bigbro 1.0

an asheron’s call decal plugin to track the online statistics of your friend's list

1 summary

bigbro intercepts and logs the incoming messages pertaining those users on your friend’s list. a separate utility generates a summary reports from the logs that details time and number of logins for those friends. Use bigbro to keep track of your friends, or run on a mule account to weed out the freeloaders in your XP chain!

2 requirements:

Asheron’s Call or Asheron’s Call Dark Majesty. October 2001 Monthly Update.

See section 6 for details on operation with Nov 2001 Game Update.

Decal version 1.1.0.0

Windows 98SE or Windows 2000 Professional

3 settings

3.1 menu

there are two user accessible controls on the ingame bigbro menu

the Watch Friends checkbox enables/disables the online tracking of friends

the Regularly Ping Friends checkbox enables/disables the periodic tracking (ping) of all users on the friends list

3.2 command line

command line interface

bigbro command can be typed into the char bar. bigbro commands are accessed as /bigbro or /bb

command line options

enable/disable: identical to checking/unchecking the Watch Friends checkbox

poll/nopoll: identical to checking/unchecking the Regularly Ping Friends checkbox

interval nnn or nnn: sets the ping interval to nnn minutes. The value nnn must be between 1 and 999 minutes

help: displays the above message

4 logfiles

4.1 logfile generation

naming: logfiles are generated in the installation directory (C:\Program Files\bigbro be default). Logfiles follow the naming convention of:

yymmdd-name-bb.log where

yy = year

mm = month

dd = day

name = character name

multiple logfiles can be generated from multiple account running in a ‘dual-log’ configuration

users can log on/off at anytime. while friends’ information will not log during time offline, subsequent log entries will be appended to the logfile. Subsequent logons will append data to the logfile

Logfiles are generated in real-time – i.e. if a character is logged in through a day change (before and after 12 midnight), a new logfile will be created coincidental with the first entry past 12:00:00).

4.2 logfile format

tbd

5 report generator

5.1 main window

Generate Report: opens the standard (rev6 common controls) file open dialog

immediately generates the report upon opening

report output filename is displayed

if file exists, report is appended to existing report.

5.2 file menu

5.2.1 open file dialog

Standard Open Window

5.3 settings menu

Terse Myself: generates terse output for this user’s statistics

Terse Friends: generates terse output for all friends on the friends list

Use 24 House Time: used to select time generation in 24 hour or AM/PM format

Debug Output: adds debugging output to the reports

all settings are saved to the registry upon program exit. there is no user prompting at this time.

6 notes

NOVEMBER UPDATE

The November 2001 patch created significant upheaval with the operation of Decal – specifically, the interface to chat bar messages and commands was significantly affected by the seemingly inconsistent optimization of the AC client.exe executable. Full functionality of bigbro was finally restored with the use of Decal 2.0 RC1. While RC1 remains unsupported from the decal development community, the stability of all major functions (with the exception of the direct spellcasting interface, which is not used in bigbro) exhibits enough stability for us to recommend its use at this time.

bigbro has not been tested with components except those listed in section 2. specifically, Windows95, Windows XP and Decal beta 1.9+ have not been tested.

bigbro has not been tested extensively with the full non-alphabetic character set of legal Asheron’s Call character names

for accurate logs, the user running bigbro must exit cleanly from asheron’s call – this mean a normal shutdown (exit from the menu or <SHIFT-ESC>. shutting down using <ALT-F4> or closing the master window (if run in windowed mode) will NOT generate the user termination log. this will cause online time tracking for all characters currently logged to be in error.

bigbro will attempt to read and parse any file selected from the File->Open dialog. selection of a file other than a bigbro generated logfile may generate unknown errors.

7 credits

bigbro was developed by Di’spressa of Thistledown

please contact dispressa@hotmail.com for questions or support