Its been a long time that I’ve been working on this latest version of finduo. I think I introduced the greater Luna area search sometime around April. Its been about 7 months that I’ve been tweaking the code, also sharpening my skills in web design once again.
There’s alot of work under the cover of the new finduo. Here’s a list of the new features implemented:
- We have images, alot of images. Sometime in March of 2008 we introduced images of uo items and the list was approximately 2,500 images (and wow that was alot of work). This latest version, we have over 30,000 images, as well as 30,000 mini icons! After I extracted the images, I had photoshop run filters on the images and it took a day and a half of processing before they were completed!
- I developed some new software to extract overhead images of housing. Yes I know, I’ve been going long periods of time without actually updating the pictures of homes. Thats all fixed now, I can literally snapshot images of homes as quickly as it takes me to run around!
- I added Tokuno to the search. The comps I use for scanning have doubled. Anyone in Tokuno city will have their vendors automatically added to the index.
- We’ve integrated a wonderful Ultima Online themed free flash game into the website! Its called UO Defender. Special thanks to Noxin for branding Defender for finduo.com. I’ve been guilty of playing this game for hours on end, I’m happy I can do this on my own website now!
- The search has improved. I rewrote the routines for extracting data, its more accurate now without sacrificing speed. Stray items that didn’t make it into the index are there now.
- New commodities search! It actually sorts by price per commodity, regardless of the cost of the deed! Its always been inconvenient to me to search for commodities and having to do the math to get the best deal. That’s all fixed now!
- I had to come up with a new solution for mapping that wasn’t quite so screen-real-estate-intensive. With adding Tokuno, I needed to adjust things so I could instantly swap between shards as well as facets. The mapping is more awesome than ever, it now can zoom in to the exact pixel a vendor is standing on.
- New blog and forums! I have to admit, I’m an old dog that doesn’t like learning new tricks. I’ve been doing websites for over 12 years now, and whenever it comes to design, my first instinct is always to write something from scratch. A good friend of mine prodded me to learn some new software and I’m glad that I did. After much research I settled on Simple Machine Forums for the forums and Wordpress for the blog. (I would have selected vbulletin but its a little pricey for me at the moment).
- News! Yes, we have news now. I’ve automated the process so within an hour of EA posting news it should show up on the forums for you to comment on.
- Believe it or not, we’ve only just begun the improvements! But I’ll leave whats coming up soon for another post.
Thanks to everyone who buys Ultima Online gold from us. I love programming finduo for a living and these gold purchases help me live a very happy life (love my job)! I will keep everyone up to date with new changes here soon, in the meantime thanks for using finduo!
Kevin, aka Stubby Gnome
finduo.com programmer
