or <=. I'll have to redo a bit of the writing in the bestiary to accommodate Xepel's change, but I'll do that soon.

Does anyone care that you can't search for creatures between, say, 350 and 400 Atkus required to hit? I guess this would be useful if you're wondering "if I train 50 Atkus, what do I get?" maybe.

It would be useful, but not required.

Probably the main reason for searching between such and such numbers would be to look for mid-level (or anything above newbie) hunting grounds... So you could say that you want atkus between 200 and 250, with darkus <300 and defense to brick <600.. or whatever.

I don't see it as useful as the other things you have implemented, though.

Org du Lac wrote:Does anyone care that you can't search for creatures between, say, 350 and 400 Atkus required to hit? I guess this would be useful if you're wondering "if I train 50 Atkus, what do I get?" maybe.

The problem is that the total list is very long. If I am interested in finding creatures of my level, I have to wade through a lot of non-matches in the search results.

Would it be easier for you to export the database to an Excel spreadsheet and let people sort and search that on their own? Just trying to give you an option in case upgrading the online search is a lot of hassle.

Torin wrote:

Org du Lac wrote:Does anyone care that you can't search for creatures between, say, 350 and 400 Atkus required to hit? I guess this would be useful if you're wondering "if I train 50 Atkus, what do I get?" maybe.

The problem is that the total list is very long. If I am interested in finding creatures of my level, I have to wade through a lot of non-matches in the search results.

Would it be easier for you to export the database to an Excel spreadsheet and let people sort and search that on their own? Just trying to give you an option in case upgrading the online search is a lot of hassle.

It would be possible to export Excel spreadsheets, but it would require Apache plugins that aren't installed, and my web host is gone for the next few weeks.

Since by the time he gets back to do this, I'll probably be sick of updating the bestiary, ...

All searches now are temporarily ordered in descending order of Atkus required to hit. This is the exact opposite sort mechanism applied to the main bestiary pages (which are sorted in ascending order of Atkus to hit). I believe this takes care of both your and Xepel's issues with the search (let me know if it needs further tweaking).

I'll allow the user to decide how to sort the search page results soon, probably some time this week. This should eliminate the need for any Excel output? (You can just Print -> save as PDF anyway.)

I also increased the result limit to 60 results.

Org the new features rock! I wish I could get off my lazy ass and do something as cool.

Org du Lac wrote:It would be possible to export Excel spreadsheets, but it would require Apache plugins that aren't installed, and my web host is gone for the next few weeks.

Not really following this thread at all, so not sure what you're trying to accomplish. But, at work we often use .csv file as an output option for any type of database, so it can be easily emailed off to partners/vendors/contractors who aren't inside the firewall and are used to using Excel for their data manipulation.

It's pretty trivial to make a .csv file by hand, and there's even a few libraries to make it real easy. Look at Text::CSV if you're using perl. There's probably something similar on Pear if you're using PHP

mrfancypants wrote: It's pretty trivial to make a .csv file by hand, and there's even a few libraries to make it real easy. Look at Text::CSV if you're using perl. There's probably something similar on Pear if you're using PHP

And so it is! Whoops! Not sure what I googled for when I looked. Anyway, I'll add this feature eventually.



Updated to do list:
1. Add creature rarity search
2. Allow user to sort results
3. Help page
4. Export data to some sort of delimited format

CSV export is trivial. I'll post the MySQL command for exporting to CSV when I get the right syntax Monday. The only problem is the file is owned by MySQL and permissions AND it's in the MySQL data folder by default. So, that's a bit of a problem.