I recently ran into a problem where the Dota2 Web API api.steampowered.com/IEconItems_570/GetSchema/v0001/?key= was down and still is down for 3 days now.
I am working on a new version of my app – Game Stats – Dota2 Edition where I want the schema details to be present at my location. So I had no where to go but to find an alternative.
I luckily found one and sharing with you all.
Step 1: Use VPK extracter like GFSCAPE etc. to extract the items.txt from the package. This file contains the details about all item def. Once you have extracted it, you know see that it is neither json not xml.
Step 2: VDF to JSON. This is actually VALVE specific data format for data representation. You can google to conver VDF to JSON andyou will land with in a PHP script with convert using regex etc.
Step 3: Alter the script to add the following – removing comments and remove any occurences of ,} as this can’t be set using JSON as a valid format.
Step 4: Use some online json viewer to format the json and use the same.
Hope this process can help someone to get by the non availability of Dota2 Web API.
Very informative post…Liked reading it…Thank u for the share.
this article is better:
http://roshpit.ghost.io/getting-updated-item-schema-for-dota2-despite-app570econ-api-being-down-for-5-months/
I agree but people have different ways now of finding the solution. Thanks for sharing.