Playershops.com

Playershops.com opened 15 Aug 2004 as a reference to aid characters in finding items in the player run shops.

Playershops.com is a project of the player of Xygon. It started as a project to combat the boredom of trying to find an item... From Xygon, "It took only two rooms of shops before realizing I'd never find what I wanted, and knew I could do this better. Once I built a script for myself to go through the shops, I realized, as long as I got the data for myself, why not share it!"

It started as a pretty complex StormFront script (836 lines), which dynamically went through each room, into each shop, and looked on the containers. After running the script, a second application was used to parse through those logs and update them into a database. Unfortunately, even with that complex of a script, it was near impossible to do things like pick up items within a reasonable amount of time. So there was a list of items, still a huge step forward to having to manually search through the shops.

A website was born, playershops.com, to allow all players to search on any piece of information gleaned from the scripts.

It then advanced to a custom application, code named ShopSmith. The application is its own front-end, which uses the StormFront P&C data streams and manages and manipulates every item within the shop and sends data realtime to the playershops database. Over time, the application and website were enhanced to include getting every available detail from the item: name, long description, enhancives, inspect data, spells from scrolls, and item price.

Finally, everything was changed to run automatically. A custom logon engine was modified to be able to auto-start specific characters from a command-line, a script was built that could tell which was the last town to update, and whether any town was currently updating, which in turn logged on the appropriate character for the town and automatically started the updates. If not already started, the playershops.com scanning begins every day at 1AM PST and continues until manually disabled.