Crafting news!

[Gilrond]

Yes, crafting books are just transformation tables dumps. Desired format should include human readable recipes for end products. For example:

Item P1:
Combine 3 ingredients I1, 4 ingredients I2 / perform action A1 / ... (the whole chain) -> End product P1.

But that requires some additions to the actual data which will require lot's of manual input I suppose. For example indicating which objects are in fact end products for such recipes, and which ones are starting ingredients. Having such data available, one could write some graph traversing for building optimal recipies (paths) for each combination of start products -> end product, which will allow to generate human readable crafting books. So far this automation lacks input data to build those paths.

[Mordaan]

No question about it, on the test server, I went and made all the shields to make sure they could be completed all the way through.  I'd say 90% of my time spent on it was searching through the books to find the amount of metal I needed to make something.  It was very frustrating.  It's easier once you know what you're doing but that first time when you're trying to figure it out, the books are not very helpful.

Talad mentioned that it was a GSoC topic to deal with books but it wasn't picked up.  Let's cross our fingers that we'll have another run at it this year and someone will work on that.

It's also not very realistic that the entries in the book change once you reach certain skill levels.  There are two things in play here: the tasks you can do with the book on your mind, and the process for actually doing them.  Cooking recipes are the best example.  Imagine a cook book with a random selection of things you CAN do, rather than a step by step recipe to make a specific dish from beginning to end.  It wouldn't sell very well.   

Right now we just have a list of tasks available and not proper step by step instructions.  What's worse is you can't even do a word search.  You have to eyeball many lines of text to find what you're looking for in a font that's not the easiest to read.  But it's a well known issue and should be addressed at some point.

[Sarva]

Of course the /study command does make things easier to read. When ever I need to read one of the crafting books now I always use the study command since it makes it easier to read for me.

[Bonifarzia]

In my experience, players preferably use in game books written by others to avoid the hassle with the crafting "book" (dump). I have seen several nice cooking books in the past years, for example.
I wonder if it makes sense to step back from the "should look like a hand book" style and use something more abstract, like the magic window with all the glyph combinations. There you have different columns to get your list sorted by ways, realms or spell names. Maybe a similar thing could be used with processes, tools, ingredients and result items. Combinations might need a different format, though.

[Mordaan]

Of course the /study command does make things easier to read. When ever I need to read one of the crafting books now I always use the study command since it makes it easier to read for me.

Ah, that's I was looking for, but I couldn't remember the command name.   

[weltall]

when you've finished trashing database space with useless discussion we are searching for someone willing to do this:
http://planeshift.ezpcusa.com/pswiki/index.php?title=Improved_UI#Improvements_needed (Crafting books: )

[qwertymc2]

2011/01/15?   

[Herihi]

Actually study does a good job of making it clearer, whether it's just smaller font so you can see more it at once or whatever, I find it much easier to figure things out with it.