GnomeKP
david.nikdel posted in Uncategorized on February 5th, 2006
This was a project I tackled for a guild of mine in World of Warcraft, I’m considering cleaning up the installation process and publishing it under GPL since I’ve had a number of other guilds approach me and ask for copies. Essentially, this website manages DKP (dragon kill points for those who don’t MMO). These are a means of distributing loot (treasure) that drops while the guild is killing monsters. Since the higher level instances require 40 people at a time and only a few items drop each time, it’s important to have an established and (ideally) mechanized method of determining who gets to roll on each item.For this project I wrote a php front end (seen above w/ link to the live site) as well as a php administration panel and a custom mod for the World of Warcraft UI. The custom mod allows the DKP moderator (usually my friend Dan) to push one button and assign/deduct dkp points from everyone in the raid or from individual players as well as dump a list of the current DKP tallies to his screen or to the entire raid. When the raid is done, the savedvariables UI file contains all the information needed to update the site, so all he has to do is log in to the administrator control panel and upload the file. The backend takes care of parsing the file, incrementing the points, and adding any users that aren’t currently in the system. During the raid, he is able to keep the admin panel open and, when an item drops, quickly determin who is elligable to roll on it. The ability of anyone to follow along with the steps he’s doing on the frontend and essentially double-check him keeps everyone honest. Also, having the detailed history of dkp awarded and items won has prevented or ended a huge number of arguments. When he uploads the event file at the end of the raid, all the items that were awarded to people during the raid are automagically associated with that event.
All in all, I’m pretty proud of how seemless everything is. Dan was very helpful in pushing me to polish things that weren’t quite done or which manifested themselves as bottlenecks during his testing. The ability to restrict the list by class, for instance, was a late addition, but has proven to be one of the most time-saving features we added.
Try out the Admin Interface (don’t worry, it’s restricted)
Download the GnomeKP WoW UI-Mod