What is parsing? When you play EverQuest, you can have all the actions saved to a file. Parsing is the process of reading the file and turning the thousands of lines into information that you can understand. GamParse will parse the log file and show you the information grouped into fights and allowing you to track your, and others, DPS. Download and Install GamParse My programs require "Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0" installed. This comes standard with Windows Vista and Windows 7, but if you use an older version of windows, you will need to download "Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0" from the Microsoft site, on this page. Once your computer has "Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0" installed, you can run GamParse. Once you have "Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0" installed, go to the Downloads page to download the latest version of each of my programs. You will have two choices, with an installer, and without. Most people will want to download the package with the installer. Unzip the file you downloaded. If it is the package with the installer, simply run the Setup.exe and follow the prompts, which will install GamParse and create an icon on your Start menu. If you downloaded the package without the installer, you now have the GamParse.exe available. Place it into a folder of your choosing, and if you are upgrading from an older version, you can overwrite the old version. Preparing EverQuest for parsing You need to enable logging, so the information goes to a file. It is that file which GamParse will read. To turn on logging in game you enter the command: /LOG ON You can also set EverQuest to automatically start logging. In your EverQuest directory you can find the main settings file called EQClient.ini and updating this file will make logging permanently enabled. Search for LOG= and change it to appear as: LOG=TRUE Now information will be saved to your log file as you play. You may have some information filtered, so you will want to check out your filters in the Options tab. To access the Options tab in game, use the key combination of Ctrl+O and then go to the Filters tab. Set the options to 'Show' for any information you wish to parse. See the options tab shown below: If you are trying to parse your group or your raids, you will want to set most of your filters to 'Show'. Now that you have enabled a lot more information, you may want to place some of that into a minimised chat window so you don't need to see it in game. The information will still go through to your log file, so it is fine to hide it on screen. You need to create a new chat window and then right click on the chat window, select Filter and the form the list, pick each of the bits of information you want to hide. I often hide all the melee from others, spell casting, critical messages and many other messages, leaving only my own melee, melee against me and direct damage reports available. Once you have everything hidden that you don't want to see, you can minimise the window and it will no longer be visible to you in game, but still available in your log file for parsing. Just minimise the window and place it out of the way as below: Once you have filtered all the extra information into this window, after some fights there is a lot of information in there, but it hasn't been shown on screen. If you ever open this it will try to catch up everything that has been filtered in there, which has a high chance of locking up the game. NEVER OPEN THIS CHAT WINDOW AGAIN. You have been warned. Working with logfiles Now that you have EverQuest prepared for parsing, you are ready to run GamParse and start looking at the log file. Make sure you have logging turned on each time you want to parse. There are several options to look at the log file. Go to the File menu and then select one of the options. Load entire log file - This will read in the entire file, showing all fights completed. Depending on the log file, this could open days, weeks, or even months worth of fights, so it may take a while if you have a very large log file. Once it has completed, GamParse will then periodically check the file for any new information, so if the logging is active, it will also pick up any new fights as they finish. Load last 7 days (2 days, 24 hours) from a log file - These options allow you to open your most recent log file, but skip most of the old information in the file. The 7 days, 2 days and 24 hours are from the current time, so if you had backed up the log file, it will not have any information in the latest 7 days. This is mostly to allow those people with enormous log files to access just the most recent information faster. Once it has loaded in days requested, it will then check the file for any new information. Monitor a log file for new fights only - Use this when you only want to see live information. It will not load in any old information from the log file, but only look for new fights that happen after you had starting monitoring a log file. If you choose to open a file after you had previously loaded some information, it will clear your lists and then load what you had requested. Choosing the monitor the file you are in will result in 'resetting' your list of fights. There are two ways players use GamParse, as a live tool, seeing information as it happens, or to go back over old fights later to look at the fights in greater detail. As it is very common to track events live, on the Options tab, you can set a file to be automatically monitored when you start up GamParse. Enabling the option will lead you through selecting a log file, but you can set the auto-monitor to look at a different file next time using the 'Select File' button. Viewing the information Now you have some fights loaded, you will want to select a fight and look at the details of that fight. Select a fight using the Nav list on the left, or by double clicking a fight on the Fight List tab, then you can look at that fight using all the other tabs. The main information you will use is on the Overview tab, showing a quick summary of all the players involved in the fight, and the total for your raid or group. You can look into further details about how the damage was done on the Player DPS page, splitting the damage by type, by critical hits, and giving statistics about accuracry, defenses and swings per second. Track the spell casting of those on the raid or in group, including spells by the target itself. Compare players of the same class to see how their casting habits differ, or see what spells the opponent was casting, and how frequently. Tanking stats are available, so you can see how much damage they took, how hard the hits were, and see the spread of the hit sizes to gauge how effective the tank's amount of AC was. Just explore through the various tabs to see just what information is available, and if you want to understand the various pages further, look up the instructions section on this web site for details. Pasting information into EverQuest One of the main features of GamParse is the ability to share the information with others in EverQuest, on the forums, and in files you can host on the internet. To share the information in EverQuest you need to set up a hot key in game to 'Paste from Clipboard'. Go to the options window using Ctrl-O, and go to the tab called Keys. In the dropdown, go to the option of 'UI' and you will see a series of actions with a key combination next to each, some are not set and so they show as '-------'. Click on the '-------' next to 'Paste from Clipboard' and then use the key combination you want for pasting the information into EverQuest. I personally use Shift+Control+V as it is hard to accidentally hit, and Control+V was already taken. Now you can paste in EverQuest, you can share information. Many tabs in GamParse will have an option to 'Send to EQ', which will produce a summary of the data on the page and place it on the clipboard so you can paste it to EverQuest. Click into a chat bar to get a cursor, and then use your paste hot key to put the information into the game. Most outputs will be sent to the selected output channel which defaults to guild chat using '/GU' but you can change it to any channel you want, or have no channel by setting it to a single space. Some sections are specific to a player, so they will form a '/tell' to that player by default, but you can always edit the line before hitting enter if you want to share it with others.
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