Public release of tool (HarmlessButler)

Many of you may have heard whispers of HarmlessButler, the game-UI-enhancing tool I developed several months ago to improve many of the annoyances found in the current UI and aid coordinated operations.  We at Harmless kept it "secret" because A) it did help us operate more efficiently and effectively, which we felt we needed as a competitive edge over the initially-expected talents of our enemies, and B) more importantly, it served as bait for a spy-catching honeypot.

Well, we no longer feel so threatened as an alliance in the current climate, where people instead seem to think we're untouchable...which I'll presume is the over-cautious voice of inexperience.  And while HB could still serve its role in enticing spies to spring our canary traps, my vanity and desire to see greater in-game activity prevails.

I can honestly say that using HarmlessButler is a substantial improvement in convenience and reduction in the workload of account maintenance, making it a valuable modification for any player.  It is very likely that I'd not have stayed had I had to use the stock interface.  HarmlessButler's attack-planning guide would also aid those who would oppose Harmless, and I considered removing them for the public release.  However, I prefer to be able to say that I'm releasing the full product and offering to you every benefit that I sought for my own alliance members (with the exception of bits that tattled on spies).  And, as I said, I'm really quite vain and want to see many people enjoy my work...particularly before the devs release a whole new interface that breaks HB and possibly renders it mostly obsolete.

I would be remiss not to explicitly note that using 3rd-party userscripts is always dangerous, and you should never use them unless you trust the author and also the server that hosts his work.  The security risks associated with userscripts are by no means trivial.  I have sought to keep my work secure and safe, and operating within the game's rules, but offer no guaranties and disclaim myself of any liability for the results of using this script.  If this doesn't scare you away, visit HarmlessButler's new home on Arcanum Illyria to see a full feature listing and try it out for yourself.

Please note that unlike many other userscripts, this one only works with Greasemonkey on Firefox.  Chrome and Opera are sadly not supported due to a lack of essential features--particularly E4X (ECMAScript for XML, needed by my templating subsystem).

*edited for grammar*


Edited by HonoredMule - 21 Sep 2010 at 04:44

If you're using Firefox with Greasemonky installed, it should.  It's past my bedtime right now, but if you can provide more information about how it fails, I'll look into it tomorrow and see if I can help you.

This has already proved useful in the first 5 minutes of use!  Very nice!

Larry wrote: Your operating system should have 0 affect dude, its a greasemonkey plugin. I'll update in a few sec if its working. Confirming it works fine on a mac. Its a rather nicely written addition. Still pouring over the code. EDIT: What's the xml parser for the datafile_towns.xml stuff in there for?

A local copy of the datafile_towns.xml is stored in your browser as json tables for data lookup.  This is how the script is able to provide more detailed information about various towns, players, etc. with which you are interacting.  Otherwise every event would be linked to nothing but coordinates and you wouldn't even be able to tell if there's a town there let alone what player, alliance, race...

If people wish to tinker with it, I can at some point provide some architectural overview and general documentation.  It is somewhat divided into single-purpose subsystems, but in a way that's not made clear by their respective contents.


Edited by HonoredMule - 21 Sep 2010 at 14:07

Regarding this:

GM Stormcrow wrote: b) the Security of your personal data within the tool

I have published some auxiliary material addressing this concern.  It is rather sparse, but I will add more as I come up with it.  In particular, you can at least know whether the script is capable of sniffing your login password on this or other sites.

http://illyriad.honoredsoft.com/wiki/How_to_Spot_Unsafe_Scripts