Offline Diablo 2 Information Document

[jamesixgun]

I just took a quick look at the Amazon forum, found their FAQ, and it's chock-full of information on FHR, FRW, etc, and on items, attack speeds, etc. Incredibly valuable. I assume this is pretty much the same for every toon, so gogo. Thanks for the reminder Pyrotechnician!

And I wonder if we couldn't offer a pdf and a zip file full of individual documents with an index or simple list of what there is to find and what it's called. I might actually like to have both, though I don't know why, really. A big folder full of stuff makes things harder to find than a well indexed pdf, but it makes things easier to manipulate. Just a thought.

[Smips]

@Pyrotechnician:
I'll admit, I'm getting more and more keen on the idea of using a linked excel sheet to link to all the documents. Are you able to link to different types of documents in Excel? Such as Word, PDF, images, etc?

@jamesixgun:
If a linked Excel file would work the way I've described above, then you would have the best of both worlds! I think I might have that post in the Amazon forum already linked. I went through all the strategy forum FAQs and put the ones I thought were applicable in the list, but I did it really quick so it would be worth another look.

Just another update about having not done anything yet :

After talking with Thy, I've decided to broaden the scope to include putting this information onto the Diablo 2 Wiki site in order to get the community more involved and reach a greater number of people. This might be a little bit more work, but I think going through the formatting troubles for the offline guide will prep it pretty well for the wiki site. Again, if anyone wants to help with that work, let me know. That will probably be a couple weeks out, but more help is always better.

As for progress, pretty much none right now. I want to get that started this week, but with starting a new job this week I'm not sure how much time(or perhaps motivation) I will have. It doesn't help that I'm playing D2 again either . So, in the mean time, I want to at least gather more potential info for it. I'm hoping that some time next week I'll have a "preview" of the document done. Basically, just a peek at it with a handful of document available in it just to probe the community and see how they like the direction.

Thanks to anyone who has sent me e-mail with information, it'll be a big help! If anyone has anything to send, feel free!

[Pyrotechnician]

@Pyrotechnician:
I'll admit, I'm getting more and more keen on the idea of using a linked excel sheet to link to all the documents. Are you able to link to different types of documents in Excel? Such as Word, PDF, images, etc?

It is possible to link to other documents outside of excel but they normally require the use of a path and the path is never the same once it is downloaded by different people. It may be easier to embed the documents in different sheets rather than linking them from the excel to the folder itself, and you can have an index sheet in the front of the workbook which would take you back to the correct tab holding that document. There are a lot of possibilities and if someone wanted to put in the effort you could work the link to change based on where the information is saved I believe.

[Smips]

It is possible to link to other documents outside of excel but they normally require the use of a path and the path is never the same once it is downloaded by different people. It may be easier to embed the documents in different sheets rather than linking them from the excel to the folder itself, and you can have an index sheet in the front of the workbook which would take you back to the correct tab holding that document. There are a lot of possibilities and if someone wanted to put in the effort you could work the link to change based on where the information is saved I believe.

That could be problematic. A lot of the documents will be very long and mostly text and I don't think Excel would handle that well. However, I if I'm remembering correctly, you can access the root path of the Excel file using VBA. This would give you the root path of the files regardless of where you extract it. I've done this using VBA buttons before, but not with links embedded in an Excel document. I suppose I could pretty easily just make a VBA macro to handle everything since I have quite a bit of experience with that, but that would be a bit more work and it would be more difficult to add more documents. What do you think?

Edit: I suppose one problem with that is that I think it will require having Microsoft Office.

Edit2: Decided to try this out with the VBA coding and it's pretty simple... But again, I don't know how accessible it will be for everyone since it will require using Microsoft Office.

[jamesixgun]

The various OpenOffice.org ports can handle quite a bit of Office, and for free... I don't know much about VBA macros. I did a quick search, and it looks like OOo 3 supports some limited vba coding, so that may be workable.

Could it be done with html? I could see creating an index page, and linking from there to docs in various folders and putting the whole thing in a zip file. That would add a bit of coding on the front end, but only for the index file, which could be uber-simple, but make it so anyone with a web browser could access the documents. The paths wouldn't change (unless someone moved something around), since all the stuff would be linked to /breakpoints/fhr.xlsx or /amazon/d-a-e-bug.pdf or whatever, and the root index file could be anywhere on the user's system.

I've coded some simple websites in my day, and could slap together a simple index file in no time. I've got a bunch of stuff going on over the next few weeks, but once August rolls around, things should calm down for awhile.

Another quick search reveals the possibility of using relative links in Excel, so nothing would break as long as everything remained it the same relative location (much like html, unsurprisingly), and this might be easier, and easily handled by OOo or one of its more open clones/ports.


edit: I just looked back at this... apologies for the rambling...

tl;dr:
OOo might be able to handle some of the vba stuff.
excel can be told to use relative links.
we could skip excel and use simple html instead to make it more open.

[Smips]

@jamesixgun:
I tried opening it with Open Office, but no luck. I have a feeling it will handle macros that will edit cells and such, but not stuff with user forms and junk.

I tried googling relative links and found a bunch of unhelpful forum topics... I'm guessing I'm just looking in the wrong place? If you have a link about them, I'd appreciate getting it

I would imagine an HTML document would work fine, though I'm god awful with HTML. If you'd be willing to help out with that in the next month, that'd be great.

For the time being, I'm going to continue formatting and adding things to my VBA code. Adding stuff in is as easy as adding a button and adding one line of code, so there's no reason not to. Until we get a non-Excel required format to go along with it, people can navigate through the folders. I'll post a screen shot of what I'm putting together shortly to give everyone an idea.

Edit:

Here's basically what it will look like.

D2Offline_pic.jpg
Navigate the sections with the tabs, then click the button for which guide you want. That launches a Word/Excel/etc. document for you to look through.

Here's a link to download it. If you have Microsoft Office, you should just be able to extract the rar, open the Excel file in the root directory, enable macros, and click on the buttons under the Magc Find tab. If anyone downloads it and has problems, let me know.

http://www.smips.webs.com/Diablo II ...e Resource.rar

[Pyrotechnician]

Open office and Excel although they are similar don't handle coding quite the same way so its unlikely that it will work. If we are trying to make this as absolutely useable by everyone then yes you will probably be restricted to a pdf or html document.

[jamesixgun]

You can definitely make it look tons prettier and way easier in Excel than I could in html...

And here's a link to the microsoft office help site about linking... There's a bit about relative links in the first section. It looks like you'd set the path to something like /nightfish/mfoddbals.xlsx and it would open the mfoddballs spreadsheet located in the nightfish folder that resides at the same root as the as the excel doc. But I may be reading it wrong...

Here's the section:

Spoiler

In a Microsoft Office Excel workbook, unspecified paths to hyperlink destination files are by default relative to the location of the active workbook. You can set a different base address to use by default so that each time that you create a hyperlink to a file in that location, you only have to specify the file name, not the path, in the Insert Hyperlink dialog box.

I ran a quick check... selected a cell, hit cmd-k, told it to link to a document, and then picked a document in the same folder. I saved the file, quit excel, moved the documents (but kept them in the same relative location), opened the file, and the link still worked. I tried an uber simple version with both files in the same folder, and then with one file in folder a and the linked folder in file a1.

I run a mac, and I'm on Office 2008, so your it may be different in your version. But it was really easy to type the path, or to find it through the gui.

If I make some time this evening, I'll try all this again in OOo (actually LibreOffice) and see if the links still work... I'll have to pull out the netbook... *shudder* Edit2: and the relative links worked fine in LibreOffice on win7 starter (and I also got the compulsion to uninstall the cruftware version of office that came with this little pos 'computer'). So simple relative links work fine.

Edit: I have no idea how this will work with your vba code.

Edit 3: it is different in vba... of course, why make it easy? There's some discussion on stackoverflow about this... they say Workbooks.Open FileName:= ThisWorkbook.Path & "\nightfish\mfoddballs.doc" This is meaningless to me, but maybe it means something to you? I doubt this will all translate to OOo or one of its clones, though.


If we want to do this through html, I can definitely help with the coding. I know enough html and css to build a website by hand. Of course, that was a far simpler undertaking than what we have going on here (I expect)... I'm happy to help, for sure, but my free time will be somewhat limited until the end of July when a couple of projects wind down.

[Solar Ice]

Just popped in to say that this is a VERY nice project that you guys a working on! Keep it up. Don't know if I am able to contribute much, though if I look at Eastern Sun, most of the information on that game comes in a Downloadable Pdf. Perhaps that may be the best way to go?

[Smips]

Brief update:
I added the majority of the original links in my OP to the VBA program. All but jiansonz's MF guide and Nightfish's MF guide are unformatted, so they'll be mostly unreadable until I go in and make Excel tables and whatnot. Feel free to try out the program if you have Microsoft office though. Here's the link:
Diablo II Offline Resource