Databasing/Indexing Oolite

[hiran]

It seems Ooniverse is rich enough it takes ages to explore all corners, items and characters. What helps - especially newcomers - is documentation for various topics. The Gameplay is already documented in the Wiki, the plot is actually the adventure to explore.

But then there are thousands of equipment and even more thousands of ships with each their own behaviour, availability data or price.
Here it helps a lot to have a good, up to date reference to lookup information while playing the game.

This thread is about creating/maintaining that good reference.

[hiran]

This is a response that would otherwise have clogged another thread:

<getting interested> Database? What kind of database? What is the purpose, and how are you filling it?

That are many questions.

• The database shall include every Information about Oolite that I can get.
  The records are in in German.
  As base I use Microsoft Access.

That's why an information like "it is included in the newer version" is not very helpful.

I totally agree the quoted information is not very helpful.

Going for "every information that I can get" is ambitious. I take it that you want to lookup stuff and the database shall help you get this.

* Why in german? Who is your target group?
* Why in Access? Could you share a bit the table structure?
* Do you have a rough estimate how many records you are going to have?

I started a tool to collect some information, and one of it's resutls is the Index of artefacts
Maybe we are following the same purpose but using a slightly different approach. If possible, we should join our forces rather than working parallel in isolation.

[Cholmondely]

What version (timestamp) are you referring to? Recent versions do contain the Auto Eject expansion and equipment.

Ahah! I"m using the 25th May/3rd Edition (which I still understood). After that one, you lost me!

Where did I loose you? Did you not grab an update again? Don't know where to get it?
On top of the Index of Artefacts page you find the location for updated files.

Or do you not understand the structure/data of the pages? Maybe we should have a dedicated thread for that.

It's quite simple, really. Not understanding the discussions about what you were doing I surmised that the updates were irrelevant to what I was doing. I had no idea that relevant material had not made it into your 3rd edition... nor do I like updating all the jolly time...

But I think that I've pretty much finished the first tranche for the OXPs. I don't wish to tread on Griff's toes, for reasons adumbrated elsewhere at length. Nor do I see point in creating a redirect for something which I presume will be easily found.

I want to do something for the ZygoUgo OXPs, but really Josef's questions are the main impetus for my current activity. And I need to get back to the F2, F4, F6 & viewscreen pages.

[Josef]

* Why in german? Who is your target group?
* Why in Access? Could you share a bit the table structure?
* Do you have a rough estimate how many records you are going to have?

I started a tool to collect some information, and one of it's resutls is the Index of artefacts
Maybe we are following the same purpose but using a slightly different approach. If possible, we should join our forces rather than working parallel in isolation.

In German because I am from Austria and I projected it for myself. In English exists so much in German a little bit more thaan nothing. I use Access because it's a good tool for an user-friendly database project. In the moment I have 246 records - that's what the database shows to me. If you want, I can load it up into a cloud for you.

There exist some readers but I don't know what of them will match with the 2016-version.

[hiran]

Where did I loose you? Did you not grab an update again? Don't know where to get it?

It's quite simple, really. Not understanding the discussions about what you were doing I surmised that the updates were irrelevant to what I was doing. I had no idea that relevant material had not made it into your 3rd edition... nor do I like updating all the jolly time...

I totally understand having to constantly update the files on your side is a nuisance. That is where I intended to place them somewhere in a browsable fashion straight away. It would provide others the service of having up to date files about all OXPs at any time. This could be one of the improvements for oolite.org.

But I think that I've pretty much finished the first tranche for the OXPs. I don't wish to tread on Griff's toes, for reasons adumbrated elsewhere at length. Nor do I see point in creating a redirect for something which I presume will be easily found.

I want to do something for the ZygoUgo OXPs, but really Josef's questions are the main impetus for my current activity. And I need to get back to the F2, F4, F6 & viewscreen pages.

No worries at all. We have agreed to keep documentation manual, and you have boosted progress there considerably.
Thank you for that important contribution.

[hiran]

In German because I am from Austria and I projected it for myself. In English exists so much in German a little bit more thaan nothing. I use Access because it's a good tool for an user-friendly database project. In the moment I have 246 records - that's what the database shows to me. If you want, I can load it up into a cloud for you.

There exist some readers but I don't know what of them will match with the 2016-version.

I do not have Microsoft Access available. Nor do I have Microsoft Windows.

But Access for sure can export into other formats, like CSV or XML. However before we do that I think it is sufficient to look at the data structure (ER Diagram, Table definitions) so I get an idea what you intend to collect.

I doubt that by asking about equipment in each and every thread you progress fast. Further more you so far asked about 'obvious' stuff like price and techlevel. There are almost 700 expansions spanning about 2300 equipment. I created code to automatically download the expansions, lookup the metadata as @phkb showed you and finally create HTML files with that information.

The source code and a compiled version is available on Github, the output of my last run available on Box. If you insist on Access we can for sure look into generating CSV files ready for you to import. Or we simply localize the HTML page templates and generate German ones straight away...

[Cholmondely]

* Why in german? Who is your target group?

In German because I am from Austria and I projected it for myself. In English exists so much in German a little bit more than nothing.
There exist some readers but I don't know what of them will match with the 2016-version.

We used to have language versions of Oolite. I presume that the Russian language version is up to date on the Roolite website, but the others fell behind.

From the OXP list page on our wiki:

Code: Select all

Misc 	Oolite en Français is a French Oolite localization 	Poovga 	 	 	 	2013-09-29 	N
Misc 	Oolite auf Deutsch is a German Oolite localization 	SwissMäc 	 	 	2009-06-02 	N
Misc 	Oolite Italiano is an Italian Oolite localization 	another_commander 	 	2012-01-06 	N
Misc 	Oolite in Russian: Roolite.org provides localizations of Oolite 1.76 and some OXPs. Also check Elite Games 	Seventh 	 	2009-03-26 	N

And last year I tried this: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20696

What do you think we would need for non-English speakers to give them a chance to enjoy the game?

Do we have a proper conversion for German keyboards, for example?
Do we have any basic literature in German?

[hiran]

Do we have a proper conversion for German keyboards, for example?

We do not need conversion for keyboard drivers, just a diagram showing keyboard layout types where the keys you press is marked up at the right locations. This would mean one or two images together with a table explaining the meaning of the buttons is sufficient, rather than trying to come up with something for every language a keyboard driver might be set for.

But yes, this is something that needs to be done, and the verification would have to come from people who actually have that keyboard available.
Could we start collecting a backlog of things to do somewhere? Preferrably a wiki page?

[hiran]

Where did I loose you? Did you not grab an update again? Don't know where to get it?

It's quite simple, really. Not understanding the discussions about what you were doing I surmised that the updates were irrelevant to what I was doing. I had no idea that relevant material had not made it into your 3rd edition... nor do I like updating all the jolly time...

I totally understand having to constantly update the files on your side is a nuisance. That is where I intended to place them somewhere in a browseable fashion straight away. It would provide others the service of having up to date files about all OXPs at any time. This could be one of the improvements for oolite.org.

BTW, you said you did not understand the fuss about XML data. As phkb described, it is a different file format that requires extra code to handle it.
At that time I did not have that extra code, meanwhile it exists. The impact is that the index files generated at later stages are far more complete. Unless you grab an update you cannot take advanatage of such development.

In the meantime the code even downloads the latest Oolite distribution and also parses that one for equipment and ships. Which means the artifacts built into the vanilla game are also referenced.

Then I tweaked readability, added data to overview tables and the such. It is a pity that you, being the main user so far have never seen those improvements.

[Cholmondely]

It's quite simple, really. Not understanding the discussions about what you were doing I surmised that the updates were irrelevant to what I was doing. I had no idea that relevant material had not made it into your 3rd edition... nor do I like updating all the jolly time...

I totally understand having to constantly update the files on your side is a nuisance. That is where I intended to place them somewhere in a browseable fashion straight away. It would provide others the service of having up to date files about all OXPs at any time. This could be one of the improvements for oolite.org.

BTW, you said you did not understand the fuss about XML data. As phkb described, it is a different file format that requires extra code to handle it.
At that time I did not have that extra code, meanwhile it exists. The impact is that the index files generated at later stages are far more complete. Unless you grab an update you cannot take advanatage of such development.

In the meantime the code even downloads the latest Oolite distribution and also parses that one for equipment and ships. Which means the artifacts built into the vanilla game are also referenced.

Then I tweaked readability, added data to overview tables and the such. It is a pity that you, being the main user so far have never seen those improvements.

Fair enough, but I doubt that it impacted massively on what I did. Thanks to your all-singing all-dancing 3rd edition I could get my grubby paws on all the information I needed to create new pages - and everything was at hand. The only time I knowingly came a cropper was with Josef's recent query.

[montana05]

In German because I am from Austria and I projected it for myself. In English exists so much in German a little bit more thaan nothing. I use Access because it's a good tool for an user-friendly database project. In the moment I have 246 records - that's what the database shows to me. If you want, I can load it up into a cloud for you.

There exist some readers but I don't know what of them will match with the 2016-version.

Out of curiosity, which version of Access do you use ? I used Access 2.0 quite extensively trying to connect data from a German science-fiction-serie to find creative discrepancies by the different authors. I specially liked the SQL, a lot undocumented was actually possible.

[hiran]

If you want, I can load it up into a cloud for you.

There exist some readers but I don't know what of them will match with the 2016-version.

Seems there is a way to read the data from my system:
http://tahsinabrar.com/open-a-microsoft ... in-ubuntu/

[Josef]

Out of curiosity, which version of Access do you use ? I used Access 2.0 quite extensively trying to connect data from a German science-fiction-serie to find creative discrepancies by the different authors. I specially liked the SQL, a lot undocumented was actually possible.

I use Access 2016.

[Josef]

And last year I tried this: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20696

What do you think we would need for non-English speakers to give them a chance to enjoy the game?

Do we have a proper conversion for German keyboards, for example?
Do we have any basic literature in German?

I collected and translated some into German:

pilot's handbook (like for an airplane)
standard- and enmergency-situations
system-forms
money-making

Organisations are not finished.

[Josef]

I loaded the database now up

https://onedrive.live.com/?id=495C3C97A ... 97A6639589

Just respond, what you think about it and if you find any errors