Setting a Standard
Jan 22, 09:01 AM
NCSoft has been providing Dungeon Runners game data (character stats) as an XML feed that can be accessed by third party website and applications. This is brilliant, and is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been ranting about for a while. (As discussed in the comments at that link, Dark Age of Camelot made this kind of data available back in 2002, but not as an XML feed, which is kind of critical in my opinion.)
Examining an example of the XML in question, one can see both basic stats, items equipped, and also icon information. This last part is particularly cool, as anything enclosed in the Icon element references this list of icons which you can use to illustrate things about the given character.
More games need to do this. And who knows, maybe we’ll settle on that open standard I’ve been dreaming of in ten or so years.
There is some confusion about exactly what DAoC did and did not do, as well as other games out there… but I think the ground we’re breaking is really in terms of encouraging community involvement by just providing the raw data, and providing easy-to-grab images to go with the data. We’re also pushing the data out to the web much faster than most services, ~15 minutes is the current upper bound on how out of date the data is.
But DAoC isn’t even the only one to come before us – the WoW Armory provides raw XML on their site, they just also happen to provide a comprehensive XSL that transforms the XML into a very interactive web page. Similarly, EVE Online apparently provides both browser-friendly character sheets and raw XML for the asking. There may be others I am not aware of, too.
So without claiming that we’re breaking new ground (and hats off to everyone who has done so ahead of us), it’s what we are doing, and I think it’s the right direction.
As for standards… I think the one thing everyone else should adopt from our design is clean URLs that are easy to pass around, remember, and code against. The people who are doing it are already mostly providing raw XML data, and I don’t think there’s much standardization possible – we’re definitely at the point where a standard flexible enough to handle everyone’s data would be too complex and time-intensive to be worthwhile.
— Matthew Weigel · Jan 23, 04:07 PM · #