• Hi there !

    Sorry if i post this in the wrong section.

    After starting entering manually my chestrunning stats in a excel sheet, which can be very fastidious I was wondering if there was a tool who could read the drops name / req / color and recording it in an excel sheet.

    I was thinking about kamadan.toolbox.com who is (as I believe) just reading/copy/pasting the chat to their server.

    Having absolutely 0 knowledge about coding I don't know if and how it would be possible, but if anyone has an idea or so, that would be amazing !

    Thanks in advance

  • Disregarding the call to write the Item Data to an Excel Spreadsheet, this task sounds similar to that of a farming bot - "Merch/Salvage all these items, but keep/store these specific items".

    I'd imagine a similar script being required to do what you're asking; possibly with a bit more development to capture all the data you're asking for. I wouldn't think that the logic in a farming bot would have to read the details of a weapon in order to merch/salvage every item, but keeping/storing the specifics might be communicating to the Objects Name/Attributes.

    Or image analysis could do the trick.

    With that said, if you took screenshots of all your drops and stored them in an isolated folder, you could create a program that reads & extracts the text within those images in that folder. This could allow for you to extract the text data from each screenshot, and map it to an Excel Spreadsheet. You'd have to do a bit more development to capture the color of an item, but that could be done as well.

    Though, not having knowledge in programming may be a problem, especially if the interest isn't there to do it yourself :).

    But, I'd recommend watching some videos on Youtube, and then modifying the code you see to meet your needs. You'll have to add quite a bit of customization in the code in order to place the images text in the specified columns on the Excel Sheet. The program would have to analyze the text in order to know which column the Items Name, Requirement, Base Mod, and Gold Value would go in the Spreadsheet; otherwise you may put all the text in a single column.

    Edited once, last by Shaggy (November 18, 2020 at 8:12 AM).

  • Thanks for your answer.

    I am looking for a "reader" not a bot.

    Just something who could read those 2-3lines and copy/past/export in a text file (excel).

    As you said, image analysis. However taking a screenshot of every single drop is almost as fastidious as recording the stats manually.

    I was secretelly hoping finding something where I could just drag my mouse on an item, press a touch and my keyboard and voila !

  • Well, the reasoning behind the "bot" word choice, is that a lot of bots could be built around images.

    So a non-developer, may be able to scrap some of the script used in botting techniques, if they weren't wanting to build a solution themselves.

    Taking screenshots in guild wars is by far easier than looking at each item, and typing the data into Excel; even with dual monitor setups. If one were to go that route, once the program was built, you'd just need to take 20-40 seconds to get a screenshot of each item in your inventory. I feel it's safe to say it takes 0.5-1.0 seconds to hover your mouse on each item, and then press the screenshot button.

    Edited once, last by Shaggy (November 18, 2020 at 9:38 AM).

  • Having no knowledge about coding, I prefer stay away of bots (program, source code etc...)

    I agree with you taking a screenshot isn't long, however I will need to manage my screenshot folder everytime.

    I am looking at some "image analysis" (never thought to this term before) app on google right now, might find something !

    edit : or actually a Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

  • I'd suggest looking into Python; Python has some useful Libraries for this sort of task. The Screenshot approach is a pretty easy solution, and I guarantee that you could quickly find code that would work for your needs from a quick YouTube video.

    However, having no programming knowledge, you may find that you need to invest more time in other videos, in order to create the Program I was talking about. It'd require some basic knowledge on loops for automating the analysis/extraction of data from all images, parsing the text data into sub strings to be analyzed and placed into the specified columns in Excel, navigating the OS, etc.

    Best of luck - Fun stuff to play with

    * Also- You could automate the management of the Folder that holds your screenshots. Once the program finishes extracting the text data, it could just delete all the images; or it could delete them as it finishes each extraction, rather than all at once.

    Edited 2 times, last by Shaggy (November 18, 2020 at 10:01 AM).

  • Well thanks for the terminology, it helped me finding what I wanted, a tried a few but the one who suits me the best (and has the best character recognition).

    A little program called Easy Screen OCR


    I can just copy/paste the result into where I want !

    (sorry to be lazy :p)

  • The team behind https://kamadan.gwtoolbox.com/ already have tools that make use of reading the in-game text. It is probably harder for specific item dropped info like requirement as it would need to be able to get the ID of the item that dropped and this isn't stored as part of chat.

    Their Discord server is: https://discord.gg/pGS5pFn I would suggest to join and discuss with the devs what's possible, they have a lot of experience with what data is available from the game and what isn't.

    Not only can the GWCA API read the Kamadan text to output to the website, but some other examples: Toolbox can read in-game text and remove it from your chat window, can take external text and put it into your chat window.

  • That Easy Screen OCR looks like a nice tool for recording drop tables for different enemies: e.g. copy all your chat while farming and filter the words preceding and following the text "drops a". But for recording item stats, I don't see how manually copying text for each item is faster than typing it directly into your preferred excel format?

    One other note about a dedicated automatic script: ideally, it would be able to distinguish between same-skin items with different attribute reqs (e.g. bladed shield requiring strength or tactics) and also between same name items with different skins (e.g. cane dom/illu, hornbow dragon/stoneshard/mursaat, spiked targe large/small, all different elemental staffs). It should be assessed whether doing this is worth the extra work though.

    >WTB< | ign Adanel Jade

  • Well, distinguishing the first part of that ask is essentially what the Automated Solution would already be doing since all that information is coming from Extracting the text of the image/screenshot.

    The text would be parsed in the below categories that would be sent to their respective columns in an Excel Spreadsheet

    • Name - Blade Shield
    • Requirement - 9 Tactics/9 Strength
    • Mod A -
    • Mod B -
    • Gold Value -

    That 2nd ask wouldn't be worth the effort - a lot more involved than having the program read the color of the text: Purple/Gold.

    Some skins could be less challenging than others, such as a Longbow. Example: Wooden Longbow and a Feathered Longbow. The image of the "Longbow" would be different for each. I'm not sure if that's the case for the Spiked Targe - I believe you actually have to equip the item to visualize this difference.

    Either case, that'd be a lot of work and responsibility to put into the program for only a little additional detail to be collected. You'd almost want a database of images for those unique cases.

    If I've time over the holiday week, I may play around with some python.

  • That Easy Screen OCR looks like a nice tool for recording drop tables for different enemies: e.g. copy all your chat while farming and filter the words preceding and following the text "drops a". But for recording item stats, I don't see how manually copying text for each item is faster than typing it directly into your preferred excel format?

    It's called fastidious and lazyness !

    I much rather copy/pasting 40 items (and do one or 2 adjustments by hand) than having to type down everything (it should avoid any typo aswell) and still believe I would be faster to ctrl+c/ctrl+v

    So far, I just have to "OCR" my screen, copy/past the result and add a gold/purple color, which is fine for me.

    Praise, I still have your Ice caves of sorrow datas, tried to work a bit on it, but got discouraged very fast :(