Help - ISDroid Reports

This screen facilitates submitting Interplanery Survey Droid Reports to SWGCraft (more on ISDroids in the foot note). To utilize this function you must first register at SWGCraft (SWGCraft.co.uk) and, second, you must provide SWGAide with some details at Options >> SWGCraft.

SWGAide discreetly stores your SWGCraft password in ciphered form. Furthermore, when necessary for authentication with SWGCraft the password is always sent strongly encrypted.

At the menu bar Options >> ISdroid there are other options:

Once an ISDroid report is saved to harddisk with the in-game command /mailsave, with other in-game mails, it can be processed by SWGAide.

Any ISDroid report older than 4 hours raises warning dialogs as the report may be outdated. One option is to delete the report right away and another options is to delete all old reports. It is possible to continue but then you should be very careful not to upload stale data.

Notice that some tasks going on under the hood, such as downloading resource data files from SWGCraft, may take some time and thus occasionally make SWGAide unresponsive. Furthermore, since the communication is over the Internet, errors, time-outs, etc., may occur. I welcome problem reports as they will result in improvements on how SWGAide deals with such irregularities.

Please remember, this feature is in Beta phase and you better double check all your submissions at the SWGCraft web page. All bug reports are welcomed and much appreciated, as are suggestions and enhancement requests.

The Graphical User Interface — GUI

Lists 1 and 2 can both be uploaded right away to SWGCraft while lists 3 and 4 present resources without stats that you are welcomed, but not required, to update before submitting the data.

List 1 presents resources which are already known at SWGCraft for the current galaxy but are not yet reported for the planets the reports are about.

List 2 presents resources that are depleted at the galaxy the reports are about.

List 3 presents resources that are new to the galaxy, found at the planets the reports are about. These resources are not yet reported to SWGCraft.

List 4 presents resources that are already reported to SWGCraft for the planets the reports are about, but they are reported without stats. You are welcomed to provide stats for them.

How does the ISDroid feature work?

"Submit 1 & 2" starts submitting all data presented in lists 1 and 2 to SWGCraft, that is, mark known resources available at the planets the ISDroid reports are about, and mark resources depleted at the current galaxy. (If a dialoge pops up saying that a resource already exists, see the footnote on "How to fix an 'existing resource' at SWGCraft.)

"Write to "res.txt"" writes the content of lists 3 and 4 to the notes file "res.txt". If the file "res.txt" is not empty a dialog is raised and you are given the choice to erase the content automatically.

The file "res.txt" can be opened in the in-game Notepad by the command /note res (notice that the file ending is not typed in the command). Unless the option "Long list" is selected the text looks like:

Gorath / Lok / 1197207193
swgcraft_start
Alpha,Desh Copper,
Beta,Colat Iron,
swgcraft_end

Gorath / Tatooine / 1197207193
swgcraft_start
Sigma,Kelsh Copper,
Delta,Dolovite Iron,90,89,78,67,56,45,34,23
Alpha,Desh Copper,**
swgcraft_end
The notes file "res.txt" can be read both in game and at the Notes file text panel in SWGAide. At its end you will find a help text (unless you have opted out this text), somewhat shorter than the following:

You will find one such block of resources for each planet the ISDroid reports are about. The first line reads the galaxy, the planet and the computer time of the reports. The block of resources is delimited by the lines "swgcraft_start" and "swgcraft_end" Do not edit these lines! Then comes one resource after another, its name and its resource class.

Notice that in the second block one resource has stars ** after its class name. That is since that resource name is already written in the previous block and since you do not need to provide resource stats more than once this is a marker for your convenience. All these duplicate resources are listed at the end of the block and there is an option to hide thees duplicate resources completely.

If the option "Long list" is selected a similar list is written, however not planet by planet but conveniently sorted for ease of use with the 30k Veteran Resource Crate. SWGAide manages which planets the reports are about.

What to do in game?

While in game, open the notes file (command /note res) and for one resource after another, fill in the stats after the comma sign, each stat delimited by a comma, in the same order they are read in game. See the example above.

Resource stats are found by sampling resources and reading the stats at the resource's examine screen.

A far more convenient way is to to look up the resources in the 30k Veteran Reward Resource Crate ("A crate of free resources"). The most recent resources are almost always listed bottommost in each resource class' view. Please, be very careful at the screen where you read the stats as any mistake can provide you with a crate of lousy resources in your inventory. Hence, do not type chat or play around with other tasks while reading the stats but carefully back out using the keyboard Esc-ape key or the screen's Cancel button.

Back to SWGAide and the ISDroid panel

Submit from "res.txt" to SWGCraft: When you are done with updating the resources with stats, click this button and SWGAide will conveniently upload all data to SWGCraft. Upon a successful upload the content of "res.txt" is erased (reset) for next session (unless you have opted to delete the content manually). If anything goes wrong it is retained, in some cases you get the option to keep it, for manual editing and/or manual upload if necessary.

Errors: SWGAide tries to catch as many input errors as possible and will present them via dialogues, giving you the options to Abort, Edit now, or Skip line.

A few other dialogs may occur but should be pretty self explanatory.

Manual submission of data is possible if you have not selected the option "Long list" described above. Go to www.SWGCraft.co.uk and find the page "Current Resources" for the proper planet. Bottommost you will find a text input field named "Add resources for: galaxy/planet". In SWGAide, find "res.txt", at the Notes file view, and copy all lines between and including the delimiting lines "swgcraft_start" / "swgcraft_end". Paste into the input text field at SWGCraft and click "Add Resources". At next web page, confirm the names, resource classes, stats, and the galaxy/planet before you click "Add resources". Repeat for each planetarian block. When you are done you can erase the content of the file.

Misc: To avoid unwanted clutter in the file "res.txt" you may want to create a plain text file named "isdroid_blacklist.txt" in the folder named "misc". Add the names for the resource classes you do not want to have printed to "res.txt", one name each new line. Remember to spell the class names exactly as they are spelled in the ISDroid report.

Limitation 1: The ISDroid panel retains its content just as long as you do not shift to another toon and view the ISDroid panel. The positive side is that any data is not compromised and can safely be uploaded without further inspection. The down-side, the limitation, is that possible new ISDroid reports or new data from SWGCraft will not update the view.

To update the view, simple got to any other toon and view the ISDroid panel and then go back. That will reset the ISDroid panel's content and the current state of buttons, etc. Thence this advice: while updating the file "res.txt", do not view the ISDroid panel from any other toon.

Limitation 2: In the rare cases somebody has entered a resource as available at a planet where it is not available but the resource is available at one or more other planets, then, when parsing the ISDroid report for that planet where it is not present, SWGAide will interpret that as the resource is depleted. This is true unless SWGAide can find a trace of the wrongly marked resource at some other planet.

Keeping this in mind is important since marking a resource as depleted at one planet will make it marked as depleted at the entire galaxy by SWGCraft.

If you notice this kind of error you must manually rectify it: first mark it available again, second you try to remove the resource from the planet it is not available at. If you are not entitled to "remove" the resource, post a notice in the "resource discussion" forum at SWGCraft.co.uk to have the moderators remove it (galaxy, planet, resource class, and name, planet).



The following options and features will be implemented over time to the ISDroid panel (not considering any other features planned for that is not about ISDroids):

Mark completed marks the processed resource classes as fully completed, planet by planet, at SWGCraft. This button will be only enabled when/if all resources have been marked available, marked as depleted, and uploaded with their stats, since the resource class is not complete otherwise.

GUI input, if you play SWG in "windowed mode", as opposed to full-screen mode, it is possible to use a GUI panel for input of stats, one resource at a time.



Interplanetary Survey Droids (ISDroids): These droids are consumables and do not really appear in the world. They are manufactured by Droid Engineers and normally sold in factory crates (Bazaar: Misc >> Factory crates >> Interplanetary Survey Droids). They have two stats: number of uses, and how quick they report back the data. The optional ISDroid has 10 uses (one for each core planet) and a high "mechanism quality" (quick report time).

In your inventory you must also have as many survey tools as the number of droids you want to dispatch, for the resource classes you want to survey for. These tools can be made by any cheap metal, including any recycled metal, and thence they have a negligible cost.

When you dipatch the droid for its work the number of uses on the ISDroid is decreased and one survey tool is used up. To send out a droid, double click its icon in the inventory, choose a planet and choose a survey tool for the wanted resource class. You will read a system message stating how many minutes until the report will come back.

The reports come back as in-game mail, one mail for each droid you sent out. These mails list all current resources for the chosen classes, at the planets the droids were sent to. Use the command /mailsave to save the reports to hard disk, so that SWGAide can pick them up.

No stats and no waypoints are included in the reports but together with SWGAide they are most convenient to keep on top with the current resources for the entire galaxy and all resource classes, what is new and what is depleted.

SWGAide downloads resource data from SWGCraft.co.uk and compares that data with the fresh reports. All resources reported in the ISDroid mails but not in the data from SWGCraft are considered new, while all resources in the data from SWGCraft but not in the ISDroid reports are considered depleted. SWGAide also finds out which resources that are already reported to SWGCraft but are not yet reported for the planets the ISDroid reports cover. The results are presented in the different lists at the ISDroid panel.



How to fix an "existing resource" at SWGCraft: It happens every now and then that a resource is added to the database with a mistyped name. Next time a user tries to add a resource with that name these two resources will clash and the erratic resource must first be corrected. Since the new resource comes from an ISDroid report we can assume its name is correctly spelled.

Editing a mistyped name must be done manually at SWGCraft:

  1. Use Find Resources to look up the faulty resource.
  2. Click on its name to get to the details page where there is a link to edit the resource.
  3. If you have the 30k Veteran Resource Crate, try to look up the resource class and see if it is possible to find the mistyped name, possibly only one or a few characters are wrong. Rectify the faulty name right away.
  4. Otherwise, rename the resource to anything such as "abracadabraiswrong" if "abracadabra" was the faulty name. Post a message on the forum's resource board with the following details: Galaxy, resource class, and the name you changed the resource to, so that the moderators can look into this later.
  5. Add the new, correct resource.
If something doesn't work out for you, post a message at the forum for the admins to look into, with as many details as possible.