Currently, there are only a few pieces of data that can be retrieved historically. The intel graphs give access to every 6 ticks worth of player data. The stats on these begin dropping off as the game progresses and they don’t contain star ownership.
Both are missing several ticks worth of data. More recently, we start to gather more, but there’s still some blanks spots where the automated script failed.
After two weekends worth of work, this stat collection works much in the same way that Qwerty and Dysp’s stat collectors do, with a few easy to use enhancements. There’s still some more fine tuning of controls required here, but some quick actions include:
Advance to the previous and next ticks:
← and →
advance to the first and last ticks:
[shift] ← and [shift] →
Switch between infrastructure and technology views
[tab]
At this time, the views really only work with 8 player games. It should still record games with more people. It just looks broken for the moment and future refinements should resolve that.
@Dysp has offered to do some work in the game code, perhaps its about time we start saving off whole save games to the database every 6 hours so that, after the game is finished, a site like yours could query the API to retrieve full scanning data for each 6 hour block.
I really want to support you guys building interesting tools and additions to the game.
I am going to start a new game for my company buddies very soon and would like to make sure I have all the data gathered at the end.
Could you please tell me in simple words what do I need to do to gather the data needed for this kind of analysis, and how often do I have to do this (it will be a turn based game)?
I am eagerly looking forward to progress on this topic, as it makes the after-game very interesting and makes people more likely to start a new one afterwards. I must admit that the moment of winning the game as it is right now is rather unspectacular (only the message displayed and a mail to the players). This kind of debriefing would nicely fill that gap and allow for tactical and strategical analysis (to some extent).
I’ll see what I can do tonight to provide up to date tracking for turn based games.
@JayKyburz, @nstarz:
Ultimately, a data dump from every six ticks should be more than enough data. While it’s nice to have more granular control, I can do interpolation on the data to reconstruct the missing ticks - which may be overkill.
That being said, a built in replay tool with all the fleet data at the end of the game would still be awesome.
That’s been a recurring request for a while now though:
At the top of the screen, you’ll see “Search Game ID.” Copy and paste your game Id there and hit enter. You can force an update by clicking the refresh icon at the top right of the page. If you do this after every turn, you’ll ensure that every tick is being collected.
Since turn based games can quickly jump through ticks if all players are active, force refresh retrieves fresh data instead of pulling results from cached memory
You may want to create a test game to validate this is working as it should.
I just read your post. Great stuff. My game had some turns already, but the most interesting phase is still to come.
So I will try to do the updates in each turn. I just have to synchronize this with me making the turn.
My game is 15 players game, so the display is not yet correct, which I understand is work in progress.
As I understand it this is only the matter of displaying the data, the data acquired by update is still complete, am I right?
This looks great Kexington and I’ll start using it for my turn games but I wish it could accommodate more than 8 players. Are you not supporting it at this time?
@barka, I haven’t put any development time into this since May. I’m looking at the server now, it looks like it stopped automatically recording games after my database went offline at some point. I restarted the daemon and it seems to be working now.
When I started this, there were only a handful of others doing this similarly.
@wrenoud has his API. I’m fairly sure it only showed the current tick: Playing with Triton Data it looks like it may be nonfunctional at the moment - only showing a blank graph.
And then @Dysp had some work done on gathering game data as well. His site was always offline and didn’t offer some of the niceties that I was looking for such as using the arrow keys to jump through the tick data.
With my current work schedule, I don’t think I’ll be able to update my code base further in the foreseeable future. I’ll see if my server manages to collect the next couple ticks worth of data that it’s tracking. There may be more issues.
Even now, just doing a cursory look through the forums, I’m not seeing any new developments. @JayKyburz has been working on Blight, so I don’t think NP2’s official API has gotten any love recently.