A new stats tool | Forums

[rlmergeuser]

Alright, I think there are few enough people following this thread that opening it up for some testing is possible now.
On your first record search, it will automatically create a snapshot for you. Any successive snapshots will have to be taken manually, however, if you break a record, then search for yourself, your new records will be saved and shown in the 'latest' section above.

There's still much to be done (and it's not bug free, I have to remove wheelie scores for instance), but I figured the sooner people can try it, the better. Let me know what you think!

http://www.bagill.com/trials

[Godmil]

True fan!

[AnttiKi]

Very nicely done. Looks really useful and it might motivate me to play Trials more.

[rlmergeuser]

Very cool! I'd put the snapshot list in a combo box as it'll get ungainly otherwise and throw the page formatting off. Also I'd add the time (and faults?) difference into the changes table, but that's a nitpick. It's a bit scary to see yourself dropping on the tracks you're not working on!

Can't wait to see the per-track stuff.

Edit: just noticed the rank at the bottom of the changes box uses a different sign convention to the individual track ranking.

[rlmergeuser]

Any successive snapshots will have to be taken manually, however, if you break a record, then search for yourself, your new records will be saved and shown in the 'latest' section above.

But not saved as a snapshot, is this correct? I purposely haven't taken a manual snapshot for a couple of days and it hasn't added one automatically. My newest records do appear in the Latest Improvements box though.

[rlmergeuser]

Correct. I should probably not call it a 'snapshot' since it's not technically one. The idea was to save only the latest improvements automatically each day and when you search yourself. Saving it as a snapshot would just overload the snapshot menu with too many items. I have a cron job running each night that finds your latest changes and makes sure they are recorded. It's mostly for the per-track view that I haven't implemented yet. That way nothing's lost, and you will be able to see the daily changes once I have the chart in place. Unfortunately, I don't know how well it's working, since I have to wait 24 hours for each run to test it I'll do some manual testing now to make sure it's getting everything.

I feel the full snapshots should be up to the user, since it's your choice what constitutes a state worth saving. I improved 15 or so tracks this weekend, and that's the snapshot I was using for comparison's sake. I wanted to measure this weekend's progress specifically. As of last night, I saved another, so I could keep track of this coming week. It's been a fantastic motivator for me, watching tracks turn green (or red).

It's also been good for spotting improvements among the top players. Degn for instance has posted a number of 5-10 rank improvements that I may otherwise not have noticed. I was even thinking, in my absolute dorkyness, that I could create an RSS feed for any new top 20 runs among the users. But that's pushing the limits of obsessive stat-watching.

This week I'll be working on fixing anomalies with the points calculated from deadlast's runs. I can't quite settle on the best method for calculation. Then I'll bring in the per-track views, so you can see improvements for each track in one screen. Beyond that I want to improve the UI in general and tinker with things like sorting and perhaps a way of highlighting the tracks where you stand to gain the most points. Oh, and a snapshot to snapshot comparison, for weekends like mine where I posted big improvements. I want to make sure I can reminisce about the time I went from 16 to 5 faults on YSNP.

And, as always, I'm looking for suggestions or new ideas.

[Edit: by the way, if anyone has their old redlynx.com stat pages saved, you can PM them to me and I can import them in as snapshots. I had one from a month ago, and it's cool to see my progress in a month (400 pts!)]

Thanks for the feedback, and congrats on the superhuman achievement!

True fan!

Hearing that from a true fan made my day

[rlmergeuser]

I have a cron job running each night that finds your latest changes and makes sure they are recorded. It's mostly for the per-track view that I haven't implemented yet. That way nothing's lost, and you will be able to see the daily changes once I have the chart in place.

Are these auto-snaps (to coin an expression) just snapshots that are taken and stored on the server but don't appear in the user's snapshot list? If so then that's the best of both worlds. As I've said above, I'm not too fussed about the comparison of manual snapshots (unlike you!) but a daily auto-snap for the per-track stats would be ideal as it would provide the best info without the user needing to take a manual snap every day.

Beyond that I want to improve the UI in general and tinker with things like sorting and perhaps a way of highlighting the tracks where you stand to gain the most points.

Sortable columns would be great, particularly for points and rank (although it might be a bit awkward; if you sorted by points column in your current values table, the snapshot table would have to be displayed in the same track order as the re-sorted current table... if you know what I mean).

Used it daily so far, and as you say it's a great motivator. There must be a bug somewhere though as my rank has barely moved for days!

[rlmergeuser]

This is a nice tool. I can use this to check my regress.

[rlmergeuser]

Hey, who would have thought, more stats geeks on the forums!

Facestab, a fantastic tool that is, congrats and my vote for providing a TRUE FAN is yours as well!

Funnily I had the same idea months ago when I was still playing the game, but lost interest somewhere in the early stages for the datamining backend concept, due to my ranks not changing very much anymore and having lost the "interesting" data of climbing the ranks in the past forever.

Furthermore I had the ongoing feeling the XML-request caused significant lag to the redlynx-servers and so a daily update of track data just would not be possible for the accounts of more than 20-30 players (then again which, given the traffic on these forums nowadays, could be enough...) even if done at low pressure times. But seeing this now realised as - if I understand this correct - a save-on-demand-tool seems to be both cool and technically efficient.

I recall my plan back in the day was (as ever) a bit more focused on having the ability to compare your improvement with the other players who get their stats saved as well but most of all (since my comparison tool wasn't really all that improvable in this field) bringing the whole stuff to life with extensive javascript visualisation pyrotechnics (see maybe http://highcharts.com/demo/ for reference).
Is any of this currently planned for your app? Let's share thoughts on this if you like, man.

[rlmergeuser]

I sent you a PM. I hope you read it.

And AnttiKi, what did your message contain?
Don't tell me you've got a hidden date-parameter in the API or something. Maybe the old dream of you keeping outdated records in your database is true after all...