Mob List

[divisortheory]

I need a list of every mob in the game. If anyone can point me to such a list, or give me an idea for easily compiling one I woudl appreciate it. Alternatively, if someone wants to make such a list for me, I would give appropriate credit when I finish my parser. I've tried some creative logic to determine what's a mob and what's a player, but no solution will be as good as just having a list of all possible mobs.

[Ddong]

http://ffxi.somepage.com/mobdb/

[Ichthyos]

I'd suggest asking the somepage admins to do a quick query on their database for you.

[divisortheory]

Ahh, I thought of Alla but then realized it's a slow piece of shit. Dunno why I didn't think of Somepage. Thanks

[Not Kuno]

Just an FYI:

Somepage doesn't list any Dynamis mob.

[thegilseller]

Alternatively, mysterytour.

[divisortheory]

Yea, I thought about mysterytour. But I don't wanna copy and paste from 1100 different webpages if I don't have to lol. I emailed somepage, mabye I can get some from them, and some from Alla (e.g. Dynamis mobs). not sure anyone has beseiged/assault mobs up yet though, i might have to do my own DAT mining for those.

[Russta]

Vanamon

It's Japanese but you should be able to make your way around it quite easily. One of the best sites I know of and use almost daily for finding camps and stuff.

[Wizerd]

divisortheory, there are character names such as Suzaku, Byakko, Behemoth, Guivre, etc. Not just mules, actual characters. That's gonna screw your whole list idea up... =/

[divisortheory]

divisortheory, there are character names such as Suzaku, Byakko, Behemoth, Guivre, etc. Not just mules, actual characters. That's gonna screw your whole list idea up... =/

Yea, I've thought of that already. It's a limitation I just have to live with. I don't imagine Spyle's FFXIP handles the case any better, because what are you gonna do really?

Kuyui hits Nidhogg for 26 points of damage.
Nidhogg hits Kuyui for 26 points of damage.

both look exactly the same to the parser. Actually, that's not entirely true, in some situations the parser can tell definitively which one is a player and which one is an enemy, but in some cases it can't.

I thought about various types of "smarts" to have it figure out which is a player and which is an enemy. For example, player names match the regular expression [A-Z][a-z]{2,14} (a capital letter followed by 2-14 lower case letters). I had the idea well if something doesn't match that, it must be a mob. Unfortunately that doesn't work. In Beseiged, say General Zazarg is fighting next to you. He should be classified as a player for all intents and purposes. I thought about checking for the word "the" in front of the name. This fails too, again in beseiged consider the other non-general NPCs fighting alongside you. "The Volunteer hits the Troll Hoplites for 65 points of damage."

In the end, the case where a player has the exact same name as an enemy is extremely rare, and while it's not perfect, I can live with telling people that your parse is just going to be fucked up if you do that.

[Khamsin]

Or, in the case of a player named Fafnir:

Fafnir hits Nidhogg for 26 points of damage.
Nidhogg hits Fafnir for 381 points of damage.

Fafnir being a taru BLM without stoneskin or blink up.

[Dezzimal]

Aren't there different codes in the message headers for "Damage taken by player" and "Attacks by party member"? I remember messing around with this kind of thing when I used ffassist.

[aurik]

Aren't there different codes in the message headers for "Damage taken by player" and "Attacks by party member"? I remember messing around with this kind of thing when I used ffassist.

There are different message headers for self/party/alliance/other attack and take damage. They're used internally by the FFXI client to apply chat filters.

[Shuemue]

You could parse a conversation with Argus the NPC in Port Bastok >_>

[divisortheory]

Aren't there different codes in the message headers for "Damage taken by player" and "Attacks by party member"? I remember messing around with this kind of thing when I used ffassist.

There are different message headers for self/party/alliance/other attack and take damage. They're used internally by the FFXI client to apply chat filters.

Indeed, that's why I was careful to use the word "sometimes". Example, suppose my name is Nidhogg.

Nidhogg hits Nidhogg for 27 points of damage. (me hitting him)
This will be code 20

Nidhogg hits Nidhogg for 27 points of damage. (him hitting me)
This will be something else. Maybe 27? Can't remember


However, for people outside of your party and alliance, it doesn't distinguish. E.g. if the player named Nidhogg is outside of my alliance, and he is the one currently fighting the monster Nidhogg, both of the above two messages will come across with a code of 40. Essentially what it boils down to is that you just can't always tell. Having a list of every mob in the game is almost foolproof.

As a fallback (in addition to using a list), what I may consider doing is adding another node to the tree control that you've seen in various screenshots. The node will be called "Players & Enemies" or something like that. You'll see a list of all players and enemies, including the ones it can't figure out, as well as how the parser currently views them i.e. "this guy is a player, this guy is an enemy, this guy I can't tell" and allow the person using the parser to select a new status for them. It won't change the fact that things will be fucked up if there's a player and an enemy with exactly the same name though, I don't see any way of handling that at all. Manual selection would be useful, however, since I doubt I'll get a complete list of every monster in the game, and people are eventually going to parse on mobs that aren't in my list and therefore won't know about.

[Wizerd]

Aren't there different codes in the message headers for "Damage taken by player" and "Attacks by party member"? I remember messing around with this kind of thing when I used ffassist.

There are different message headers for self/party/alliance/other attack and take damage. They're used internally by the FFXI client to apply chat filters.

Indeed, that's why I was careful to use the word "sometimes". Example, suppose my name is Nidhogg.

Nidhogg hits Nidhogg for 27 points of damage. (me hitting him)
This will be code 20

Nidhogg hits Nidhogg for 27 points of damage. (him hitting me)
This will be something else. Maybe 27? Can't remember


However, for people outside of your party and alliance, it doesn't distinguish. E.g. if the player named Nidhogg is outside of my alliance, and he is the one currently fighting the monster Nidhogg, both of the above two messages will come across with a code of 40. Essentially what it boils down to is that you just can't always tell. Having a list of every mob in the game is almost foolproof.

As a fallback (in addition to using a list), what I may consider doing is adding another node to the tree control that you've seen in various screenshots. The node will be called "Players & Enemies" or something like that. You'll see a list of all players and enemies, including the ones it can't figure out, as well as how the parser currently views them i.e. "this guy is a player, this guy is an enemy, this guy I can't tell" and allow the person using the parser to select a new status for them. It won't change the fact that things will be fucked up if there's a player and an enemy with exactly the same name though, I don't see any way of handling that at all. Manual selection would be useful, however, since I doubt I'll get a complete list of every monster in the game, and people are eventually going to parse on mobs that aren't in my list and therefore won't know about.

Well, if you're gonna watch a player named Fafnir fight Fafnir and he's not in your alliance, I don't see any reason you'd want to parse it anyway.

It isn't that hard to make a complete list of mobs. As a programmer, you shouldn't have any trouble doing it, either. If you open the DAT files in a Hex editor you can see most/all of them have some kind of header label, or something that indicates what the file is. Just make a program that will iterate through each and every DAT file and add non-duplicates to a list. Then erase names from zones without mobs (would be bunched together), and manually (unfortunately) erase NPC and other such names that you recognize and don't want there. That's probably the fastest and most accurate way to get every mob in the game.

Only other thing I can suggest is using memory and researching from player encounters, the mobs in each zone, region by region.

[aurik]

Sadly, FFXI fails really hard at chat filters.

A better way to do it would be to read the incoming packetstream and associate messages to the objects in memory themselves. If you can query the object in FFXI's memory, it's easy to determine if its a PC or NPC. However, because you are working through that "chat log plugin" interface I doubt you have direct access to FFXI's memory.

[divisortheory]

Sadly, FFXI fails really hard at chat filters.

A better way to do it would be to read the incoming packetstream and associate messages to the objects in memory themselves. If you can query the object in FFXI's memory, it's easy to determine if its a PC or NPC. However, because you are working through that "chat log plugin" interface I doubt you have direct access to FFXI's memory.

Eh, I'm not releasing this thing as a plugin to yet another app. Either I'm gonna figure out the memory structure myself or it's not going ot be real time. That simple. That being said, the chat monitoring plugin is written in .NET, and therefore easily disassemblable. Although obfuscated, that presents only an hour or two's worth of hurdle as somewhere it's got to call ReadProcessMemory, and it certainly can't hide that call very long. I don't want to do it by figuring out what this other tool does. I want to do it the "real" way, but if that fails sinec I have zero to no experience reverse engineering software, I can always fallback on disassembling LogMon.