Hi Folks,

as you might have noticed, PK Trader wasn’t able to track any stats the last few days,
since PerBlue decided to relaunch their website with heavy use of Ajax.

Meanwhile I converted most of my background job scripts to simulate Ajax mouseclicks
to gather the relevant tradepost / hats and rankings data.

So far only city updates and user profiles remain broken,
all other stats should start plotting again within the next hours.

Please let me me know if you still see something wrong on the site.

Thanks,
AngryMinotaur/HappyMinotaur

Hi folks,

I’ve been rather busy with my baby son recently, and PK Trader had some hick-ups lately, but everything seems to run fine again.

PK Trader has gone through a lot of changes.
The webserver and database have finally moved from an old mac mini 1,6GHz to my big iMac 3,4Ghz,
resulting in a huge boost for the background price plotting, chain calculation, page compression, graphics compression and finally page delivery time.
(Before an hourly price update took 50 minutes, and plotting some graphs could not be done in realtime or even within one hour. So I had to pre-generate them in background and did only update them once a day. Now an update cycle is completely done within 10 minutes. Realtime plotting works for most items.)

All webserver database and scripting software is up to date again, (there have been troublesome changes in configuration though), even in the php language I used for scripting.

PerBlue changed their id tags within the tradedata page, resulting in prices not being updated in my database for about one week. (Always be skeptical if you see no price changes for all items on the frontpage. Should be fine again now.)

The PK City Directory subpager is now working correctly, and now showing all the cities in the DB not “all-1” 😉
US states could not be changed recently, always showing cities of Alabama for US, thanks to Scott for reporting this. It’s now fixed.

Greetings,
AngryMinotaur/HappyMinotaur

Please be patient with PK Trader updates, as my son was born last week, daily business needs to settle down a bit before I’m back on making up to date changes in PK Trader. BTW writing this is tough, holding a baby in my arms 😉

PK Trader was updated for the recently introduced fire metal, created from the also new ash feather.
As well as some swag updates.

Updated PK Trader statistics for the two newly introduced kingdom hats.

• Monolithic Hat – for the kingdom with most monoliths destroyed
• Crystals Hat – for the kingdom with the highest crystal production

Both can be seen on the PK Trader Development page for either PK Web or PK Mobile.

By the way: Madison, the developer city and biggest in PK Web just got destroyed. If you search for a big tradepost now, you may want to visit München in Germany, post in german chat for invitation, they all understand english.

Hi Folks,

just a short notice:

I finally managed to record the PK Web ranking statistics for kingdom influence, kingdom conquest, city development and of course the weekly hat statistics into my database.
Plotting for those values will start as soon as there is enough data available.

Further I fixed some minor errors and mix ups between mobile and web data.

I also did get some requests to move over to the new gold values which in my eyes should be no longer a problem as prices start to stabilize, lets still wait if halloween might mess this up.
For the new gold values, it should also be possible to plot long time graphs as requested.

And as you may have noticed, the database moved to a much more capable machine which speeds up things a lot.

Regards,
HappyMinotaur/AngryMinotaur

Big change in PK – Food is now an official resource

The latest change to Parallel Kingdom introduced the possibility to sell food for gold in a tradepost.
This makes food a new available resource which is not any longer calculated through the cost to create refined oil from crude.

I’m not sure how well this will work as I expect a lot of food to player transfers for dummy gold amounts, making this value much more unpredictable than the former artificial calculation, so I decided to stick with the old one for now.

I try to incorporate the new food value on the front page as soon as I have more stable data.

Other updates:

• PK Web Data is now recorded automatically without the need for manual fixing, via the new public available URL: http://parallelkingdom.com/TradeData.aspx?WorldID=2
• Added some more cities to PK Web City Directory.
• Charts are now rendered with tags [mobile] or [web] to better identify what you’re actually looking at.

Some fixes:

• PK web chart overview, now renders correctly even if monthly and quarterly data for Tops and Flops is not yet available.

Soon coming feature:

• Comparator will be extended soon to support drop trade calculation between PK Web “Horizons” and PK Mobile “Legends”

As you might have noticed, PK Trader’s design and menu structure changed slightly to more easily incorporate the second database for the PK Web based subpages.

PK Trader – Mobile centric pages are now highlighted with a RED color side menu (as you got used to it for a long time already)
PK Trader – Web based pages are shown with a BLUE color side menu (still not much here, I need to fill the database first)
PK Trader – common content is shown on pages with a GREEN color side menu

Further the submenu tab links, now exclude the currently shown page, which on one side makes the menus move from page to page, but at least it should get things a little bit more compact.

Whenever you click on a subpage, you should reach the content for the previously chosen PK world Web/Mobile.

PK Web subpages will be added as soon as enough data is available to render the subpage content correctly.
Although there are some minor showstoppers for PK Web which include the hat, kingdom and city development statistics as they are not directly accessible the same way they are on PK Mobile.
Good news, I already was able to extract newest cities, starting from the first ever built city, so this information will be available soon.

Hi folks,

some updates about the ongoing PK Web integration into PK Trader…

As more and more people are moving towards PK Web, which has completely different market values compared to the PK mobile version,
PK Trader with its current information is of no big help for our hardline merchants out there.

From today on the market data of PK Web is also recorded on PK Trader, although the graph plotting and subpages
need to be substantially redesigned. (not yet public)

UPDATE: this is done manually at the moment as for PK Web there is a logged in session required to get accurate data,I already contacted PerBlue for a free link to PK Web Tradedata.

PK Trader will be especially valuable for the browser based version of Parallel Kingdom, as you can use browser tabs or side by side now during trading. Just think about having Matrix Calculator side by side.

Stay tunes,
Angry/HappyMinotaur

Another huge update by PerBlue affecting some calculations in PK Trader too.

• Updated PK Advisor subpage with all german translations to reflect the new and modified specialization classes. (Best Weapon/Armor combinations for these new classes yet unknown.)
• The merchant specialization now affects the tax from tradeposts, I’m not yet sure if I should integrate such a change into PK Trader price calculations. (Such advanced players should be capable of subtracting 1-3% of a value by themselves ???)
• Needed to revert some database tweaks which should have speed-up hourly price calculations but I reached the maximum of my computer memory ending up in slowing down the whole process even more.

There are now 14 specialization classes available for Parallel Kingdom.