S_Bartfast

Very good @deraven! Yes, I dare say you are correct. I think it must have been the Dragon that I was thinking of. Thanks:

I've been trying to remember a set for days and just can't recall what it was. It's a large classic set consisting many, many of 2x4 bricks of all the same colour (yellow I think) and the model was a large duck or something. It's an old set and builds one of those pixilated sculpture type of models, kind of like this: It's not this model in particular, I just posted it as an example of the style of model I'm thinking of... I'm pretty sure the one I'm trying to recall was an official Lego set and as I say I think it was a large duck or something but I just can't seem to find it. Any ideas?

To be clear, the reason Brickficiency was slow is not because of the page scraping. Admittedly the scraping was slow but the great majority of the time was in the actual searching algorithm itself, which is necessarily very computationally intensive. As it is I find it hard to imagine how an exhaustive search (such as what Brickficiency does) could be made much faster. Mdoupe has most certainly implemented several clever optimisations to reduce the search time as much as he could and, while there are no doubt still other optimisations available that are yet to be implemented, doing an exhaustive search of the entire space (which is what is required to be guaranteed to find the best solution) is unavoidably expensive. There are however several non-exhaustive search methods available that focus on just key parts of the space. On the whole these non-exhaustive searches do a remarkably good job in just a fraction of the time, they are however not guaranteed to find the best solutions - though they can get surprisingly close. It is no doubt one of these non-exhaustive algorithms that BrickLink must be using to get the results they do.

There are a few places you could ask. Probably the best would be 'mkdir's subredit: https://www.reddit.com/r/brickficiency/ Of you could create an issue on the GitHub project page itself: https://github.com/WindmillHelix/Brickficiency2/issues/13 Oh, I see you've already done that - any got a solution :), well I guess that makes the rest of my post kind of redundant. The problem seems to be with your "Settings.xml" file. It will most likely be in: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Brickficiency\Brickficiency-Settings.xml or similar. See if you can't workout the problem my examining or deleting and replacing the file. If you're still having trouble post a copy of your Settings.xml file some where and I'll take a look at it myself. All the best, Slarti. By the way, what is going on with the formatting in this forum? I appreciate there implementing an upgrade or something but what's with all the broken links and images.

Yeah, it's kind of easy to miss that one. Enjoy ;)

And here is a direct link to the package: https://github.com/W...iency_2.0.0.zip

It is, and I've done it for you ;) You should now find a file called "Debug-parsesource.html" in your 'debug' folder which will be filled with the last page that was parsed for pricing data. I also corrected what I believe was a small typo in regard to extraction colour options for pieces. There was a line that read: foreach (Match colourmatch in Regex.Matches(page, "http://www\\.bricklink\\.com/catalogPG\\.asp\\?" + item.type + "=" + item.number + "&colorID=([0-9]+)")) { However the page being parsed actually contains a capital 'C' for "ColorD=..." and seemed to be being missed by this search. Hopefully this will help with your issues. In particular I found the optimisation was getting tripped up by rck004 (Jet - Trans-Neon Green Visor), probably because it's colour is assigned as "(Not Applicable)". With the modification I was able to get the optimisation to run however no 1, 2 or 3 store solutions could be found to satisfy all your pieces. After 'excluding' all pieces that were available from fewer than 100 stores, but adding back all 4 pieces that had their colour set to "(Not Applicable)" Brickficiency was able to find 14 solutions. Anyway, here's a link to the 'Alpha' again to save you hunting back to find it: https://dl.dropboxus...storesAlpha.exe

Curious... It's a little hard to debug without being able to reproduce the problem, but it appears that the issue is that a page is received however the page does not contain the information expected. In particular the source for the page received does not contain the string: <B>Currently Available</B> What do you get when you click the "Show Bricklink Price Guide" option from the context menu: This should open the following page in your browser: http://www.bricklink...2013&colorID=11 Does that page open properly? BTW the "roaming/brickficiency/debug/debug-priceguide.txt" file is empty for me as well.

Hmm, well, I'm afraid all I can say is "Works for me":

Arr, I see. I'd thought it was something I'd done. Care to post us a parts list and I'll investergate.

Hmm, curious. Is the original program working and performing the optimisations for you properly? I did add a little fix to do with receiving blank pages from BrickLink as I was getting "Excpetions" while I was debugging. I have now removed the "little fix" to set it back to be the same as the regular program. Try downloading the 'exe' again and see if it's now behaving the same as the original. If that still fails I'll swap it over to a "Debug" version (rather than "Release") which is what I believe the original executable was compiled as. BTW, I'm using Win10 as well.

Okay, here is a link to the 'alpha' build I mentioned above: https://dl.dropboxus...storesAlpha.exe You should be able to just copy this executable into the same directory as your regular "Brickficiency.exe" file and if you want to give the alpha a look just run the "Brickficiency - AvailstoresAlpha.exe" instead. Note, you should still be able to run the regular Brickficiency program in whatever way you have been previously. Just be aware that looking up the number of available stores for each piece takes a little time. It's not much of a problem when you add pieces individually but if you import a whole list the program can bog down for quite a while as it fetches all the pages. Note that the 'alpha' program fetches the piece information in the same way the regular program does (which it does when you click the "Calculate" button) however it does this when the pieces are added rather than just before the optimisation is carried out.

I was working on that and I got it to a kind of "proof of concept" stage which was when I posted the screenshot. However, not long after that there was this post from mdoupe: So I just kind of gave up on the project. There were a few issues with my 'alpha' to do with prompting for the users password and things so I wasn't intending to let it loose on the public and I just kind of let it slide when I saw the "impending obsolescence" comment. I do however have some spare time on my hands again now so I could take another swipe it it if it's worth doing. Unfortunately the code I attempted to commit doesn't seem to have made it to repository after all so I'll have to start a fresh, but I certainly can do it if theirs interest.

Yeah, it was designed with King of Tokyo in mind. For those that don't know King of Tokyo is a dice rolling game that uses oversized dice and this tower has been designed to accommodate KoT sized dice (these are the dice used in the videos). While 6 KoT dice work almost flawlessly 7 and even 8 dice do fit however there is an increased chanced that one of the dice may spill out of the tray at the bottom or end up stacking ontop of one of the other dice. It's not really a problem when this happens as it's still clear what was rolled and easy to resolve but it does tend to happen more when more than 6 dice are used. Note it's not that common to roll 7 dice in KoT and very rear to need all 8. Rest assured however this tower will handle itit should all 8 be required ;) As random as dice rolls are. I haven't done any statistical sampling or anything but there are enough baffles and edges in there to give the dice good scattering.

Okay, I've finally finished this project. Here is a video showing the completed tower in action: And here is a clip showing just the tray: