Galaxy Harvester News

The entire source code including database seed for Galaxy Harvester is finally moved to a publicly available repository. Previously the source link on the page footers would link to a tarball of the sites web files, but now it links to this new GitHub repository where all Galaxy Harvester development activity will happen now. I hope this will serve these purposes:

• Help people be able to set up their own private Galaxy Harvesters easier.
• Disaster recovery incase the site needs to be recreated somewhere else for whatever reason.
• Allow for an avenue for more contributors to site development in the future.
• Provides a place to share documentation, users to report bugs, and activity to be shared/tracked.

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How do you keep track of what ingredients you use to make the different variations of products that you craft? I have pretty much relied on my memory in the past, which is not so great. That is why I was happy to see the feature being released today voted to the top of the suggestions list by Galaxy Harvester members. Starting today, you can build recipes that define a set of resources that are used to fill a schematic. If you're already using the favorites/inventory feature, you'll be ahead of the game for getting started with recipes, becuase your favorite resources are what you can select to build recipes from.

If you haven't already started defining your inventory on Galaxy Harvester, you might want to start by clicking the star on some resources in the resource list you have, or heading over to the My Resources page to set up some inventory. If you've already got some favorites defined you might want to start at the Recipe Home page to start a new recipe or try out the suggestions tool. I hope people will find this to be a useful crafters aide.

With this release, there's also a little something new to acquaint you with the new recipes feature. In addition to providing some information on the help page, there is also a tutorial video available to watch that will show you around. You can watch the tutorial on the help page here.

Other Minor Updates Included in this Release:

• Schematics will list component ingredients as a link to that component schematic.
• Schematic resource ingredients will link to resource type.
• Added shortcuts to Alerts and Inventory in login area at top right of pages.
• Prevent same user from being able to verify resource on same planet multiple times.
• Updated the default theme to resemble the in-game Alpha Blue theme.
• Tweaked Top Resources list calculation to more directly take into account a weighting of how much different stats are used in resources overall.
• Include unavailable resources in auto-complete add by name feature on Favorites page.
• Make user names in Waypoint list linky.
• Fixed favorite indicator not working on schematic pages resource lists.

Over the past couple weeks, I have also been adding more schematic images. The Artisan and Armorsmith professions are complete, and the furniture for architect. If anyone is so inclined, all members are able to add images for schematics that do not have them by going to the schematic page. The new recipe tool uses the schematic images for the lists, so some of these will be blank until more schematic images are uploaded. If you do decide to help out, please follow these guidelines to make the images more consistent:

• Include only the object and background in the cropped image, not any surrounding borders or text.
• When you crop the image, make it square.
• Make sure the cropped image is at least 300x300 pixels.
• If the schematic uses an image that is the same as another schematic, just link it to the other schematic instead of uploading a new image.

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You may have noticed that advertisements were removed from the site recently. For various reasons that may be obvious, it wasn't a very good fit for the site. Think ads for agriculture equipment, and combine that with people who appreciate Galaxy Harvester, but really aren't interested in things that really aren't remotely related, and we had something that probably didn't work well for anyone.

For those who find the application useful, we've set up a new way for you to contribute to keeping us running. There is a button on the home page which you have probably already seen you can click to make a donation to the site. Your donation will help to pay for art, development, and hosting of Galaxy Harvester, keeping the lights on and new features coming your way. We appreciate any donation you can give, and if you can't, everyone appreciates your continuted contributions to updating resource information on Galaxy Harvester.

Thanks,

-ioscode

I've manually added a few schematics today to help fill in some of the gaps for doctors and combat medics. They are:

• Advanced Biological Effect Controller
• Advanced Chemical Release Duration Mechanism
• Advanced Solid Delivery Shell
• Enhance Health Medpack - D
• Advanced Dispersal Mechanism
• Advanced Infection Amplifier
• Advanced Resilience Compound
• Mind Poison Delivery Unit - C

This brings the total number of schematics available to 686. There may be other schematics you would be interested in seeing available. If you are someone who is working on SWG Emu lua scripts for draft schematics and have some those completed scripts available, please let me know and I can use them to import the schematics to my site. Otherwise, please post here with the names of schematics you would like to see here on the site. If enough people want certain ones, I will do my best to get them added.

It took some time to get this release put together, but today's update brings the beginning of what I hope you find to be a very useful feature. A tool to let you view crafting schematics and quickly find the best resources to craft with them. You will find the new schematics page here. The schematics available now are based on what is currently available from the SWG Emu project. As work progresses, more schematics will become available. In the meantime, you can usually at least find a schematic similar to the one you are crafting to get a top resources listing based on similar weights and requirements. Having the schematic information up also means that the profession drop down on the Top Resources widget on the home page is now enabled. Use it to find the best stuff out there based on the unique requirements and weightings of a specific profession.

Another major feature releasing today that some of the more hard core harvesters and/or site developers might be interested in is export files. When you are logged into the site, you should see two new links in the Other Links box on the home page. These will link to 2 files for the galaxy you have selected up at the top of the page. These files are updated at 5pm UTC time each day with the current available resources data. One is XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format which developers working on other community tools might find useful for incorporating resource data. The other is CSV (Comma Separated Values) format for those of you that like to dump the resource data into a spreadsheet and do some of your own manipulation.

There's always a few other odds and ends worthy of note as well, and here they are:

• Added Top Harvesters section on the home page showing top harvesters for current spawns.
• Made resource type names a link to other recent resource spawns of that same type.
• Added more user stats breakdowns to the Stats page as well as charts of the top 5 members in various categories.
• Some new graphics for top links and other UI polishing

The schematics feature is based on a large set of data which is not complete. In addition to the need to get missing schematics filled out, there's another job that anyone can help with if they are interested. You may notice when you are logged in that you should have the option to upload an image for a schematic. Anyone who wants to help fill out some of these images is welcome to help out. We'll want to stick to the same method to create a consistent look though. Have a look at an example that I already have an image on like Bone Armor Left Bracer or Ubese Armor Segment. You should be able to get the same look by following these steps:

• Open crafting tool and select the item schematic
• Make sure the item preview part of the window is pretty square and you have the window at full height, then take a screenshot.
• Crop the screenshot so you have just the item preview and background without any of the dark edge or light border.
• Make sure your resulting cropped image is square and at least 320x320. It will be automitically resized down to that when you upload it if it is bigger.

Also keep in mind that there is an option to just link up a schematic to use another schematics' image. This is handy because many schematics use the same image resource in the game. Using this feature whenever possible will make the tool run more efficiently, and be a little quicker for you than browsing to and uploading the same image again. If enough people chip in and do a few images, I bet we can fill out all of them before long. The same group effort that keeps track of hundreds of in-game resources at a time should do well at conquering this task as well.

These two major features may prompt questions and suggestions, and if so, I encourge you to send me any questions or feedback. Feel free to post a comment here on the blog and start a discussion, or send me an email with the contact link at the bottom of the page.