Tracker/ Data Gathering

[Guildenstern]

  First off great game so far folks, of all the attempts over the years to bring a game like this back to the genre, this is definitely the best indie title I've seen.

  My suggestion/question is this, with all the items in game that still need play balancing, would it be useful to have some sort of gameplay log of each game that could be used to see what all is going on with different playstyles?  I could see this working out to be two separate scripts, one that writes a geoscape log (player building order, money spending patterns, interception losses, sales, etc.) and a tac log(more or less of the dumps of the to hit rolls and damages, troops x moves to xy seems useless unless you want to balance tu costs).  This would allow the folks working on the economy and weapons to get data from the community (and each other)  To make this a feature and not a issue with the community, it would have to be set on in console and manually uploaded, (perhaps into a svn branch for the data in particular) with the only identifying info being the game profile name and the date.

  I could also see this being useful as a place to start with some sort of tac debriefing screen (which incidentally I think would be cool if it got archived in the ufopedia so I could see the results of all the tac missions to date).  If this is something that would be useful for the team I'll see what I can do to enact this for the build (with the eight or so other things I'd like to work on)

  Hope this helps,
  Guildenstern

[BTAxis]

It's an interesting idea, though I don't think it would really do much for balancing. Nobody is going to read through a few MB of generated text per submitted playthrough. It's just not worth the effort, compared to getting pre-analyzed opinions from users directly. What WOULD be interesting though, is the ability to save and post battle replays for other users to view.

Also, we already do gather various statistics both on the geoscape and in tactical combat. Most of them aren't displayed yet, though.

[Zorlen]

Nobody is going to read through a few MB of generated text per submitted playthrough. It's just not worth the effort, compared to getting pre-analyzed opinions from users directly.

I think a simple script could parse such logs into readable diagrams showing which piece of equipment was used more often and its efficiency at given conditions. Players can give their subjective scoring, but one can hardly count e.g. total damage/TU ratio for all weapons used on 20+ meters range.

[BTAxis]

Why would you want to count that? You can calculate that from the weapon scripts with reasonable accuracy. There's some random variation due to the gaussian spread and the damage fluctuation, but that all averages out anyway. Besides, the counts would be LESS accurate than that, because of map architecture getting in the way. That's not really useful information.

Not to mention that Damage/TU is a function of more than just the weapon parameters. The enemy's armour makes a big difference.

[Guildenstern]

  What I mostly had in mind with the tac stats was the start for the debriefing screen.  There is of course the current mission report screen, but it would be nice if the player also had the ability to see both detailed stats on the mission, and to determine loot status.  On top of that, I could see it being fairly easy since the game runs on server-client basis to simply save the state of the mission at start and then record all the player and alien "moves".  The only real thing that would have to be added is the weapon fire results and the replay would be set.  Setting these up as relative instructions rather than an absoulute replay should keep things relatively small for filesizes.

  As for the geoscape I was looking at building the data gathering so we have some data on the playstyles that people use to work the economy into shape.  I was also thinking that if you had all the step by step instructions for what the player did in the geoscape it might be possible to create a co-op mode where time on the world map is measured out in turns.  I could see play by email working well in that mode.

  That is basically what I had in mind with the suggestion,
  I'll likely just stick replays on the todo list for me and drop the rest,
  Guildenstern

[Doctor J]

  What I mostly had in mind with the tac stats was the start for the debriefing screen.  There is of course the current mission report screen, but it would be nice if the player also had the ability to see both detailed stats on the mission, and to determine loot status.  On top of that, I could see it being fairly easy since the game runs on server-client basis to simply save the state of the mission at start and then record all the player and alien "moves".  The only real thing that would have to be added is the weapon fire results and the replay would be set.  Setting these up as relative instructions rather than an absoulute replay should keep things relatively small for filesizes.

I like it!  Kinda like replays in Battle For Wesnoth...

[shevegen]

Hmm, i think replays may be useful, but I actually neved needed them in wesnoth. For me actually, they were totally useless :/

(If i made a mistake in the game, then I knew why or where anyway)