Hello and welcome again,
Entropia Central is a tool for Entropia Universe that I will work very hard to make essential tool for success within Entropia. Anyone who know me, know that I do not give up, however the big idea or the project is, it will see its light of the day eventually.
It started as an idea of simple implementation of data display, since good old wiki was not working well, and grew into a bit bigger project, considering the old wiki was not changing its shape as the game itself changed over time.
Problems
- Data integrity – Data provided by MindArk officials at PCF besides being extremely polluted, it also as mentioned earlier kept its original shape from 2005, which made it challenging to implement certain aspects such as item effects.
- Huge website downtime and very long load time for existing data source (wiki)
- Anyone could edit anything
- The tools shows misleading or false data that could cause someone make a bad decision while buying certain item
- Maintenance
Solutions
- Database is rebuilt from scratch, solving every single table problem there was, such as inconsistent naming of columns, missing data, incorrect data, misleading data
- Audit logs – Each item has Audit Log where every change to it (add, update, delete) can be viewed and reverted if necesary.
- All available item effects in game are added to Entropia Central, and any item available can have effects. If the item requires multiple pieces of armor for instance to activate certain effect, moderator can create multiple “Effect Groups” and assign them to the item. For pets Effect Group can have information such as: Nutrio Bar consumption, cost to unlock the Effect Group etc. Everything you see in game is taken into consideration and implemented in the most simple and logical way.
- At Entropia Central, there is multi-level role implementation where registered user can use advanced tools & persist the changes they make using those tools, share their creation with others, such as Loadout, Loadout Compare, Ring Configuration, Armor vs Armor, Weapon vs Armor, etc. Higher level roles are designed to allow users to add and update the data, so the role above the registered user “Contributor” can add and update data, but can not delete anything, while the “Contributor+” and above can delete the data. Contributor+ (and roles above) can also view and manage “Audit Logs” for each item, and reverse the change if required by click of the button.
- After gathering data from friends, society, community, I detected the misleading and false data generated by wiki tools, replaced or implemented a better solution to increase the data integrity significantly
- Entropia Central project is thoroughly documented, every step of the way, the architecture is pretty simple, so in case of my inability to continue developing and maintaining this project, someone will get access to source code, secret keys and documentation to continue this work.
- Entropia Central uptime goal is 99% and there are mechanisms in place to make sure whenever something happens, there is a way to self-recover or in worst case notify me to react immediatelly.
- Caching strategy implementation – there is a basic caching implementation at the moment, which will be monitored and improved where needed over time, to decrease the load times.
How to help?
You would like to help in development, data maintenance or in any other capacity? Contact us here and let us know how exactly you could bring value, and your time availability.
Thank you
Thanks to everyone who helped to make Entropia Central happen, here’s the incomplete list of “thank you”s to everyone who helped in any way.