D&D 4E 4e Searchable / Sortable Index

[Siberys]

I've been working on this tool for the last three or four months, and I just put it live last night. It's a searchable and sortable index of pretty much everything 4e. It can be found HERE if you'd like to use it.

"But wait, Siberys," You ask, "The D&D Compendium already exists! Why go through the trouble of duplicating an existing tool?"

For one, I'm concerned about when the compendium will be taken down. It's likely to be up for the forseeable future, but I could see it being taken down at some point - whether to encourage people to pick up 5e, or because it's taking up too much space, or from disuse, or whatever.

Also, a number of elements in the compendium are marked as being from "Multiple Sources", which makes finding things in my books a pain since I recently let my subscription lapse. Creating my own index lets me list those repeated elements separately.

Finally, I could make a couple of tweaks to the index to suit my needs. Namely, I have marked elements that have been errataed; I've marked which elements I've houseruled; I've added in third-party books, in particular the Zeitgeist adventures, Blackdirge's Dungeon Denizens and Creature Catalogs, and Azagar's Book of Rituals; and I've included homebrewed game elements.

If you see any typos or an element isn't properly marked for errata, please tell me. There are over 25,000 entries in the database, so I'm sure I missed something somewhere.

Anyways, it's up if anyone else wants to use it.

 

[D'karr]

If you see any typos or an element isn't properly marked for errata, please tell me. There are over 25,000 entries in the database, so I'm sure I missed something somewhere.

Anyways, it's up if anyone else wants to use it.

This is very cool, and I can see the amount of work that went into it. Well done.

An enhancement I'd like to see in a resource like this is sorting by any of the columns. For example level, etc.

Once again, well done.


EDIT - Never mind the enhancement. It must have still been loading all elements. Once it did, sorting was available.


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[Siberys]

Yeah, especially for searches with a lot of returns (such as a straight monster search), give the page a minute to work through everything. I opted against pagination because I didn't want to screw around with it either as a user or a programmer, but it does mean loading time will be pretty high in some cases.

EDIT: As a heads up, the Themes page is pushing errors. I'll be fixing it later this afternoon, but until then it won't work. All of the other pages seem to be doing fine, though.

 

[Saagael]

This is awesome! I've been thinking about doing something like this in case the Compendium is taken offline, but I was hoping to go one step further, and actually put in rules, to make it a fully working compendium, and then get around copywrite issues by having it be a computer application, rather than a web application.

How hard would that be with what you have set up here? Like, if you wanted to take this database off the internet and run it from a local computer, could that be done?

 

[Siberys]

It's how I put it together, so yeah it can be done; you'd need a virtual server to run the PHP, though.

The problems with including the rules text are many, but really boil down to IP and time constraints. Putting up an index like this sits pretty squarely in fair use, I think, but if I actually put in rules text? Even if it only worked offline (something I didn't want, because I wanted to use it on my tablet), if I distributed it in any way that'd be a pretty clear IP violation. Not to mention, it took me months to collate just the data you see now - imagine how long it would take to have fully formatted rules text worked in! That's a full-time job for a team of people, not a fun diversion for a lone programming nerd. ;P

 

[Mist]

Never again will I have to spend ten minutes scanning through tons of books to find the one that has the thing I'm looking for.
Signed up here just to say thanks for this thing, so, uh... thanks for this thing! >_>

Edit: Hrm. This experience system apparently doesn't want to let me give actual real points, but I totally would if I could. That some bar on new accounts?

 

[Siberys]

Okay, the themes page is up and running. Apparently, I'd missed uploading the theme data.

EDIT: Also discovered a sorting issue I thought I'd taken care of, but now it's working.

 

[Saagael]

It's how I put it together, so yeah it can be done; you'd need a virtual server to run the PHP, though.

The problems with including the rules text are many, but really boil down to IP and time constraints. Putting up an index like this sits pretty squarely in fair use, I think, but if I actually put in rules text? Even if it only worked offline (something I didn't want, because I wanted to use it on my tablet), if I distributed it in any way that'd be a pretty clear IP violation. Not to mention, it took me months to collate just the data you see now - imagine how long it would take to have fully formatted rules text worked in! That's a full-time job for a team of people, not a fun diversion for a lone programming nerd. ;P

Yeah, I was aware that adding rules would be outside the copywrite laws. I was actually thinking of just screen-capping or copy/pasting everything from the compendium, then displaying it as text or an image, rather than formatting an endless sea of text. Still, not a fun task by any means. It was mostly for the idea of having an offline compendium so that if/when the WoTC Compendium gets shut off, I'd still have an encyclopedia of monsters.

In any case, this is really awesome, and I'll probably end up using it as is.