EntropiaPlanets presents: Integrated tracker

[Lykke]

Dear community,

After reading people being frustrated about their globals somehow missing from other trackers, the technical team here at www.entropiaplanets.com decided to come up with a way to assist you in those matters, and we started working on a tracker that integrates neatly into the forum itself. After several weeks of work, we are now proud to finally be able to present it to you.

In the navigation menu at the top, you will see a new link to tracker. The direct link is http://www.entropiaplanets.com/forums/tracker.php. Yet another entry point to the tracker is (and this is one of our favourites) by checking a post, and then clicking on the "globals" link from there.

The globals listed are the total amount of globals on hunting, mining, and crafting, as well as the total amounts of PEDs in total, and the numbers are updated every 15 minutes. Should you not see any globals under your avatar, chances are you did not fill in the AvatarName in your profile, which you can do by clicking on this link.

If you want to help us out and run the tracker client yourself, you can download it from this link. The client has been coded as lightweight as possible, meaning it will affect your performance as little as possible. It simply reads from the chatlog (which default is installed in your My Documents\Entropia Universe folder), and sends information picked up from there to our server, where it is then picked up and fed into our database. Please note that we ONLY transfer global data, and nothing else (like your private conversations or chats) to our server.

Like other trackers, our data will only be coming in as long as people are running the tracker client. Therefore, in order to encourage you to help us out, we will offer those of you who actively run our client with a free monthly subscription, and a special Tracker badge in your profile. If you are interested in this, please pm admin, so we can things up to ensure we can see who is participating.



Below, you will find some basic information about the various ways around the tracker.

From the tracker home page, you will see a great deal of links to follow. In the top menu, to the right of the Tracker Home, a link can be found that will bring you to an oversight of Tracker Statistics. It shows the number of globals tracked, the value thereof, average values, and individual statuses for hunting, mining and crafting, all both for the last 24 hours, as well as during the whole lifecycle of the tracker. These statistics are updated every 10 minutes.

On the main page itself, you will see the globals roll by. The feed is as live as it gets. The maximum difference between what you see ingame and what you see in the tracker is 30 seconds, as that's the frequency at which our trackers synchronize their data with the server. As you can see, all AvatarNames are displayed as links, and by clicking on them, you will drill down to the globals for that person. If the owner of an avatar has an account here on EntropiaPlanets, and has filled in their AvatarName in their profile, the AvatarName will have a looking glass icon next to it. Clicking on that will take you to their profiles.

Clicking on the link of what was globalled on will take you to the information page on the EntropiaPlanets Wiki.

Additional search mechanisms are available in the menu right below the link to the Tracker Home. "My Globals" should speak for itself; it shows all globals you had that have been picked up by the tracker. Next to that is a dropdown menu, containing one entry for every "subject" (Mob, mining resource, crafted item or material) picked up by the tracker. Selecting one, and then using the Search button will provide you with an oversight of all globals tracked on that subject.

Lastly, you can search for avatarnames. By using the drop down list next to it, you can select whether you want to see all globals, or just drill down to specific globaltypes. If you know the full username of the Avatar you are interested in, that works, but if you only remember part of the AvatarName, the script will be able to handle that and show you all the names containing your search term.



Please feel free to supply us with feedback on our implementation. What works, what could be improved, and what would you love to see added or gone?

Enjoy,
EntropiaPlanets.com

Wizzszz & Peter
Tech Crew

Upcoming suggested improvements:

* Detailed statistics, using graphs, to track loot patterns over time.
* Automatic sreenshot and upload thereof to the EntropiaPlanets.com Gallery.
* Additional integration of personal global information into the forum.
* Detailed tracking capabilities for land owners.
* Additional surprises we do not want to reveal just yet

[Pennsif]

Congratulations to the EP Tech Crew on this - it looks most impressive.

I haven't managed any globals yet since I started playing again a couple of weeks ago.

This will encourage me to do some hardcore killing this weekend to get on the Tracker!

Pennsif

[Lykke]

Ty Pennsif

As a little site note - and it can't be said enough - make sure you have your full (and correctly spelled) avatar name in your user profile, if you wish to show you're having a profile on EntropiaPlanets for others to see

[Steve Saber]

Nice addition

I'll dl the software and give it a go tonight

[wizzszz]

Please wait a second with downloading the installer, we have a "last minute" feature addon that is not yet included in the current installer - i'll post here when it's ready for download

/Edit:

Ok, the newest version is there now, happy downloading!

If you experience installation problems or problems with the tracker client please let us know - we're about to set up a subforum for tracker related stuff shortly.

The tracker client is designed to run in the background, as long as you are not playing it sleeps and consumes next to zero ressources - upcoming features will require that you have it running even when you do not play, checking "Autostart with windows" puts you on the save side.

This can be disabled in the clients menu at any time, or simply delete the link in your "Autostart" folder in the windows start menu.

[sahel]

It looks like a great tool . Forum integration is a really nice feature!
Nice work.

[narfi]

This will be an awesome feature! Great work!

I notice that there are some globals missing, is this because you dont have enuogh clients running yet? For instance i checked Tony TwoToes who I know got 2 drone globals yesterday.

narfi

[admin]

Yes, if no clients were running at the time, no globals were recorded. The majority of the data available now is form when we were testing, so there might be huge gaps inbetween.

For the statistics, I will address this over time, but seeing all these globals are legit, and we wanted some actual data to be there when we'd release it, we have not deleted the old data from the database.

Hopefully, with enough people running it, there eventually will be no gaps whatsoever.

I also added a sub forum for discussion of the tracker.

[Wren]

awesome job guys!

[jdegre]

Yes, if no clients were running at the time, no globals were recorded. The majority of the data available now is form when we were testing, so there might be huge gaps inbetween.

For the statistics, I will address this over time, but seeing all these globals are legit, and we wanted some actual data to be there when we'd release it, we have not deleted the old data from the database.

Hopefully, with enough people running it, there eventually will be no gaps whatsoever.

I also added a sub forum for discussion of the tracker.

i just went to check my chat.log file and realized that it was like 30-40 Mb size, and it occurred to me that it must have plenty of hof/globals recorded there, so... would it be a good idea to let the tracker go through existing log files and upload old globals to the DB ?

you could have an extra check to ensure that same globals are reported from more than 1 source, etc.. as the other tracked does, and also make this reporting of old globals a background task consuming as few resources as possible, so your server is not chocked by a massive amount of simultaneous reporting.

well, just an idea...