Parsemania

The source code has been migrated to Sourceforge! If you’re so inclined, feel free to browse the project at http://www.sf.net/projects/parsemania. There’s not much there yet, but it’s a far better host than my linux box (which is now behind a firewall in a hotel).

sf.net came through with their approval. Expect things to be uploaded within the next few days. At that point I’ll transfer everything over to that site as a more central way to manage the project.

I’m working on setting up a sourceforge project for Parsemania. That way people who wish to submit code will be able to use a well trusted interface to do so, and build things by themselves too!

As opposed to popular belief CSM isn’t dead - just changed hands. Follow the link for the latest versions.

Dd

The parser now picks up the name of the character from a complete log file, or if you’ve been cutting and pasting then you can set the default name of the character in the options dialog.

Pet parsing should be much nicer now. All damage is given to the pet owner and then broken down under the details view. Grab the latest version in the usual place.

Quick release to fix the log parsing for heals. Seems they were changed recently. Parsing seems a little slow at the moment - I’ll have to look into it when I get a chance.

Yes, I am still thinking about Parsemania in the back of my mind. The problem is that it works pretty well so I haven’t really had a lot of incentive to go back and fix things.

Thanks to Cinnabar of Najena for a bugfix for the HTML exporter.

I also rebuilt the code to use the released version of .NET 2.0 Framework, which I can recommend everyone upgrades to.

Just an aside - if you’re interested in coding, be sure to get the C# 2005 Express Edition as it’s a free download from Microsoft for the next 12 months, after which they’ll start charging $50 for it. I’m told Parsemania builds and runs fine with it, so if you enjoy tinkering with code - there’s your chance.

Made some more fixes to the log viewer, and some performance improvements. 

Warning: Tech Details Follow!

Basically my method for determining the position each line was in the log file was messed up because the StreamReader class in .NET doesn’t give any feedback on your current position within the file.  As a result I had to make my own file reader class (in LogReader.cs) which does maintain the position within the file and reports it back to the application when asked.  I also skipped the “Decoding” step as I can make the assumption with the EQ log files that the file format can be directly converted from byte to char.

Once I’d built the new reader, things were going a bit slow so I threw it into the Visual Studio 2005 profiler to see where I was losing my time.  Turned out the time was being lost in a number of places:

• Using regular expressions to match the date/time at the start was very expensive, especially given I already knew the exact characters within the line I wanted to pull out.  Just extracting the specific characters was an order of magnitude faster.
• Accessing the stream length every line to show the progress indicator was taking a lot of system time.  I guess it was checking the length of the log on the file system every single time I asked.  Storing this in a local variable before the loop sped things up.
• Constructors of string() and StringBuilder() inside the LogReader class were taking a lot of time.  I turned the stringreader into a preallocated buffer that I just set to zero length instead of reallocating every time and things also got much faster.
• Calculating the time as a DateTime every line was taking a fair amount of time.  Converting Start and Finish to Unix times and comparing integers runs much faster.

Most of those improvements help the parser run quickly through “dead” times (outside the start/finish boundary) but I could now run through a 180M test log (thanks Keldoth) in under a minute.  Made me feel all happy!

Ebbin on Kithicor found a minor bug for me (thanks much) on files larger than about 20M the progress indicator would make things die horribly.  It’s all fixed now, I hope.  I don’t actually have log files big enough to test that one on at the moment.