User blog:Rephira/Guide to reading Raw API Data

Disclaimer

This is a work in progress. Contents of this post have been made through personal observations and by no means are official opinion, facts or any sort of representation of such opinions or facts. The author is not responsible for any sort of misunderstanding or misleading conclusions drawn based on the information below.

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=Introduction=

First of all, welcome to my guide on how to read raw API data.

I am pretty sure that many of you are familiar with various viewers for Kancolle, namely KCV and KC3Kai. Many admirals use these viewers as an aid to their daily command activity. It is a very neat tool that allows you to visualize variety of information that are otherwise very hard to grasp from just looking at your flash game screen.

However, viewers aren't really running around digging through server-side information how many 12.7cm Single Mounts you have or what the next enemy fleet is going to be. Rather, viewers are actually parser that represents relevant information with various graphic representation and also take a step further to use certain output numbers to calculate things.

What does this mean? What your viewer is actually doing when it shows you all this information from the server response made for a recent request made by the game, and if you have access to a developer tool (which you should for most browsers...), you would be able to read what your viewer is showing you in a completely raw text. Of course, such endeavor might sound inefficient, because it really does not achieve anything that your viewer couldn't already do for you. However, the viewer can only do so much as to do things that it was programmed to carry out, and it does not think for itself.

Learning how to read a raw API response data can have its merits. Personally I feel that people below might find the information here interesting

1. People who like numbers... A LOT OF NUMBERS. You can be dumped with 1235792470921357 different values and you'd be happy. 2. Programmers who would like to play around and make their own little gadgets for KanColle, but have no idea what any of those API data want to say. 3. Theorycrafters who would like to access info that are sometimes no apparent on the viewers too.

Hope you enjoy what is coming.

Reph

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