Talk: Final Fantasy XIV Database

Come to my attention that these have been neglected for a while now (3.4 was the last update, which was released on Sept 26 2016). Unfortunately the FF14 Explorer program that was being used to update it seems to have been abandoned since around 3.5, and probably would no longer work as of Stormblood's release, as expansions tend to break these kinds of programs. May take to updating it by hand to satisfy my OCD/boredom once 4.2 rolls around in the near future if nobody is opposed to the idea.--Adonzo (talk) 04:08, January 17, 2018 (UTC) EDIT: Or someone more talented than I at these kinds of things can find a way to integrate the data from https://www.xivdb.com/, which can seemingly all be found here --Adonzo (talk) 04:18, January 17, 2018 (UTC)

Correct that XIVExplorer no longer works. I have wanted (since 3.5) to switch to Saint Coinach but haven't had the time or will (not entirely true, I had time when 4.0 first came out, but I spent it all playing 4.0!) to write the code to make it work.

The XIVDB API is a great find though and would reveal a great deal more information than I could hope to recover from Saint Coinach (a pipe dream when I was working with XIVExplorer was to get enemy data, but I found this nigh impossible -- XIVDB would make this extremely easy).

Note, I don't know how to use JSON. Unless someone (hi JBed) knows how to embed JSON directly in MediaWiki (which seems unlikely to be possible) the right way to do this would be to download the JSON files with the relevant columns (Achievements for example), parse it into Lua, and upload it to the database. This wouldn't be too hard and I could take care of it myself, I believe.

However, this would not solve the problem of turning the Lua into MediaWiki, which is probably the bulk of the work. If someone who's actually active on the wiki wants to take care of that though, XIV database would be up to date for the first time in literally years. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 05:16, January 17, 2018 (UTC)

Because a JSON file is just a text file, you can do something like Module:Codename.json. Then you can use something like Module:Json to parse it (I saw a JSON module floating around on dev which is probably more reliable than this one).

This is unreasonable of course. We're only going to be modifying the data in Lua so we might as well parse it and save it in a Lua file as a Lua object. JBed (talk) 07:53, January 17, 2018 (UTC)

FWIW I would not call XIVDB a good source for enemy pages, as it literally contains the name and nothing else (no level or even location). All the info on the current enemy pages was gathered by hand, essentially, using a ton of sources and my own gameplay. On a related note, however, a Translation Database could be built with XIVDB, as it has the names of everything in its database in English, Japanese, French, and German. --Adonzo (talk) 22:11, January 17, 2018 (UTC)

That's weird because the columns for location and patch, among other things, exist, it's just that they're empty.

But very well, I'll mash something together that turns JSON into Lua, including translations. Note that this won't be compatible with the old DB, but at least the Lua side of things will be up to date. Translations included. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 01:21, January 18, 2018 (UTC)

Update: I have a JSON-to-Lua parser working in a halfway-intelligent way. I'll probably start uploading 4.2x data this weekend. But as before, it won't be compatible with our current XIV Data setup, so I'll save it to a separate module (XIVDB Data, probably) until we can get that updated. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 04:12, March 8, 2018 (UTC)

Parsing and uploading data will take a lot longer than I thought, just because of the sheer amount of it. But maybe I can get 4.2x data uploaded next week? This will be partial (I don't have a good system for icons atm, so those will have to wait), but will contain all translation data, among lots of other things (including enemy stats!) Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 05:25, March 20, 2018 (UTC)

Incidentally, one can view progress (and push edits?) at the wiki github. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 05:38, March 20, 2018 (UTC)

IT IS DONE! ...sort of. It'll take several hours to parse all of the data (mostly because I have to load each entry with a separate call to api.xivdb.com) but the first ten entries of each data type are up as a proof-of-concept. If you want to add even more data to be added to future patches, just push an update to databases.py on the github.

Anyone who knows Lua can use the data as they wish; hopefully it's easier to use than the old way. (I know it's a hell of a lot easier to upload!) I personally hope to set up Final Fantasy XIV translations to use the data some time in the next few weeks. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 22:28, March 29, 2018 (UTC)