hi,
i've made a small program to extract skills info from screenshots; the same as EUComp or NRF did but, hopefully, it should work with the new skill screens.
please find detailed info here:
Skill Scanner
the program has been in beta testing for several months now, and it is getting quite ready to a "release" status. still, if you find out bugs or parsing errors, please let me know by PM, email, or posting here.
any other kind of suggestions, impressions, recommendations, etc... are extremely welcome.
main features:
- the scanner parses your in-game skill screens and shows skill levels, skill tt value and skill market value
- market values are calculated from peauction.com prices
- profession levels are calculated (not parsed from in-game screens); there are some high-level unlockable skills, whose influence in the professions is unknown, so some professions might not be 100% accurate. (texture-related professions are completely unknown yet).
- you can export skill and profession levels to a text file formatted in Comma-Separated-Values (CSV), to be used with other applications.
additional features (only if you have an account in the chipping optimizer; read below, in the "donation-ware" paragraph, about how to get an account):
- you can save your skills with 1-click in the chipping tool
- you can load your skills from the chipping tool and check your progress comparing your current skill set and your last saved skill set
- same progress tracking, but applied to profession levels
known issues:
- the scanner relies on the windows clipboard to get the content of the in-game screenshots. there are issues related to the way the Java system handles this clipboard that makes it difficult to co-exist with other clipboard-reading applications (such as PEAss, AutoScreen, and such). if you experience problems with it, please turn off temporarily any of these applications while you run the skill scanner
- the gamma setting (when you're running in full-screen mode) should be set around the center point of the slider. most probably, it will work ok with other settings too, but if you move it too much to the extremes (i.e. too dark or too bright), the parser may fail
Note: this software is donation-ware. what does this mean?:
i was asked some time ago (in the chipping optimizer thread) if the scanner program was going to be released "for free", or for "subscribers only", and my answer was that it was going to be "donation-ware", the same model as the chipping optimizer web app.
this means that it is absolutely free to use and people have no "obligation" whatsoever to donate, if they choose so. but, it is very appreciated if those people that find the application useful, and use it frequently, decide to support its development with a small donation.
this model has been "reasonably" successful with the chipping optimizer (which means that, in terms of donated money, it barely covers the web site hosting fees, but you get the idea, i appreciate people's gesture of contributing to it).
i have included a "donate" link, so people can donate via paypal. other than that, if people wants to donate ingame peds, that's also ok.
donators to the scanner tool, will also be "rewarded" with an account in the chipping optimizer.
some people seem to be a little bit confused about this model, and they usually ask me what's the purpose of paying for a feature (the account) that does not really add a lot of functionality to the tool (it is more of a "convenience", to save you some typing and stuff...). well, the answer is that i'm not "selling" the account functionality; instead, i'm simply asking for donations to support the development of these (and future) tools; the "account" thing, is simply a kind of reward for donators.
if you want a simple comparison, it is similar to the old
EF forum donations, where people contributed to support the forum, and they were rewarded with minor forum function enhancements (such as a rep boost), but they were not "buying" these features. hope it is clearer now
cheers,
/jdegre.