SWGAide Help — ISDroid Reports

This panel presents you with features to manage reports from Interplanetary Survey Droids (aka ISDroids) and to upload resource data to SWGAide.com. In summary, SWGAide scans the ISDroid reports and compares them with resources that are listed at SWGAide.com and determines which resources that are new or depleted, or if they can be complemented with stats or planets. Then the result is displayed at the GUI elements and you select appropriate actions; first you submits depleted resources and planet availability; second you write resources to a notes file and in-game edit the file with stats; finally you submit new and complemented resources to SWGAide.com which also makes it available in SWGAide.

The SWGAide.com web server automatically reports all resources to swgcraft.org, optionally you can link your swgcraft account on the swgaide website so that you get credit at swgcraft for your reports, otherwise it is listed under the swgaidefeed account at craft.

Content:

• The ISDroid panel
• Setup and Options
• Initializing this panel
• Submit, Write, (in-game) and Submit
• Error dialogs
• The "res.txt" notes file
• In-game – update the notes file
• Similar names dialog
• Black-list
• Limitations
• 1 – content retention
• Force a content update
• 2 – Superfluous planets
• Manual submission
• ISDroids – what are they
• Creature resources, Kashyyyk, and Mustafar
• How to fix old, wrong resources

Setup

SWGAide.com – to be able to submit resources to swgaide.com you must register yourself at the site, click the verification email, then you must input your SWGAide username and password into the app and verify; open the SWGAide dialog via menu Options » SWGAide... . SWGAide stores the password in encrypted form in the DAT file and it is never sent anywhere but only used when communicating with SWGAide website, and also then it is strongly encrypted.

Options – at menu Options » ISdroid you specify your preferences:

• Allow w/o stats – allow submission of new resources without stats, this is recommended. Resources submitted without stats are made visible for more players who can complement them at any convenient date; conversely, not submitted resources cannot be augmented and possibly they do not trigger depletion of older resources (this is Organics).
• Long list – write to the notes file as one continuous list. The list is ordered for convenient browsing of the "30k veteran resource crate". Otherwise the output is "planetary", the list is written planet by planet, this is for players who hand sample for stats.
• Skip duplicates – do not double resources that are already written to the notes file (only in "planetary" mode). Otherwise doubled resources are marked with trailing stars (**); you add stats just to one of the doubled resources.
• Auto-delete – allow SWGAide to automatically erase content of the notes file after error-free submission to SWGCraft.org. If there is an error the file is retained; a backup is always created in the "backups" folder.
• Single report – select this option to manage ISDroid reports one by one rather than all reports in one batch. Default is all in one batch which also is safer and a lot faster.
• Help text – always append a help text to the notes file.

Initializing the ISDroid panel

This panel populates itself when it is opened. However, because ISDroid reports arrive as in-game mails you must first have done /mailsaveas for any other mail. Then, when opening this panel, if a report is older than 4 hours SWGAide displays a warning dialog with the options:

• delete the report
• delete all old reports
• continue, which is OK if you know that the data is still valid. In fact, a slightly aged report makes no harm, at most a few new or a few depleted resources are omitted.

However, if you realize that you must refresh this panel, first see limitation one further down.

GUI Elements

This panel displays four lists of resources that are up for action and buttons for these actions. Lists 1 and 2 can be submitted right away, without further ado. Lists 3 and 4 display resources that you are welcomed to update with stats before submission (optional); you can also submit them without stats right away.

List 1 – resources which are already listed at SWGAide.com but your reports add one or several planets to them.

List 2 – resources which are depleted from the galaxy.

List 3 – new resources which are not yet reported to SWGAide.com

List 4 – resources which are listed at SWGAide.com without stats; you are welcomed to complement them with stats.

Submit 1 & 2 – press this button to submit everything displayed in lists 1 and 2.

Write to "res.txt" – press this button to write the content of lists 3 and 4 to the "res.txt" notes file; select output style as described above. If the notes file is not empty SWGAide displays a dialog with the options to erase the content, or to cancel; a backup is always created in "backups".

— Before you press next button, switch to SWG to add stats to the resources in the notes file; this is optional and if you cannot complement the resources now it is better to submit them right away without stats. This way you notify others that these resources exist and you also records the earliest possible date for their spawn. Otherwise these resources are available but nobody knows about them and the recorded spawn date is the worse.

Submit "res.txt" – press this button to submit the data from lists 3 and 4 together with the stats you optionally have added to the notes file. If there are errors in the notes file SWGAide displays a dialog:

Errors– when SWGAide reads the updated notes file, but before submitting anything to SWGCraft, if there is an error it is displayed at a GUI dialog with the options to Abort, Edit the line, or Skip the line. If there are several error this dialog is displayed for each of them, unless you select Abort.

• Abort – terminate the process so that you can manually edit the "res.txt" notes file. Perhaps you can edit the file at SWGAide's Main panel, or you may have to find some data in SWG. Once you have corrected the error you press the submit button once again. Use this option if an error cannot be solved by the other options.
• Edit now – open another dialog at which you can edit the line right away, if that is possible.
• Skip line – ignore whatever you wrote at this line and if it is possible SWGAide submits the resource as-is. This usually means that SWGAide submits the resource for all planets but without stats.

A few other dialogs are possible, they are self-explaining. After submission SWGAide sometimes displays another dialog about similarly named resources, see further down.

"res.txt" notes file – the way it looks depends on the options described above; this sample of a planetary output covers the important parts:

Chimaera / Lok / 1234567890
swgcraft_start
Alpha,Desh Copper,
Beta,Colat Iron,
swgcraft_end

Chimaera / Tatooine / 1234567890
swgcraft_start
Sigma,Kelsh Copper,
Delta,Dolovite Iron,90,89,78,67,56,45,34,23
Alpha,Desh Copper,**
swgcraft_end

Notice the two blocks of resources, one for each planet the ISDroid reports pertain to. The first line reads the galaxy and planet, plus a time stamp of the report. The block is delimited by the lines "swgcraft_start" and "swgcraft_end", you must not edit these lines. Such a block contains just resources that should be complemented with stats; each line read a name and a resource class.

Notice in the second block, the last resource reads some trailing ** after the resource class. Compare the blocks and see that this Desh Copper was already listed, the stars is just a reminder and doubles are always listed last. See the option "skip duplicates".

Long list – provides a similar list but it is sorted for ease of use together with the "30k Veteran Resource Crate" and SWGAide keeps track of the planets.

SWGAide always keeps track of planets, this is true also for the planetary style, hence you can manually delete doubles if you want to. However, see limitations 2.

In-game – within SWG you open a basic notepad by the command /note res – notice that you do not type the .txt. For each resource, append the stats at the end of the line in the same order as stats are read in-game. As delimiter between stats, use any of  ",.;: " (white space is OK but quotes are excluded). Notice, for manual submission at SWGCraft only comma signs and no white spaces whatsoever works as delimiters; see the example above, the Dolovite Iron in the second block.

You obtain resource stats either by hand sampling and read their stats at the examine window. However, it is more convenient to use a "30k Veteran Reward Resource Crate", its correct name is "A crate of free resources". This reward is indeed a galaxy-wide sampling device; for each resource class, the most recent resource is almost always listed bottommost. Select a resource and the next window reads its stats; you back out with Cancel or the Escape button of the keyboard; otherwise a confirm dialog prevents you from the mishaps we had in the past.

Once you are done in-game you must close the notepad which also saves the notes file to disk so that SWGAide can read your notes. Do not have this file open in-game while you edit it elsewhere because your edits are overwritten by SWG when you close the notepad.

Similar resource names — Dialog

After SWGAide has submitted resources to it's website, sometimes this dialog is displayed; this section explains why, false alerts, and how to act:

To prevent that you submit resources that double resources that are already listed at SWGCraft.org SWGAide determines how similar the names of your resources are with all other resources. A spelling erroris so easily done, this is without competition the most common mistake, either by you or another player. If such names are found SWGAide displays a dialog with some options. Remember that ISDroids in themselves contain no spelling errors, but if a resource is already submitted manually, either via SWGAide or at SWGCraft, it may be in error. If you then try to upload a report, with a correct name, you are about to submit a double.

In this case you should not submit but correct the existing entry.

If a resource is similar to several other resources you see a cluster of your resource and those with similar names. Please, review all alerts in that cluster before you decide how to proceed and select at most one of the options.

Each entry at the dialog has two buttons; to send your resource, or to send a name correction, but you can of course decide to do nothing.

Submit new — press this button to send your resource as-is; see "false alert" below. If your resource is in a cluster, review all alerts before you decide how to proceed.

Submit name — press this button to send a name correction for the existing resource; the other resource is correct except for its name — both your and the older resource must be identical except for the names. If your resource is in a cluster, review all other alerts.

Other errors are not handled by this dialog. If the resource class is in error you must visit SWGCraft to edit the class, or to report the error at the resource forum. If planets are in error you must report that at the resource forum at SWGCraft; only moderators can resolve such errors

False alerts — the algorithm to determine if names are similar is called the Levenshtein distance; it is quite simple and measures how many edits it takes to change one name to the other, the edits being replace, add, or erase. Thus, it is a fair risk for false alerts every now and then, certainly so for the shorter names. To prevent too many false alerts SWGAide also tests the resource classes against each other, a quite simple test. However, please report your experience so that we can improve the logic.

Black-list

To prevent unwanted clutter in the "res.txt" notes file you can create a file named "isdroid_blacklist.txt" in the "misc" folder. Type the resource class that you want to hide, one class per line; you must spell exactly as the classes are read elsewhere in SWGAide.

Limitation 1

The ISDroid panel retains its content as long as you do not switch to another character to view its ISDroid panel or as long as you do not exit SWGAide.
pros: resource data is not compromised by some other action and you can safely submit the content without further verification.
cons: new data from SWGCraft.org does not update the content of the panel, neither does new ISDroid reports.

Force an update of this panel– switch to any other character and view its ISDroid panel and then switch back. This resets all internal states and refreshes all lists for ISDroid reports but it does not overwrite the "res.txt" notes file.

While you are updating the "res.txt" notes file you do not want to switch to another character in SWGAide and view the ISDroid panel. If you did, to be able to continue must copy or save the content of the file somehow; then you press "write to file" to generate an updated file. Notice, the new output may be different than the old file: if the resources of the two files are identical you can replace the content with what you had; otherwise you must line by line replace only equal resources, update new resources, and not add resources that are missing in the new file.

Limitation 2

It happens that somebody wrongly enters a resource for a planet where it is not spawning. Assume that someone reported a resource for Lok, it is not available there but it is available at several other planets, this will happen: When SWGAide reads the ISDroid report for Lok it does not find this resource in the report and concludes that it is is depleted. Unless SWGAide finds a trace of this resource at any other planet it is impossible to realize the error.

Conclusion– it is always best to cover all ten core planets at a time, then SWGAide will find a trace.

Fix errors – quickly make the resource available (if it became depleted) and remove the resource from the erratic planet; notice that remove is not the same as mark unavailable. Or, post at the resource forum with info on its galaxy, resource class, name, and which is the wrong planet.

Interplanetary Survey Droids (ISDroids)

This kind of droids are consumables and they do not appear in the worlds. They are manufactured by Droid Engineers and are sold in factory crates, found at Bazaar » Misc » Factory crates » Interplanetary Survey Droid. ISdroids cannot be used for Kashyyyk and Mustafar.

A droid has two qualities: "charges" (uses per droid), and "mechanism quality" (response time). An optimal ISDroid has 10 uses and high "mechanism quality" (~15 minutes and one use per planet); a more economical droid has maybe 15 uses and ~30 minutes. The trade-off is between uses and response time.

You must have survey devices in your inventory for the resource class to survey for; ten devices per class, one devices per planet. Such devices are made at a negligible cost by the cheapest, or recycled, metal. To cover all ten planets and all resource classes you need 50 devices and ISDroids with totally 50 uses. When you dispatch a droid one use and one survey device is consumed, none of them is returned.

• Double click an ISDroid in your inventory
• Select a planet
• Select a survey device
• A system message reads how many minutes until the report is returned.
• Rinse and repeat for all resource classes and planets

After the specified time an in-game mail is generated* and one mail per droid is delivered into your mail-box. Each mail lists all resources that are in spawn for the resource class and the planet the report pertains to. Once all reports have arrived you /mailsave so that SWGAide can find the mails.

* It is verified that the report is generated at the specified time and not at a much later time; it is not generated when you log into game to read mails.

Comment – it is true that ISDroid reports do not read stats (stat processing was added in v1.1.5 for servers that support it) nor way-points, however, together with SWGAide they are highly useful to help you to stay on top with all current resources, for all resource classes at the entire galaxy; see paragraph on Creature Resources. This means, you will always know about new and depleted resources, and you can manage your fleet of harvesters most efficiently.

Creature Resources, Kashyyyk, and Mustafar

ISDroids normally do not cover Creature Resources or the planets Kashyyyk and Mustafar (depends on server). However, SWGAide provides you with support also for these resources, see the panel Resources » Submit Resources. At that panel you write a filtered output of resources to the "rem.txt" notes file and in-game you use the "30k veteran resource crate" to determine if they are still in spawn or if you can update them; see help text for that panel.