As I've mentioned in the past I built a database that allows me to search all the gear and food in the game by their attributes. From time to time I have epiphanies and add parameters or rewrite the code to be more efficient, but last week I got the ultimate, "Wouldn't if be cool if I could...?" idea. I thought it would be great if I could have the database write my gear set scripts for me.
Now, for sake of honesty, I use Windower, I don't get into all the gadgets and add-ons for it so save the dirty looks for other people. I mainly use it so I can switch back and forth between my monitors, however, I shamefully go to town taking advantage of setting up macros to switch gear (I also use EXPWatch and Clock). It's at this point I decided my database could intervene. You see, the gear sets are simply .txt files stored in a folder under FFXI. In the past when I've picked up new gear or switched between weapons I've had to go into each of these files and physically change the data and save them. It's not like doing that is hard, but I often forget what I've changed or even forget to change things back and on occasion I misspell things. Plus there are about 30 of these files that I've created on my computer and things can get confusing when trying to update 10 or so at the same time.
The database solves all my issues, I have the gear names, what slot they go in, what jobs they are assigned to and whether or not they are R/E. All I had to do was give the database the ability to create a gear set and then allow it to update the gear selections and overwrite the .txt file for that set. About 20 minutes ago I created my first Gear Set and saved it directly to the folder without leaving Access. My efficiency rating has just went up a level and I can now do what FFXIAH and PimpMyFFXIGear only dream of!
Stating the Obvious
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