Global statistics

[Heli Shed]

Global statistics from a flight log to scores.

 

VFS's can opt in or out, but a global stats system like 'back in the day'. Wasn't it yoda or the 3sqn guys that ran with something like this during FC1.11 and then it sort of died out for fc2?

[Frostie]

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=50206&highlight=stats

[Heli Shed]

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=50206&highlight=stats

Thanks for the link frostie.

 

I was aware of the possibility of it coming into fruition for FC2. The vfs I was a Sqn leader with at the time were not too keen for the idea due to exploits and possible innacuracies. There was no unbiased party running the global stats.

 

However, and case makes a really good point in the final post about the difficulties with log handling, it would be nice to see if this could be possible with DCS world. I have a few projects on the burner right now, one being a global flight log system, very similar to the excellent 476th flight log, but this relies upon manual entry and upkeep which is laborious and expensive in the commodity of 'time'. Not a problem if its for your own VFS, but for the community? Er...................I don't think any of us have enough hours in the day.

 

The global flight log will handle flight hours currently, but am struggling to try to automatically have scores imported and entered.

 

The purpose of the post therefore was to ensure I was not creating something that was already in existence. I known mike stalturn (code), has done some tremendous work already, but anyone else?

 

Regards

 

Hope all is well with the 51st.

 

'T'

[Grimes]

The prospect of global statistics might be worth another look sometime in the future. I know Speed in starting to code in stat tracking into Slmod. Additionally the simulator scripting engine allows for highly customized scripts to be put into the mission itself for added stat tracking. I already have a very rudimentary stat tracking for objectives implemented in one of my missions and I think Speed also has a similar feature in one of his. Hell it might be fun to display the mission stats in progress... x missiles fired, x aircraft spawned, and so on and so forth. That said building a stats thing from scratch isn't exactly a priority for me at the moment. Between testing, mission scripting, and other things I don't have the time to start a stats project.

 

However it is probably healthy to get a dialog going.

[Speed]

I donno about global statistics- but like Grimes said, I plan on including the first implementation of the Slmod statistics system with Slmod version 7. Statistics would be kept on each player that joins the server, and indexed by each player's unique UCID. The stats would be kept in a text file which would be a serialized Lua table. The kind of statistics that would be kept would be things like flight time, units killed, number of crashes, etc. I still need to come up with an exact list and plan on how to implement it. Right now, I'm working on upgrading the Slmod code base, not adding new features.

 

Global statistics would be something that server admins would have to negotiate amongst themselves. Basically, if you wanted globally shared statistics, you could have the Slmod stats for each DCS server output to a different shared Dropbox folder. There would be some "central" server (doesn't need to be running DCS) that all the DCS servers share their individual Dropbox stats folder with. This central server would just be running some simple process/script that would open up each DCS server's stats file, compile all the stats together, then output some global stats file somewhere.

 

Oh and the final link in the chain could be that this global stats file is then shared back to all the DCS servers that contributed to it. When a player on one of the servers asks Slmod to display his stats on screen (the command will probably be "-stats me"/"-statsme"), then Slmod simply uses the global stats file instead of the local stats table/file for that specific server.

 

In summary, making the probable future Slmod stats system become a global stats-keeping system simply comes down to having two new options in the /Saved Games/DCS/Slmod/config.lua file: one option specifies what file to use for the server's local stats. The other option specifies what file to use as a reference for displaying player stats. The "hard" part is getting the stats system completed, and getting server admins to coordinate and agree on using it. Actually writing it won't be hard, just time consuming.

Edited January 11, 2013 by Speed

[Cali]

That sounds pretty awesome Speed, hope progress moves in the right direction for this.

[Sov13t]

Let us know if you need tester/volunteer servers for this Speed.

 

FTP syncing might be a little more bullet proof than Dropbox syncing. Just so that we are not forced to rely on a third party service. Most dedicated servers already have FTP running anyway. Just a thought.

 

I am sure you already looked at Case's work, I feel that the variables kept/logged by his stats are great and can be used for reference.

 

Good luck with the project. :thumbup:

[Speed]

Let us know if you need tester/volunteer servers for this Speed.

 

FTP syncing might be a little more bullet proof than Dropbox syncing. Just so that we are not forced to rely on a third party service. Most dedicated servers already have FTP running anyway. Just a thought.

 

I am sure you already looked at Case's work, I feel that the variables kept/logged by his stats are great and can be used for reference.

 

Good luck with the project. :thumbup:

 

I really don't know that much about networking, and I don't know how FTP servers are set up. Do you think I should I have a reason to believe FTP will work better than Dropbox?

 

Actually, I haven't looked at Case's work. I'm not really a FC player, so I am only vaguely aware of previous stats systems. I know, for example, Moa also had one.

 

A listing of what stats he kept up with might be nice just for reference of what was previously done. One of the first things that will need to be done is to make up a listing of stats that would be nice to keep.

Edited January 11, 2013 by Speed

[Case]

A listing of what stats he kept up with might be nice just for reference of what was previously done. One of the first things that will need to be done is to make up a listing of stats that would be nice to keep.

 

As a reference, look at our historic log of the FC1.12 stats at http://www.51st.org/fc1stats/. The FC2 stats are down at the moment, but they are generally similar.

 

The FC1.12 stats got all their information from the mp_log, which only really stored a limited number of events (enter, exit, land, crash, kill, eject) that were linked to a player. I wrote software to parse that log and link events to players to compute flight time statistics and keep track of kills, deaths etc. These numbers were then uploaded to an SQL database from where they could be accessed through a browser.

 

For FC2 it was broadly similar but a lot harder. I used the information from the debrief.log but had to reference it against the mission file to extract aircraft, airbase and other information.

 

If you can get Slmod to dump game events into a file then it is quite easy for me to adapt the parser with little or no changes to the SQL database or the php scripts running on the webserver. Ideally the events should be logged with a UTC timestamp, an ingame timestamp, player name, player coalition, player aircraft, and then assorted information about the event (land at airbase, fire certain missile, get hit by certain missile, etc).

[Speed]

If you can get Slmod to dump game events into a file then it is quite easy for me to adapt the parser with little or no changes to the SQL database or the php scripts running on the webserver. Ideally the events should be logged with a UTC timestamp, an ingame timestamp, player name, player coalition, player aircraft, and then assorted information about the event (land at airbase, fire certain missile, get hit by certain missile, etc).

 

Slmod has had this feature for over a year now. Right now, it outputs all events since the last time the file was written. As of Slmodv6_3, you can turn this feature on/off and adjust how often the file is written with your Saved Games/DCS/Slmod/config.lua file. I added it for Moa, but then he quit DCS before adapting his stats mod to use it, so no one uses it that I know of.

 

That said, the coming Slmod stats system, at least in its final implementation, could be quite a bit improved over what was possible before, simply because Slmod can access all Lua environments that the game uses. I remember Moa telling me of all the difficulties he had had due to bugs with debrief events- Slmod can actually access two different simulation event systems, and also things like the real-time locations of aircraft and weapons fired, solving any kinds of ambiguity as to what was going on in the game world. You can see, for example, one significant benefit already in the events that are output- locations (x, y, z) are known.

 

But anyway, since no one, to my knowledge, is currently making use of the events output feature of Slmod, I'm free to make any changes to it that you might like. One thing I could do is make it so that it does not only output the events that have occurred since the file was last output. Another thing that would be possible is to output the events over the network via LuaSocket.

Edited January 11, 2013 by Speed

[Cali]

Glad to see you here again Case, hope you have some time to help Speed out. From the sounds of it we could have a very good stats engine.