AO Item Assistant v1.1.5

A new version of Item Assistant has just been released which should fix the major issues introduced with the "big AO server merge". It also cleans up and removes support for multiple dimensions and the player-shop monitor since these features are obsolete.

For those that play on both "live" and "test live" I recommend having two separate installs of AOIA, one for each dimension. Even with the old multi-dimensional support, it was never meant to support "test live" as one of the dimensions. (Due to, amongst other things, the difference in the AO Item database.)

I also want to give a big "THANK YOU!" to the AO community for all the feedback, testing and suggestions that just keep on coming in.

(For those that have been testing intermittent versions, this is essentially the same as v1.1.4.24.)


AOIA Homepage
v1.1.5 download

Item Assistant 1.1.4

I have finally gotten around to updating AO Item Assistant to support v18.5 of the AO client properly. A bit late, I know, sorry about that.


Changelog:

• Fixed issue with connecting to the AO client after the 18.5 patch.

• Fixed parsing of the AO DB to handle the updates of the 18.5 patch.

Happy Holidays and an educational New Year!

Downloads here!

AO Universe Interview

"Windguaerd" has posted an interview with yours truly as part of their "AO Universe Community Interview" series.

You can read the interview here!

Item Assistant v1.0

I would like to thank everyone for all the feedback, encouragement and gentle nudges I have received over the last 18 months or so. It has been a long while since I released an update to Item Assistant, and I apologize for that, but now the wait is over.

v1.0 is here!

Major changes this release include the new Summary View and an installer to supplement the regular zip archive distribution.

The Summary View shows credits and levels of your characters, while the installer takes care of some of the most common problems people have installing the application.

In addition to new features, a lot of work have gone into trying to make the application more robust to handle the different usage scenarios.

From the change log:

• Fixed bug 2947010. Generating the script with items for ingame display now use the correct linebreak tag.
• Fixed bug 2802231 in the find panel and in the PB filter panel. Toon list is now reloaded as it is opened. 
• The window location is now recorded and restored to/from the conf file. 
• Opening an item using Xyphos.com will now also supply the QL of the item so the stats are shown correctly. 
• Improved ripping of items database so it supports newer version of AO.
• New Summary View shows levels and amount of credits for all registered toons. 
• Created a basic installer.

Enjoy!

Item Assistant v0.9.7

Item Assistant version 0.9.7 has just been released to the public. This is a pure bugfix release that hopefully fixes some compatibility problems on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Also included is a bugfix from Darkbane relating to the recording of org contracts.

From the changelog:

• Fixed org city output for CharacterParser integration. Does not dump contract message on zone since it doesn't contain anything useful anyway.
• Includes UAC manifest in EXE file. Hopefully this should make some compatibility problems with Vista and 7 go away.

AO Item Assistant v0.9.6

I have just released v0.9.6 of AO Item Assistant. This release is mainly a bugfix release and fixes some critical stability and compatibility issues.

Also included are patches from Darkbane to make the application output files that can be used by his tools.

Output of the files can be controlled by the Record Stats button on the toolbar.

Here is the official changelog:

• Changed link to AO Mainframe.
• Updated SQLite to version 3.6.22 to resolve some issues.
• Fixed database parser bugs. The symptom was that the application was unable to track certain items.
• Application now outputs files that can be opened with the CharacterParser application.

The Problem Child

Getting the latest release of Item Assistant out the door has been problematic to say the least. The first published binary labeled v0.9.4 proved to be flawed in more ways than one.

After FunCom released the 18.1 patch to Anarchy Online, I had to completely re-implement the database extraction code. Before it was using an existing DLL by Faircom called CTreeStd.dll. Unfortunately the age of that DLL was showing and FunCom decided (wisely IMHO) it was time to move to something that supported a database size larger than 2 GB.

Re-implementing it wasn't really that hard, as I originally based it on mapped_file_source from the boost iostreams library, to map each of the data-files into memory at a turn, and extracting all relevant information. This turned out to be a shortlived solution, as bug reports started flooding in from Windows XP users. Apparently there are limitations in the older Windows kernel that prevent me from mapping a 1 GB file into memory at one go. So I went back to the drawing board, and implemented it all again, this time using the more classic approach of the std::ifstream. Since the "random" access I cause isn't really that random (I read all items in the sequence they are stored in the file) there was no noticable performance difference between the two solutions on my PC.

So just to sum up, here is the list of what has changed between v0.9.3 and the current v0.9.5:

• Added support for the new database in v18.1.
• The application is no longer using the registry to store its settings. Settings are stored in the ItemAssistant.conf file.
• Enhanced item listing so the container column shows if an item is equipped, and at which tab-panel it is.
• Added baloon warning popup when application is started after the AO client was started since this may lead to the database being out of sync.
• Improved statusbar for the Inventory view.
• The application will now remember which dimension you chose last time you changed dimension in either the find panel or the pattern matcher.
• Added "Copy Item Name(s)" to the item context menu.
• Bug Fix: Fixed weird encoding of ampersands in backpack names.
• Bug Fix: Exporting all items from a toon should not put multiple quotes around the backpack names any more.
• Bug Fix: Fixed buffer overflow with long backpack names.

Item Assistant v0.9.3

I have just released a new version of Item Assistant. This version fixes bugs, improves performance and cleans up/improves the GUI a bit.

From the changelog:

• Added support for NPC trade-in quest rewards in the item tracking.
• Now parsing the 18.0.1 database correctly.
• Find panel now filters on dimension as well.
• Added support for Xyphos.com for item stats/links.
• The report in the Pattern Matcher now links to the loot table for the boss.
• It is now possible to export all items (excluding backpacks) from a toon by right-clicking the toon name in the tree-view.
• Improved performance when ripping the AODB.
• Bug Fix: Identify view will now sort (right hand side list).
• Bug Fix: Toonlist in the find-panel and pattern-matcher should now be sorted.

Check out the downloads page at sourceforge to grab a copy. This distribution also includes some DLLs that were missing from the previous version and should hopefully fix the problem some people have with it not starting up.

Item Assistant Speedup

Ripping the AODB in Item Assistant have been greatly sped up in a recent subversion commit (#310) bringing the time it takes to rip the AODB down from 2:42 to about 1:25 (on my setup). Users with SSD drives are probably not getting a big boost, but you are all spoiled anyway :P

The code change simply tell SQLite to use a memory based journal while ripping, instead of the default file based journal by running the following command on the database:

PRAGMA journal_mode=MEMORY

The program is now probably using more memory while ripping, but since most people can spare 50-100 MB I don't think it will be a problem.

New Anarchy Online Item Database

A new item database for Anarchy Online has made it to the public. Still being developed, but is is already working quite nicely.

URL: http://www.xyphos.com

It is still missing things like item interpolation, but I'm guessing its not too far off into the future before its in there as well. Until then I will have to settle for Auno's site for that piece of functionality.

AO Item Assistant has been updated with support for the new site. I haven't removed the references to AOMainframe yet, but that project looks too dead to be resurrected. :(

Item Assistant - Startup Issue

Some people are experiencing problems starting version 0.9.2 (and possibly earlier version of the 0.9 branch). It shows up as a Windows error message telling you the application failed to start because the configuration is wrong. Well.. what configuration? AOIA doesn't have a configuration!!

So after a bit of googling and reading up on side-by-side assemblies, it turns out the solution is pretty simple. To run it you need the Visual Studio 9.0 CRT DLLs installed on your system. If you don't have Visual Studio you can just grab the redist package from Microsoft and install that.

Future snapshots of the application will probably have the missing DLLs bundled in the ZIP file as a "private" assembly, like in this CodeProject article about Visual Studio 2005.

Item Assistant v0.9.2

I just uploaded a new snapshot of Item Assistant to the sourceforge page. This is the official v0.9.2 release.

You can see the forum for the official release notes.

This version has been tested with the recently released patch of Anarchy Online (v18.0.0) also know as "The Legacy of the Xan" booster pack.

For downloading go here.

Cool Open Source Site

I stumbled over a cool site for open-source software development today. It has the wierd url ohloh.net and appears to be a social networking site based on open-source development.

Anyway, somebody had already registered my pet project, Item Assistant, and I diligently grabbed it and started to fill in details like SVN repository URLs etc. It then started generating some useful and interesting statistics about the project.

Anyway, its cool and you can check it out right here!

Item Assistant Inventory View Revamped!

Over the last weeks I have been refactoring the inventory view of Anarchy Online Item Assistant (AOIA) to a more traditional MVC pattern. I took the inspiration from the work I did with the identify view and made it a bit more general so it can be used to display an item-list of any search I create.

The main benefit, besides cleaner code, is that the inventory view now has a column that tells you where the backpack that has the item is located as well.

Item Assistant Identify View

More updates to AOIA.

I have added a new view that lets you quickly locate items in your inventory that are convertable into a different item type.

In the list on the left you choose the target item, while on the right it will determine the un-converted items you have that match your selection and where they are located.

The list of items that are convertable and what they convert into, is manually entered by the developers into the database. There is currently no way for me to extract all tradeskill processes (I don't even know if they exist in the AO database at all or only exists serverside? Anyone?)

Dimension Support in Item Assistant

Work on AOIA never stands still.

Here is a small screenshot showing the new dimension support in the inventory character tree-view. RK1-Rk3 are added as default, while the "Unknown Dimension" contains characters you haven't logged in with the new version of AOIA yet. When you log in a toon its dimension is automatically detected.

More work remains though, as the find-panel, pattern-matcher and identify view all need to be able to restrict data retrieval to a single dimension.

Importing DLLs

Well, it was that time of the year again... to update the external dependencies for Item Assistant. Downloading and updaing SQLite always baffels me until I remember the hoops I went through (read: googling around for hours) last time I wanted to generate an import lib for use with the DLL.

So here is a link to the MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/131313
And a good article about more advanced DLL handling: http://qualapps.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-create-32-bit-import-libraries.html

Update:
This is the gist of it:

Open Visual Stuidio command prompt and run:
lib /DEF:sqlite3.def

This will genereate the appropriate .lib and .exp file.