World of Warcraft Quest Tracker
I've released a new Perl script today, wowquests.pl: a World of Warcraft Quest Tracker, which collects quest and zone data from Allakhazam's site and tabulates it into a small and compact list, suitable for printing. You can see the quest output for Morbulin, my level 58 Troll Shaman, here. Quests with asterisks next to them, I've completed.
How's it work? Welp, this is largely because I looOove collecting stats. Ever since I started playing World of Warcraft, I've been keeping track of what quests I've finished, on paper. Now, with this script, I just print out the master list, circle the ones I finished, and feed those quest IDs back into the script the next time I run an update (every couple of months or so). Those IDs are then asterisked and counted: so far, I've finished 526 quests available for the Horde.
Yes, there are in-game-client, user-contributed, mods for this. However, none of them allow you to enter in previous quest data, before you started using the mod. So, until I start a new character (probably a blood elf, though, if sbp ever gets on, we'll be Alliance), this is more than adequate. I looVe lists, I do.
- 78342 reads
This is awesome, thanks for sharing. I was hours away from writing a parser for allakhazam myself. I have a cool idea, if anything comes of it I'll let you know.
I just spent a week trying to write something like this for Thottbot. This is WAY nicer than what I have, is there anything for Thott's webpage like this? What I did was completely in VB.NET as well. I am going to see if I can get the same controls to work there.
No, I didn't make anything for Thott - Thott's quest data data for one zone is spread out across multiple pages, and would require a bit more code to determine the number of said pages, and then iterate over them too. Alla's stuff was just stronger and easier to parse and, honestly, I think Alla has less of an "idiot" quotient to it.
Hey, thanks for the super fast reply. Have you dealt with both? Do you find Alacazam to be just as good as Thottbot? How do you exactly mark of the completed quests? There doesn't seem to be too much code there. I write VB.NET, so I'm assuming there is some sort of a loop in there somewhere until I actually read it. I would like to add something like this to my app. Are you putting in a list of names somewhere to generate the marks?
Well, I use both Thott and Alla in my day-to-day WoW'ing, yes. They both complement each other, but if I had to only use one from now on, I'd choose Alla. As for the "marking off of the quests", take a look at this file: it's just a list of quest IDs, one per line. When you pass that as an argument to the script, it'll mark off matching IDs with an asterisk.
Actually after looking into Alacazam, I like there layout, & I think....think being the key word here that I could read this with an imbedded app in my own applciation. Do you know if this is just reading the source behind? Or does this actually read the hyperlinks?
The first thing my script does is get a list of all the zones that Alla knows about - by sucking down the zone page and following the links on it. The bulk of the script however (the actual quest listings) just sucks down the individual "zone quest" page and parses the HTML. Total number of page requests is 1 + NUMBER OF ZONES.
Nice utility! I assume Alla knows about it and doesn't mind one bit?
Alla was always great for Everquest based info, and looks like they have kept with Thottbot in WoW arena.
Nope, Alla has not been informed, but I honestly don't expect the script to get super popular, due to its barrier of entry (requiring Perl and no instructions on its use). But, I doubt Alla would approve of it, because they do filter accesses to their pages by User-Agent (the script fakes a Firefox browser to circumvent this).
Nice script....but right near the top you might want to change it to say World of Warcraft..not Warhammer...unless that was your intention. =)
Ahahahah. I must've just finished reading a new WFRP book or sumthin' ;)
WOW should keep track of finished quests in game, stupid that it don't. I believe this is one of the biggest faults/bug of the game.
Much agreed.
I saw the same thing on http://wownn.com
Hmmmm interesting, i have no idea about scripting etc etc but is there anyway i can tell what quests i have done at lvl 60 and which ones are still out there to be found? this is what im lookign for but from what i can gather this involves keeping track yourself of what quests have been done and updating yourself?
thanks in advance
Unless you use a plugin from day one, or keep track of them manually, there's currently no known way of finding out what quests you've done after the fact.
if you search for about 14 hours you may find some ones. . . but they'r probly incomplete. plus the update just came out. . .
Braingle.com has made a nice WoW quest tracker that automates the entire process. You can just click off which quests you have completed, and the website keeps track of everything for you.
http://www.braingle.com/games/wow/index.php
Interesting. I have developed a quest tracking website to help level faster:
http://www.whizzardbase.com.
It's in beta as I'm still working on functionality and adding data to it (mainly Alliance quests in there right now). Basically, you can search for quests, track them, mark them complete, and hide them. Check it out! Appreciate some feedback.
The site was written using ASP. If anyone knows of a good way to get more descriptive WoW data in an automated fashion using ASP or downloading it from somewhere, please let me know. Thanks.
tried the last link but nothing happens when u click I AGREE just me? or?
It's probably the browser you're using. The site supports only Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher right now. If you're using Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, etc.., please try using IE instead and see if it works. Thanks.
Worked just fine with Firefox v3.0.1.
Suggestions: Let us filter by Faction and reputation, so I can find ALL the quests that give Darnassus reputation, for instance.
Mac users can't use IE, and most people would like to be able to choose their preferred browser for themselves anyway. There is no good reason not to make it work with all browsers.
Works now with other browsers.
does this thing works with active perl for windows cause i did like you told to do in your file and i get error and it dosent work
Most Excellent! I already had perl installed on my PC (a Windows system, but no matter; I'm a DOS command kinda guy). Had to get the HTML::TableExtract built and installed; luckily I'd done things like that before, and it went well enough (once I found a make that would work; luckily my installed perl had NMAKE.EXE).
Then I puzzled out the requirement for the qids.txt (or whatever one wants to name it) as the QUESTS input file. Since I had no history, I just left it blank. And guess what: I'm getting output of EVERY Horde quest there is! Amazing!
Now I'm gonna hack the code (or parse the html output file, we'll see) to output something that can be used more flexibly. Mainly I want to find out what quests in a specific area my character has NOT done, so he can go back and catch all the missing ones. The main reason for this is to let my level 70 gnome go earn Darnassus rep for a cat mount :-) I did it the hard way before (chasing down every NVP on the whole Teldrassil island to see if they had any quests). Still not enough rep, but I managed to dig up some more Darnassus rep-giving quests elsewhere. A tool like this would've saved a LOT of hassle.
Thanks again; great code!
Post new comment