i have always been curious about the "macro data" of any given set and would like to discuss the possibility of adding some info screens to make such things available to players. i am refering to things like gdp or money supply in general economics, but for an earth set it would mostly be player data aggregaed across all players.

aggregate macro data might contain things like total cash on hand, total turns available, total numbers of turrets currently in the set, numbers of bushels produced, numbers of bushels consumed, total turns played, total number of built farms and so forth ... almost any piece of player data, but aggregated over all players with some time selection criteria, i.e whole set, last 24 hours ...

i would hope that getting the data and displaying it might be straightforward (mostly database queries and form pages?)

i can imagine that clever players could make some use of such data to guide their development and timing

but i am sure that i would enjoy just watching the numbers grow and change as the set unfolds

any thoughts?


(~¿~)

[bonus]

I think boxcar aggregates data from collected ops on military units but that's it. I like the idea overall. I've been a big advocate for global events, global tracking (what you're basically talking about) and global restrictions (on things like land, missile launches, etc.).

I'm not sure what the restrictions are on data mining, but it's possible pang/qz can supply you with the necessary info to start writing your own tools for what you wish to see. Right now we're heavy on suggestions and light on people with time to implement them.

:) ... i get that ... a good idea is the easy part ... but i am still happy to find another advocate

for myself, yes, there was once a time i did this kind of stuff professionally (i'm guessing, but probably some kind of scripting language like perl creating the guts of the game as wellas the UIs, both using embedded sql type database calls ) ... but my skills are 15 years dead cold ... conceivably, if someone gave me an implemented skeleton making example calls and also gave me remote access to a development environment, i could fire up and flesh the idea out ... i do kinda have the time and motivation, but it would take a substantial investment into me to get it rolling ... me starting from scratch is not realistic ...

continuing, i see at least 2 kinds of data that i am curious about

1) aggregated player data, i.e total turns used, total turns on hand, numbers of each kind of building and technology and so forth; this should be straghtforward using advisor page data for each player

2) world data,i.e. total turns used exploring, total land generated from explores, total land generated by ghost acres, total money taken out of game by commissions for each good, total number of each good bought and sold on private markets , and so forth; this kind of data might require code additions to meter each observed quantity

again, thanks for your interest
:)

i'd like to do stuff like that for sure; that was part of our planned integration of typcial tools... but certain things need to be ironed out before doing that


but yea, i like!

Sounds good. Basically talking about a "world country" which adds in all the data you're talking about. That would be the easiest way to go initially. I suppose you could also add some additional fields to the country report/status page and aggregate the data from there as well. Lots of options all up to qz. :P

i'm pleased you guys generally like the idea

i really do think it would be fun to know how many jets had been used up offensively in the last 12 hours, or how many CM are in the game, or how many bushels were sold on private markets in the last hour ... and maybe useful too ...

practically speaking, i don't think i could really do much on the implementation side, but i could make a more comprehensive list of observables, help with UI design, and do some QA testing.

So when it looks like something like this might get to the top of the stack, please contact me and i will pitch in where i can

thanks again!
:)

a little more detail on what i was thinking before i move along

overall, we make the list of desired observables as complete as possible and do the easy ones first

i would like the UI to be a big page of all the observables with a time selector function that lets you pick any start and stop times ranging from the beginning of the set to the current time --> punch the button and you get the values for each observable at those times, with a computed difference between the start and stop values. it would be great if each observable value could be presented as a time graph

implementationally, i think the observables (regardless of whether they are derived using inspection, computation or metering) would need to be snap shoted and stored on a time slice, similar to how the current score list is done evey 5 minuets. the time slices would then be computationally used to produce the UI query results and the time graphs

cheers!

i'd have to have some sort of reset stats fields to track it; not sure where i'd have to add in bits, for stuff like money supply; but, could be doable

actually i need to even track histories
ugh

forgot about that

i'm sorry, but i'm not following your use of the word histories and how that get's to ugh ... can you help me see the issue?

i think i see how to go about this without any ugh moments, but of course i'm actually totally ignorant of the game's implementation, so that does seem a bold claim on my part

:)