New Devlog: Sharing Game Data

[Ubert le Danois]

Originally Posted by cheeseypie5555 Your necro skills are far superior to mere mortals. /salute

Well - we rely on the Data API in the Roberts-French admiralty, to reliable notify our squadrons/governors when attacks are in progress :-)

We would like to extend this to include hostile governor takeover attempts (elections), as well as governor mismanagement (towns not being upgraded/returned to agreed levels of infrastructure etc).

However - the Data API documentation predates PnP, and there is no reference of how (if possible) to retrieve PnP data.

[Misha]

It's not yet possible to retrieve PnP data. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Ulot]

What if you put it in TA, that seems to be how everything else gets done.

[Pnakotic]

Originally Posted by Ulot What if you put it in TA, that seems to be how everything else gets done.

The API Ape follow pet?

[Liam Langridge]

Keep up the good work! Some bugs to work out over all in the game play, but you guys are the lifeblood of the game...Well, you and the players, too. haha.

Just listen to the players and their concerns, reall concerns, not QQing, and advertise the game...my Gawd, get your name out there!!! This is an awesome game!!!

[Cap'n Bad Rad]

Hello everyone. I have created a website for the society that I am in, and have recently read about the API available. I would like to incorporate this into my website. I am very technical savvy and am actually about to get my Associates of Applied Science in IT. I am skilled at html, css, have recently learned PHP, and I am skilled at programming. Anyways I understand the concepts behind how all of this would work, but am confused on how to incorporate. I was wondering if anyone would be able to point me in the right direction, or maybe to a website or book that explains the process a little better and has some code examples. I have googled things such as "how to incorporate an API in a website" and such and have had very little to no luck finding something that will help me learn how to do this.

Thank you,
Cap'n Bad Rad

[ArmEagle]

Originally Posted by Cap'n Bad Rad Hello everyone. I have created a website for the society that I am in, and have recently read about the API available. I would like to incorporate this into my website. I am very technical savvy and am actually about to get my Associates of Applied Science in IT. I am skilled at html, css, have recently learned PHP, and I am skilled at programming. Anyways I understand the concepts behind how all of this would work, but am confused on how to incorporate. I was wondering if anyone would be able to point me in the right direction, or maybe to a website or book that explains the process a little better and has some code examples. I have googled things such as "how to incorporate an API in a website" and such and have had very little to no luck finding something that will help me learn how to do this. Thank you, Cap'n Bad Rad

There is more explanation on the wiki:
- here: http://www.burningsea.com/wiki/index.php/Data_API
- and some code examples here: http://www.burningsea.com/wiki/index...a_API/PHP_Code
- I also collected some remakrs: http://www.burningsea.com/wiki/index...ta_API/Remarks

Have fun playing around with all this. Hands-on is the best way to learn things.

[LoDx]

You might wonder why we can’t just write web tools that read the game database directly. The primary reason is that even though the game data is stored in a MS SQL database that a web app could theoretically query, all of the data is in encoded binary blobs, rather than one column per field (...) Enter the “Crawler Server.” Its job is to walk through the game database and save its data to the crawler database in expanded excel spreadsheet style that a web tool can easily read. (...) Also, there is the issue of maintaining integrity of the game data. Web tool development is usually more fast and loose, and thus more prone to corrupting data on accident. It would be a bummer if we accidentally corrupted character due to a bug in one of our web tools. (...) The easiest way to do this would be to just allow people to remotely connect to the crawler database and let them run queries against it. However, doing that is bad for several reasons. First of all, there are the obvious security concerns. IT would have to make sure that the crawler DB would be isolated from the rest of our game cluster and that DB accounts to access the data are set up correctly. Our poor overworked IT department really doesn’t have time for this. The second problem is that of caching query results. Many users of the data are going to be running the same kinds of queries. It’s more efficient to cache the kind of data people want access too in some conveniently fetch-able form. Finally there is the issue of data filtering. The Devs have data we want from the crawler, but there are fields we might not want the general public to have, or just aren’t very interesting/accessible to the general public in their current form.

Suggested solution:
Have a second "public" database mirroring the crawler database (excluding sensitive data fields), with no possible way of modifying the original crawler data.
The public database have strict rules, only to allow selection of data.
Limit the number of queries to 1-5 every 10 minutes per IP, forcing users to using a local cache.

Main Game Blob Database <-> Crawler Database -*> Public Database**

*: One way access, read only, excluding sensitive data fields
**: Read only (select), limited queries / ip / timespan

Let users like myself have a local database mirroring specific parts of this public database, perhaps once every day (once/day would really be enough)

IF something would happen, only the public database would be corrupted, leaving the crawler and the main game data untouched and isolated.

Since, if i understand this information correctly, the crawler database already process all the game data? It's only a question how to make the crawler data accessible for the public.

If this suggestion don't work, i hope it's atleast a base for discussion.