POLUtils

[Aikar]

Currently Spells have a seperation of Common + 4 Languages, where has Exporting Abilities from the Data Browser only exports the Languages.

However, if you run the Mass Extractor I found it tosses out an Abilities.xml with the common info, but no languages.

I need all 5 of the files, so i end up having to use data browser for languages, but run the whole mass extractor just to get the Common Ability Info.

Could you possibly make Abilities work like Spells, and include Common viewing in the data browser and exportable? And I also notice Recast information is not given on Abilities, that information is in the dat's isnt it O.o? can that be added to Abilities too?

Also, If you get the chance, regrouping the information all into 1 XML would be nice too as I suggested before. I know its easier to spit em out seperate since its in that format, but putting it down as a suggestion to do for next version to make it easier to parse the information instead of having to glue them back together ourselves

And lastly, the XML files are cluttered with alot of unneeded data such as "DMSGString" and such making the xml files alot larger, and is not really a 'clean' xml format. The SpellCommon file is over 1mb, but when I pieced it back with the languages, (like this:
<entry english="Haste" german="Hast" french="H" japanese="ヘイスト" type="WhiteMagic" element="Thunder" targets="Self, Party, Ally, NPC" skill="EnhancingMagic" mpcost="40" casttime="3" recast="20" />
) Its less than 230~kb, (its 230kb to me with Area and Status effects listing, including everything into 1 XML)

This is a format I think would be easier to use for authors and much cleaner/smaller file size:
http://faservers.net/xi/resources.xml

Thanks for the great work pebbles, hope you can get some these suggestions done

[Pebbles]

• Syncing up the MassExtractor with the files available from the databrowser menus is on my to-do list, with low priority (as is expanding it to dump the non-english data too)
  
• The databrowser now uses file IDs for the menu entries, so it can and will only list DATs that are still accessible to FFXI itself. If the common ability stuff has been dropped completely, it won't be listed in the data browser anymore (and it will likely be taken out of massextractor too). If it's still a "live" DAT, I'll add it back to the menus.
  
• the XML export is now an easy serialization of my internal objects; this allows me to read them back (as done by the item comparison tool) without much problems, and results in 0 maintenance of the xml import/export when DAT files get new fields (or lose some). So yes they're larger than they absolutely have to be, deal with it Nothing stops you from writing some XSL files to filter out the information you care about and formatting it the way you like.