Hello Istarians,
In case you didn't know, Istaria Reference was originally developed using my own databases that I painfully try to keep up to date, manually. I try to keep track of delta notes and anything in the database that might be affected, I'll try to update it. I sometimes miss things. Real life sometimes prevents speedy updates.
How wonderful would it be if I just directly query Virtrium's database so everything displays in real time? Well, several pros and cons to that as you can imagine; cons usually have higher priority.
We all miss the bristugo.com's Plot Finder, so I've created a tool that attempts to be a clone of what you see when you view the Community window in game. This would be impossible trying to maintain in my own database. I'd have to manually visit every community in the game, daily to keep that up to date. No way! But, Virtrium has graciously allowed me to query their database (just one web page for now). This means everything shows in real time!
My original plan was to make it so it could be queried to show all plots that are for sale or in a certain price range, kind of like bristugo.com . But those can return about 1000-1700 records. I can't in good conscious allow their SQL server to be hit that hard for that many records per query.
For now, I've made it so you can display/search one community at a time. I'll probably in next few days, add some filters so you can make it not show owned plots or filter by price range, but it'd still be one community at a time. I'll see about trying to be clever and possibly allowing multiple communities to be queried, but I don't think I can make it search every plot in the game in one search. I might have to leave it pretty much as is, minus some filters.
You'll see a new link on http://istariareference.com called Plot Finder. So check it out and I hope it helps the players to do their homework while they research a good home to find for their Plot or Lair :)
