I posted the GIF below in this IHG thread … but it’s difficult to share because it is my view of the galaxy and it shows information I would not want others to see. I.e. a quickie fix/update by Jay would be some sort of option that provides an “observer” point of view - the current “u” keyboard shortcut (nor “z”) does not do that.
http://forum.ironhelmet.com/uploads/db4495/107/dc3512e78a2bcb4a.gif
As I see it, the minimum data that would be necessary for a simple visualization are these three files:
Visualizing battles would require another file of carrier movement data:
4) {carrierid, carrierowner, shipcount, departurestar, departuretick, arrivalstar, arrivaltick} for every carrier trip.
JSON files would be my preference, but I suck at frontend/viz stuff so I shouldn’t really be choosy.
I’d love to have battle information. You could “easily” animate a flash whenever a battle above a certain size (changing with time) took place.
Very, very nice. That’s exactly the sort of post-game log I’d love to see. (I play among friends, so the post-game debriefing is often the most fun part of the whole experience.)
I recently posted the 10-day battle GIF in this thread … so you might want to bookmark that for future stuff if interested.
some tips.
You can use the url trition.ironhelmet.com/gameu/number to load the game with an uncompressed version of the scripts. (gameu - the u is for “uncompressed”)
To make the easier even easier to access, I’ll make it so you can bring up the main game model from the console in the next version. You can then just open the js console then type window.NeptunesPried.universe.galaxy and you will get all the fleets, stars, players ect ect that you can see in your game.
You could then start making regular archives of this data.
Thanks for the information, Jay.
Do you currently save the the historical “master data” anywhere, or only the current situation. (I suppose saving every hour could start taking space, but this is text, so…)
Wow cool! Could you also use this to keep track of who got what tech when? This is the kind of info that’s handy to know as it gives you a hint as to who is trading with who - I’m always too lazy to manually keep track of it 
@tlwest I’m not currently saving off a snapshot of the data every hour. Its on a todo list but its not as easy as it sounds for a few reasons.
@lookupANDY you should change your name to lazyANDY!
Yes, I thought about that but I couldn’t be bothered
This function will remove warpgates, infrastructure, ships (stationed or midflight), all paths and will change stars within scanning range so they appear like not yours.
javascript:)Note: Chrome won’t let you paste javascript: in adressbar due to security reasons so I added one additional character, which you need to delete.
Just press CTRL+V,Home,Del,Enter. 
Firefox won’t even launch the function, you would have to enable it in settings, or put it in the Console F12, without the keyword javascript:
read the new thread
#I moved this to it’s own, updated thread
Absolutely fantastic.
Love your work mate.
Kudos.
Is that… the galaxy that pacman comes from??
Can you elaborate?
We its not really any one thing that super complicated. Like all of Neptune’s Pride, it’s just a lot of simple things.
If we wanted a data snapshot every hour I would have to have some kind of process that keeps a track of when snapshots are due and save them out as required when the game is requested by a player. If a player opens the game every 6 hours for example I would need to advance the game clock 1 hour, save a snapshot and repeat 6 times. Something like that.
I would then need some kind of interface for requesting the snapshots from the server and playing them back.
We would probably want some system to animate between one snapshot and the next. There is no notion of a carrier animating around at the moment.
just lots of little things.
Jay
I’m probably seriously misunderstanding something… but can’t it be a step at the end of the current tick processing code that dumps the star and player information in a database?
Alternatively, let us do it ourselves by providing a “take snapshot RIGHT NOW” api. For example, I call Neptune's Pride and it returns JSON:
{stars: [each star is the exact same as NeptunesPride.universe.galaxy.stars with private data stripped],
players: [each player is the same as NeptunesPride.universe.player but with all the private information removed],
tick: current tick number}
and then let us set up our own hourly cronjobs.
How about a witness program as a plugin for users?
This is what is returned when you request a games data when you are not in the game. In theory you can do this now.
Oh, perfect! I’ll give it a try. If that does work now, then you don’t need anything else to keep at least me happy 
Do you have to be logged in or can I make requests for game data without being logged in? Obviously my hourly cronjob wouldn’t be logged in.
Hey Jay,
So I tried this. When I’m in the lobby, I can get the public data from any games (ones I’m playing and ones I’m not playing). This is cool - but when I’m not logged in at all, it tells “me must_be_logged_in”. What a pity!
So, I’m wondering if you could either provide a url you can hit with the game id and it sends back the data (can be identical format to full_universe_report, or whatever) - this would be awesome cause I’m lazy - OR if you can change it so that you CAN do a full_universe_report without being logged in and it works the same as when doing it from the lobby.
If that works, I’ll be extra happy 
In the meantime, I might see if I can log in with PhantomJS/CasperJS and then perform the queries from there - I only need to be in the lobby to query any game, after all. EDIT: CasperJS did not work 
For some reason, I wasn’t able to navigate the menus…
Thanks!