More info on recent games

[vitalikk2005]

Here is my suggestion for improvement.

On the site we have a list of 10 recent games and highest score games for every player. I propose to have more information available (with an expanding sections maybe?) for every of those games: list of players/companies, numbers of vehicles, perf. scores, maybe graphs, and maybe possibility to download final savegame and all-map screenshot.

Ok, I know it's a lot of work , but I see it quite useful if it will be added.

[YorVeX]

if i'd let the server do a full screenshot on server 5 or 8 it will stop responding for 2 minutes, creating a 500 MB png file while all players lose connection -> bad idea 

about savegame: should be doable. we already have a mechanism where every !admin request automatically creates a savegame (admins can later see the list of all savegames created this way and use them for review). so doing a savegame on game end (one second before all companies are reset) shouldn't be much effort. offering it for download on the website shouldn't be a problem either, though we'd need a limit for how long we keep the files, disk space is not infinite 

showing the statistics you have mentioned definitely will be possible but needs preparations. right now we don't save the long-term data that could be used to make a graph with a time X axis. but we can do this and i think it would be cool to show e.g. the full company value graph on the website.

what can be done solely on website without preparations is to show some hard numbers that were valid at the end of the game: the number of vehicles (per type), number of stations (per type), and the performance rating. but for the website part Myhorta has to comment on it.

p.s.: you can show more than the last 10 games, just click the "LAST 10" link in brackets to see your full list.

[vitalikk2005]

Just a thought: if we have a savegame, a screenshot can be made in another instance of openttd.exe, or even on another machine, to not disrupt the active server. And for those long-run servers that will need to happen once or twice a day. Of course, file size could be a problem, but the image can be downsized and compressed, and there are free file hosting servers out there, right?

[YorVeX]

PNG is already compressed. i created such a screenshot as a test, it has 282 MB. my computer got 16 gigs of RAM but that doesn't help when graphics programs don't utilize it. also the graphics program loads it in a way that makes it a LOT bigger in memory, it cannot keep the data compressed as long as it is working with it.
irfanview: "Too low memory to open image".
Paint.NET: "An unknown error has occured while trying to open the image".
Windows 7 embedded viewer: kept on saying "Loading" but never finished
GIMP: never finished, showed up as "not responding after it ate all available RAM:

a command line tool like pngcrush doesn't have to load the full file into memory for its job, so it would probably work. but what would it help to compress it down to a really poor level? you wouldn't even be able to recognize anything, it would just be a mash of pixels.

and this when on the other side i ain't programming anything else for weeks. a lot of things would be needed to be done: create the savegame, start external openttd to load it, let it write the PNG file (either putting the server under high load or if prioritized down running for 15 minutes), script a pngcrush job (that again puts load and memory usage on the server or takes another 15 minutes), name the file in a way it can be linked with the game (so get some sort of unique ID from the database first), publish it on the website...
this process only for one screenshot would probably cause more load on the server than all 8 OpenTTD servers together. even if running as low priority processes the long runtime will lead to several of such processes adding up (because it just happens that servers reach the goal within the same 30 minutes, more often than you might think)...

to sum it up:
1. a lot of effort needed for new programming logics
2. high resource cost on the machine
3. low benefit
4. no 

[Batt]

Why do we even need a screenshot if we'll offer a savegame? NO. About the savegame - yea, it's not a bad idea, but we have to limit somehow total number of the savegames.

I wanted a extended statistics too, so big + to that idea. Number of vehicles will be the most useful thing.

[vitalikk2005]

Well, what can i say... My hasty suggestion did not deserve such thorough and quality answer (with pictures and links! ). I didn't even bother to estimate what kind of resources would be needed for those things... And I agree, screenshots are not important after all.

[YorVeX]

don't worry, every suggestion is always seriously considered and checked. and except the screenshot thing we will most probably do all of the other things you mentioned (though it will take time and come step by step) 

[iSoSyS]

Actually it have been already planed such page. I started it, after forum integration. I'm sure that Valve soon™ you will have it

[teckers]

I really like the idea of savegames from every win, as for storing them, why not just auto chuck them up to http://ge.tt/tools or some other free cloud type thing.

[YorVeX]

because such services are annoying with their ads and waiting times and it's unnecessary in this case. i am quite sure we will be able to keep them for up to a year or so if we use our own space. this really should be sufficient, it's just a savegame after all 

[Batt]

This belongs to this thread.

Maybe instead of adding new points we should make new statistics. Like monthy, weekly and yearly. I also want to suggest table with average points per game  ;p that would be interesting to see

Average points per game, yay \o/

Here's the idea: we could create an additional page with TOP10 for each goal server by the average points for all their games on such servers.
Page layout? Something like server list, with TOP10s going down and you can show\hide specific server.