Question regarding a specific, uncreated calculator.

[Metaversal]

Back in 2010, I had a discussion with Tecmaster regarding the website overhaul and getting the Tip.it GE database up and running again. I was able to figure out the throttling formula as well as other information. Ultimately, Tip.it was able to get their GE database back up and running while my personal GE database was abandoned until recently.

 

Tip.it has always been my go-to for calculators in the 11 years I've been playing. However, I recently wondered why there has been no attempt to create a bank calculator? All of the information is available in a local database and it would be fairly straight forward to create a calculator around this. I have created such a bank calculator (link was advertised in "Advertise your thing here" thread) with my new database after getting fed up with the Wealth Evaluator's inclusion of tradeable items within its calculations. To me, this doesn't make any sense at all -- why give something a value if it's not tradeable? My main concern, though, is whether such a calculator could be perceived as offensive to Jagex strictly because of the Wealth Evaluator and its contribution to Jagex's income.

 

So, I am mainly targeting this post at the Tip.it crew, specifically those that make calculators. Has there ever been any work on creating such a calculator, and if not is there a particular, erm, legal reason for this or has it simply not been attempted?

[Sy_Accursed]

I'd imagine a big factor in not bothering is that the tool becomes largely redundant quite easily.

 

After all what your going to have to do is manually search each item to add it to your 'bank' to get the value added on, so in terms of ease of use its functionality is going to be just the same as searching the GE centre page and taking a note of the values to add up yourself.

 

The only thing it does is remove the small task of typing some numbers into a calculator yourself, which is next to nothing since most pcs have a calc app, most browsers can math via a google search box and most phones offer a calc that can be easily used to.

 

Just seems like it'd be a lot of coding to make the system to store bank data to calculate value for what ultimately at the user side of thing only adds a very small function you can easily do by yourself.

[Metaversal]

On the contrary! You should check out my link in that post. Initially, yes, the calculator was highly redundant. It took me about an hour to input all the information from my bank and I had to conciously make the decision as to whether an item was tradeable or not before I put it in. I was relatively happy with that since I thought the same thing, "This is as good as it's going to get."

 

However, a friend of mine pointed out that bank information can be retrieved from the RS Companion. When I found this out I was able to implement an "Import" function into my calculator. Granted, it's not super-graceful but it's not hard either and it works. Believe me, I'd like to make it as simple as "Enter your username" and "Fetch", but it simply can't be done. No amount of wizardy was able to make the process any easier (and believe me, I have a lot of wizardry -- I'm 99 magic ;)) without installing additional software or browser extensions which is both fishy and cumbersome -- not to mention it would most assuredly break the Jagex ToS. I tried snifing for AJAX requests within the Companion to perhaps pull the information from JSON, but no such requests are made. Additionally, bookmarklets are off the table in that the Companion is loaded inside an IFrame, and since bookmarklets do not run in privileged mode they cannot access the inner document of the IFrame. The only other thing I could think to do was do some pattern recognition on an image file of a bank and try to pull out the item icons and match them with an item, but that would be way more trouble than it's worth honestly (matching an image to an item ID alone would be a nightmare, not to mention the fact that many items have the same image) and probably wouldn't be any easier on the user than the method I laid out.

[Metaversal]

I forgot, you said "probably a big factor in not trying is..." Is that to say that it's never been tried? I see you've got a high post count, but do you know it's never been tried or considered?