http://www.bagill.com/trials/

Stulli's stats comparison tool is awesome, and I've found myself using it daily to keep track of my ranking as well as to decide which tracks I need to improve to move up the leaderboards. There's really no beating his tool for that purpose, and I don't really want to try competing with such an awesome resource. But I had an idea for something, so I started building it and I thought it'd be fun to see if anyone else would find it useful, or perhaps just give me some ideas on how to make it valuable to the community.

I tend to think of Trials as a long-term competition against myself as much as I think of it as a competition against others. I've been saving my stats and flipping back and forth between them in an effort to see where I've improved. I especially feel lucky when I get to work the morning after playing a few hours, and I see my old stats still loaded on the screen so I can switch between tabs and get an idea of what I've done. Well, I decided to make that possible every day

I just started this last night, but I'm getting kind of excited about the possibilities...



So, basically, you can save your statistics at any time. 'll add point values later, as well as your overall point total, and your overall ranking). But then when you want, you can load up your stats from that date, and view the snapshot side-by-side with your current stats.

Your previous runs are not saved in the system until you've used the tool for the first time, so, unfortunately for those of you who've already progressed to the edges of what is possible in Trials2, this tool may not be so exciting. But for the up-and-comers, or those who plan on making major progress over the next couple of months, you may enjoy being able to see your changes. You can save a snapshot at any time, and (once I've finished the menu) load it up against your current scores and see the highlighted differences between your times and ranks.

I'm really just starting this, so if anyone has any ideas, I would like to implement as much cool stuff as possible. I'm not going to make it public until I have it in a bug-free state, but I expect to have it ready for some testing in the next week. Let me know what you think!

Planned features:
per-track statistics comparison
multiple columns with (up to 4?) snapshots at a time
player-to-player comparisons (like stulli's tool)
points based on deadlast's records
a point/rank difference column
(and more)

-Facestab

looks cool

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Highest Track Rank: 30th Mind Bender

Given our little competition I've found myself using Stulli's brilliant application almost daily, and wishing it could do something like this too. How about rather than a manual snapshot option, it automatically saves your scores (or the updated ones, at least) every time it accesses your profile. That way you'd have a complete historical record of all records against all tracks. Then you could either select a date to compare your current records against (as you've done above) or select a track and see a graph (and/or list) of your progress through time. You could also graph your rank and points against time.

Either way I'd certainly use it, and if you want a beta tester then feel free to PM me.

Glas, glad to hear you may get some use out of it. Thanks for the feedback, too. My intention is to allow the tracks to be clickable so you can see every score you've got saved in your history all in one spot. I'll have to get a little clever in order to save it every time it's accessed so I don't get a giant database full of records and leave the users overloaded with data. I think I can do it though I was even thinking of having it check nightly for all users who have used it, so they can see their progress later on. I don't want to hit redlynx's servers that often though.

(BTW Mods, I'm scraping your site for stats. Let me know if that's not okay.)

Below is the latest version. I'll PM you a link, Glas, once I've got the score calculations going. I'll look into how to make a chart (a simple one) of your ranks on a track, and see if I can't get something like that implemented soon. Thanks again for the feedback. I've unfortunately had to spend some time away from home, so I can't play as much as I'd like. So, working on this stats thing is my consolation prize

It's funny to see how your rank goes down just by not playing a track in a while! One month of 0 improvements, and I lose an average on 9 spots on those tracks!

Oooh ooh oooh! This is exciting. I used to save my page on Stulli's site every day so that I had a record of my improvements... so this sounds fantastic.
I'd love to have a graph for each track which charts improvements (either in rank or time) per track, and maybe have my friends times/positions on it too so I can see where we overtook eachother, that would be amazing.

Also in first with the True Fan call (provided this works anywhere near as well as it sounds like it will).

EDIT: I hope Anttiki's message is more along the lines of "here are the data names you need to improve your tool." rather than "Stop scanning our server or we'll ban you"

Ah it's a web app, I sort of presumed from the first screenshot that it was a standalone app with data being stored locally. No matter, I still think it would be a really cool addition. It does make my graph request more difficult though, but there are a few javascript apps that will do something like that. Not my area of expertise though.

IMO it would be best to leave the user comparison stuff to Stulli's app - it does a really great job with that, and has pretty much everything anyone could want on that side of things. This would leave you to concentrate on the historical stuff rather than replicating what's already available. Also, and you may well think differently about this, the idea of discrete and selectable snapshots doesn't really do anything for me. I'm much more interested in my overall progression in points, times, rankings etc. rather than comparing today's data with the 8th of June or whatever. Of course you have to store the snapshots to produce the data, but being able to access them all individually and comparing them wouldn't be of great benefit to me. Regarding the data, a daily snapshot would be fantastic if it's feasible and RedLynx are happy with it, but a manual system would be cool too as I'd tend to take a new snapshot whenever I beat a record anyway.

Lots of moaning from me as usual, but hopefully it's constructive. Seconded for the true fan nomination if this works.

Okay, I've applied AnttiKi's recommended changes, which took a little while but made life much easier on both sides.
Then I added point diffs between dates.

I also added a task to save any changes in your stats when they are refreshed. I.E. you don't have to save a snapshot of your stats. If the app detects a change, it's saved. This will allow the app to keep track of per-track improvements once I write a script to separate the tracks out of your records and compare them individually. (which is going to happen).

I've also come up with a way to do the daily snapshot automatically, but in a way that limits the toll on their servers. Here's my idea:
If you log in and use the app, it'll create a task that saves your progress once per day without requiring you to do anything. However, if after 14 days, your times don't change at all, it will stop collecting . The only way you can get it to start again is to come to the application and turn it back on, and the timer starts over again. This way, we won't be hitting their servers needlessly, and we can start ignoring users who've stopped playing. Oh, and it'll force you to keep improving . I'll have to limit this automatic feature if the app sees many users.

Here's a screenshot. I have one more task and I'll PM whoever asks for a link to it. Then I'll begin working on the per-track portion.
More ideas, please!

Looking good! Do you choose a snapshot from a list to get the comparison screen? Also, for the per-track stuff, will that be a progression over time more akin to what I described above? If so, doing the same for ranking (and possibly points total) would seem to be the obvious next step.

On a slightly unrelated note, one of the things I find myself doing with Stulli's app is copying it into Calc and sorting it by the points per rank field. This lets me see where best to aim for improvements; tracks with a high points per rank where I have a relatively poor ranking. It might be nice if it could show that. It is somewhat outwith the remit though as it doesn't use the historical data.

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

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.

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.

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!


Hearing that from a true fan made my day

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.


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!

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

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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.

_________________
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.

Try agin.

Fail again. Fail better.

--Samuel Beckett

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...

_________________
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.

Try agin.

Fail again. Fail better.

--Samuel Beckett

cmon Antti, I fully expect a new bot command within the near future
example:

!track norfair e6 2008-12-11
TBot: NorfaiR was #36 on Bumpy Road with a time of 00:34:66 on December 11th 2008

_________________
Where the sun is but a memory of a murdered dream...

Gamertag: NorfaiR76
My tracks

Glas, you were right, the nightly check was screwing up! I wouldn't have even noticed had you not said anything. Thanks for the heads up!
It's working fine now, and has appropriate limitations that limit the hit on the server to levels that imagine) are no larger than they'd normally expect. I really don't want this thing to create even a small spike on their server load, and I'll continue to tweak/limit it as needed, or even keep the daily checks limited to those who personally request them. But for now, I think it's able to run as described without causing problems, and I have a limit of daily 50 automatic hits to the server as a cap spread out over 16 hours, just in case.


Yes. It will (now, thanks) keep a log of your improvements so you can go back and get a good picture of your track performance over time. I consider this the best of both worlds too

I'm working on creating per-track charts, and I just took a look at the charts that Stulley linked, and I like them.

Stulley, I'm glad you like it! I'm honored, since I've found your tool to be so insanely useful! Mine wouldn't exist had it not been for yours! I'm storing snapshots in mysql since I was sad to see all my old records disappearing. I'm concerned about the XML request too. I've been doing everything possible to cache data, even deadlast's records, so the impact is as transparent as possible. (And yes, the forums are slower, so neither redlynx nor I are taking too much of a hit here.) But it's definitely geared towards on-demand snapshots of your current status for later comparison.

http://highcharts.com/demo/ holy smokes that looks cool. I may just use that! I'll also happily work on some ideas if you have any. I have no qualms about sharing the source for it, aside from the fact that it's grown organically from a pretty utilitarian start (so I know I could have written it much better). One thing I'm curious is how you calculated records from deadlast!

I have this in place now:
90/deadlast's rank = points per track
user points = 100-(rank*points per track)

This works really well to estimate how much you've gained, but when you add the numbers up, they're coming out larger than what you're actually getting. I could just be rounding them too much.

Beyond that, any ideas you have for it are most welcome, and I'll glady play with any ideas to make it better. There's a growing list! Thanks all for the positive/constructive feedback, and long live T2SE

Haha, excellent

_________________
Where the sun is but a memory of a murdered dream...

Gamertag: NorfaiR76
My tracks

Well, the good news is that I don't have the most popular Xbox Live Arcade game on the market, so my server is ready to start taking requests

Updates:
Added a view for per-track history. It's going to improve a lot, but at least this way you can see your improvements by track. No chart yet, but implementing one will be fun.
Fixed the daily check, optimized it to hit the server as rarely as possible, and to spread the check out to 3 times per day, with a current maximum of 30 daily XML requests, each at least 10 seconds apart. Each user's scores are checked once per day.
Fixed a bug where the snapshots were breaking into two incomplete snapshots due to the timestamp changing during the request.
Shrunk the columns a little by abbreviating the track names (T1, D19, etc).
Also saw to it that the latest snapshot will show up in your list as soon as you make it, particularly on your first load, when it was most confusing.
Other little things not worth noting.

http://www.bagill.com/trials/

Better and better. The only feature that's missing now is the display of rank and points over time. This will be the same process as the per-track stuff, but with an even simpler display of date, rank and points colums. Unlike the per-track this would have an entry almost every day. Easy enough to introduce in the UI anyway; just one more history icon alongside the rank/points row.

Talking of the icon, I made a transparent version so it doesn't clash with the background - it's here. You can barely see it against the dark green, but -->

Also, if you're looking for completely over the top features, I was thinking about a graph of your rank over time marked with the points at which you recorded one or more new records. The idea came from the youtube views graphs, and the format would be identical. I think it would be difficult to implement though.

Charts are (somewhat) implemented. Let me know what you think!



Seconds are now implemented, but not shown in standard format, mm:ss:xx. Also, Thanks for the new inspect icon, Glas, It's in place.

And thanks Stulley for the javascript chart choice! I like this one a lot, and implementing it has been interesting.

I may make some stylistic changes as part of an overall revision, but right now the appearance seems to be pretty good for our purposes.

I've put the old grid of data below so you can read it plainly if you find the the chart confusing, and I'll be implementing this style for the overall history as well. Some of the charts are pretty underwhelming, and some are crazy. My YSNP history is pretty cool, for instance.

I have it set up so it's only reading from your saved history, so they may be up to a day behind your latest progress. If this is an issue for you, save a snapshot, then look at your chart for your most current scores. I have it this way so we don't have to hit redlynx's servers for per-track stuff.

I still have a lot of possible changes in mind, so if anyone can suggest anything, let me know. I've been using this thing daily, and I hope others will use it as well.

And, dang it Glas. I was going to point out that I'd surpassed you! #170 and #169, not a bad spread!

It's more or less perfect now, I was actually going to suggest keeping the grid data alongside the chart. Fantastic job. I was thinking the other day about how to represent a track like YSNP where faults and time both play a part, but couldn't really come up with anything. Maybe using a third axis for faults? Good luck implementing that though.

I'm actually going through the tracks in reverse rank order, which is far from the most efficient way to improve my ranking. It does keep things fresh though, rather than just playing Diablo over and over...

Some notes to RedLynx:
1) When you get to implementing stats for Trials 3/Trials PC X-treeeme/Trials Kitchen Sink Edition: copy this.
2) True fan.

Oh yeah, the rank/points graph is really cool. I'd like to see the corresponding dates but I'm guessing you left it off because it looks cluttered?