Thieves Tavern
I've been really busy as of late. That web contract I spoke of has kept me on as a web admin guy for the indefinite future and I'm looking to put together a team of php/mysql programmers to help me! Also, code for my CS classes has stepped up in complexity, so... ow. But in my spare time I'm still coding for fun.... just to clear my mind. The project I've been doing for the past week or week and a half is one Ammon and I are calling Thieves Tavern. What is it? Read on to find out!
About a month ago Blizzard opened the Armory, which is kind of a front end to World of Warcraft's character databases. They only show specific information (everything returned on the character tab in game), but its really kind of cool. However, its slow. Slow's not even a fair word. Sunset's are slow... long walks on the beach are slow... this is more the painful drawn out agony of, oh, wisdom teeth pulling. They've got tons of images, use lots of AJAX, and a page load is a good 5 seconds on my cable line. Even worse, due to something in their programming, it hangs the browser for a bit of that time, so I can't even go to another tab! In my mind that's horrible coding. Obviously they want it to look really good, but still, no excuse for that load time, and hanging the users browser. This is where Thieves Tavern steps in. Take a look at the difference between me on Armory, and on Thieves Tavern.
Thieves Tavern is two things. Right now its just a fast Armory. We've got load times for initial characters around 1-4 seconds, and once a character is cached that drops to 0.1 seconds right now. That's about 10 times slower than it was yesterday (load times were around 0.001 - 0.004 seconds) due to some hack code I put in last night that will be optimized later. Even with this hack it's easily at least 10 times, and up to 50 times faster than Armory. We don't show all their data, but as of this writing you can view:
- Name
- Server
- Class
- Gender
- Race
- Level
- Guild
- Spec
- Items
- The last time data was updated in Armory
Kinda slick because most of the time you're not looking for that other data like what their mining skill is at, right? We also show item stats, etc thanks to wowhead (Note: if you're from Wowhead and read this, we *will* be linking to you once we get a good format for a front page... we're not just leeching).
This site is no where near finished, I've still got about 5 features I want to add before I consider it "beta". I'm posting about it now because I feel we've got a decent enough feature set for world consumption, and can build from here. An idea of our goal for this site:
- Users will be able to sign up to our site to "watch characters". This means whenever they perform certain actions, you'll be notified via email and/or RSS.
- Actions we think we'll trigger on include: Changing gear, changing spec, reaching milestone levels (40, 60, 70), reaching milestones in skills (75, 150, 225, 300, 375), Resocketing/enchanting items.
- Eventually I also want to watch the makeup of arena teams
As you can tell its mainly designed to complement Arena teams as we come up to the qualifiers. You'll be facing a much smaller range of opponents, so it'll be good to keep track of those which give you a hard time. Especially during the finals it'll be crucial to know if your opponents switched spec or gear to take advantage of a weakness of yours. It can also work for guilds that want to keep tabs on where their members are in certain progressions. They could sign up, do a little scripting themselves, and have it automatically post to their boards congrats messages, or some such.
