Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-2045174-20131111003747

Some background first ("Why I made this." You can skip this): A while ago (several months), I was playing Dark Souls and I thought, "Man, I wonder how I can get the most physical defense with just 13 lbs (my current light-encumbrance-limit)?" And so I started working out a way to programmatically find the 4-piece combination that would give me the most physical defenses without going over 13 lbs. I started in Excel (because Excel is simple), and promptly moved on to writing my own program for it (because Excel is only simple for simple tasks). Gradually, my endeavor grew, and I wanted more features/flexibility, like the ability to pick which Armors were available to me so that only those armors were used. Unfortunately, I'm lazy, so I didn't finish it until recently.

The tool ("What I am actually talking about"): Simply named, my Armor Optimization Tool, allows the user to optimize their armor build (not their weapons/shields though). It is written in Scala, and runs on Java. It works like this:

The user first picks the Armor Sets (and Unique Helmets) that he has available to him. It should display the "Availability" of the set/armor whenever it is selected. In addition you can double click a set (or a selected group of them) to go its (their) wiki page(s). Then the user enters the maximum weight that he wants to wear, and the maximum level that he is willing to upgrade any armor pieces to. (Yeah I know the armors upgrade in three different ways, but I'm not conviced it's that important.) Then the user enters the "coefficients" he wants to assign to each of the defense statistics. This just means he gives a value to each stat based on how important the stat is to him. Then he just hits the big "Optimize" button and the program spits out the combination of armor pieces that provides the best performance given the criteria that the user entered. Voila!

So yeah, I just want to know if anyone would be interested in this tool. I don't know yet if I just want to keep it for personal use, or if I want to polish it up and make it available. Feel free to leave any comments/suggestions/questions.

As a side note, I'm new to this community, so I don't know how things work around here. Before now I've just used the wiki for the game info (and stealing all your precious armor data, mwahaha?). Just giving y'all a heads up. 