|
| 17 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hey all,
I figured I'd post this here. Over here in the Netherlands we have used a google spreadsheet to track who played what already for a long time now. This worked pretty ok, until PFS bloomed over here and there were an unfeasable amount of columns (one for each player). Also it was pretty hard to find out quickly what you can run a certain group through that they have all not played.
So when at a local VO meet I talked it over and offered my services (the dayjob is webdeveloper/IT security). I started building a tool we could use to track our sessions with a few primary goals in mind:
1: It has to be as fast, if not faster, to use then the google spreadsheet
2: It needs to support small devices like phones
3: It needs to be secure
4: It needs to not-be-a-hassle
With those in mind I got to designing and coding. A friend of mine quickly joined up to help. We now have a working tool that is secure (enough at least), think HTTPS, and also has been in testing for four or so months. We went through alpha, closed beta, open beta and have now released the tool for PFS players in the Netherlands. So far response has been very positive. The system has over 100 players in it at the moment.
Then at one point one of our local players attended Paizocon France. Even though the events that friday were horrible in Paris, they still managed to play some games and curiosity was peeked. What is this tool the silly dutchman has?
Since then some international players have registered as well and started using it. We also got a third programmer who wanted to do something like this, but never found the time. He is going to be working on implementing multi-language support (mainly for french to start with), and we collaborate through github.
Long story short: We got a tool, I would love to know what you all think of it. What is missing, what is not-as-handy and see if anyone wants to use it for their own games. I am cautiously optimistic as to what the server can manage load-wise. :)
Oh and the URL: https://tracker.campaigncodex.com
Venture-Captain, Michigan—Mt. Pleasant
|
| 10 people marked this as a favorite. |
Oh and the URL: Session Tracker
|
Suggest that the filters under other (along with evergreen, specials, retired) to also include
a and b) find scenarios i haven't played as pfs and as core
c and d) find scenarios i have played but haven't run as both pfs and core
e and f) find scenarios i have run as both pfs and as core.
Additionally, allowing fast export to pdf or some other printable file would be awesome.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Awesome, another local VO and I were talking about making something similar over Christmas...
I second a way to filter out what I've played but haven't GM'd (makes running scenarios easier) or even more advanced: Scenarios that I have played but not GM'd + What my friend(s) have not played.
|
Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
|
Are you going to release the code so that other groups could set up their own instances on their own servers?
Or... do you want to become The Hub for people to track their games? If so, one thing that would be nice would be a way of defining groups and subgroups.
Why would you want to define subgroups? So you get a list of people in your lodge, and can easily tick which people are on a table? I see the merit in that, but it's also pretty easy to just enter people's names/numbers. I'll let Simon answer on the feasibility of this idea.
(Been using the tracker since alpha. Granted, that's only for 20 or so people, but I didn't really have any problems with filtering.)
Regional Venture-Coordinator, Baltic
|
[nitpick]Probably need the community use policy at the bottom since you're using the PFS logo.[/nitpick]
The community use poilicy can be found on the information page
|
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
@rknop: The code is available on https://www.github.com/saekort/PFS-Scenariotracker you can use it with the MIT license. So yes to answer your question, you can run your own version. It requires a bit of changing though.
As for do we want to become the hub? Dunno, I am just taking it as we go. Specifically some people asked if we can have some cross country options, thus I implemented the option to set a country (and thus later on I could create a page that shows players in a country). Right now it seems fine to have one place.
Groups and subgroups could still be a thing. It is not on my shortlist at the moment, filter options seem to be more commonly requested.
Thanks for the compliments people! :)
|
|
@rknop: The code is available on https://www.github.com/saekort/PFS-Scenariotracker you can use it with the MIT license. So yes to answer your question, you can run your own version. It requires a bit of changing though.
As for do we want to become the hub? Dunno, I am just taking it as we go. Specifically some people asked if we can have some cross country options, thus I implemented the option to set a country (and thus later on I could create a page that shows players in a country). Right now it seems fine to have one place.
Groups and subgroups could still be a thing. It is not on my shortlist at the moment, filter options seem to be more commonly requested.
Thanks for the compliments people! :)
I would love to have something manageable, including being easy for people to use, but just having "United States" would not be granular enough, if I want to see what my locals (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA) could be scheduled to play without issues.
|
|
@TetsujinOni: Haha, eww php hm :P Well the app itself is 100% angularjs, the server is PHP though. I had a node.js/express/sequelize server setup at first, but it took too long for me to get the hang of it so fell back on php. Can always replace the backend with something more efficient if it becomes a problem.
@Mike: Yeah could do. If you have more ideas for cool statistics let me know and we can see what we can implement.
|
RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 8
|
Might be just us old farts, but if there was a "select all" option for the checkboxes, that would be awesome.
Manually checking everything until Season 6 is going to take me some time ;)
EDIT: Forgot to say that it's amazing and I'll be making use of it locally. Thanks a ton for doing all this work!
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
|
Maybe "lodge" is a natural grain size for sorting players based on locality? Presumably most people play most of their games inside their home lodge (apart from big Cons, obviously).
As for statistics/search - We can look up whether players X and Y have played scenario Z, but that presumes you know which players are coming in advance. If I want to pick a scenario that will hopefully attract 4-6 out of a pool of 20 players, I'd need a somewhat different angle. Trying all permutations of 4 players to find scenarios they haven't played yet is exhausting. What I want is to do the following:
- specify the major group ("Netherlands lodge" or "this selected group of 20 people")
- get scenarios sorted by fewest/most played
- per scenario, see who has/hasn't played it yet
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 8
|
That'd require a counting structure in the DB. Not impossible but a slightly deeper rework than some of the other feature requests we've seen so far.This is pretty slick.
Could there be a way to indicate how many times you have played each of the evergreens? Or how many times you have run a particular scenario?
The only reason I bring it up is that there are listings for most played evergreen and the like, so if you aren't tracking replays for credit then those listings will be wildly inaccurate.
|
|
Hmm I have heard that one before, we chose against it at that time, but mainly because people would not have a lot pending. I can see how that can be useful though if you have 8 sessions upcoming. Will have to think on this.
I noticed that my statistic cronjob has been dead since I moved to a HTTPS setup, hence the statistic is not updating. Will fix that first so you can see the ranking Mike ;)
EDIT: @Michael: It would require a lot more data input, which is asking lot more from players. At the moment I am thinking a 'basic' mode that keeps things simple and a 'advanced' mode that gives you more options.
Will be discussing things with the team. At the moment more quality of life improvements and more optimization. We are over 160 accounts so gotta make sure things run smoothly. :)
|
Regional Venture-Coordinator, Baltic
|
I noticed that my statistic cronjob has been dead since I moved to a HTTPS setup, hence the statistic is not updating. Will fix that first so you can see the ranking Mike ;)Nooo! I'm clinging onto the 'Most complete PFS GMs' list by my fingernails!
Walter also entered his list, so I'm afraid we'll all drop soon...
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hmm I have heard that one before, we chose against it at that time, but mainly because people would not have a lot pending. I can see how that can be useful though if you have 8 sessions upcoming. Will have to think on this.
Just a bit more fodder for the "upcoming" concept. During the lead into a con, we may be planning sessions for the weeks following the con. People can easily have more than a dozen sessions planned in a two or three-week period when one of the weeks is a 4-day con.
Or worse, when one of the local cons is two weeks before Origins. Real easy to have a ridiculous number of sessions planned out at that point.
|
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
|
Hmm I have heard that one before, we chose against it at that time, but mainly because people would not have a lot pending. I can see how that can be useful though if you have 8 sessions upcoming. Will have to think on this.Just a bit more fodder for the "upcoming" concept. During the lead into a con, we may be planning sessions for the weeks following the con. People can easily have more than a dozen sessions planned in a two or three-week period when one of the weeks is a 4-day con.
Or worse, when one of the local cons is two weeks before Origins. Real easy to have a ridiculous number of sessions planned out at that point.
This was one of my concerns during the Kickoff Weekend as well.
|
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 8
|
EDIT: @Michael: It would require a lot more data input, which is asking lot more from players. At the moment I am thinking a 'basic' mode that keeps things simple and a 'advanced' mode that gives you more options.
No worries, overall it is a minor nitpick and I am very happy with this tool as it currently exists.
|
|
Finally! I tracked down why my cronjob wasn't working anymore. It ran out of memory, because we have nearing 200 accounts that have reported about 15K sessions. Hence the memory ran out.
I programmed around it a bit and ran a manual statistic update. So statistics are up-to-date. Lots of shifts I am afraid. ;)
|
|
Is there a way to add other people to your list so you can look at many people without having to search for them individually?
We are till using Google Docs here because it allows us to keep track of all of our players at once, though admittedly that becomes harder with each additional person.
*Replace 'We' and 'us' with 'Kristen' in this post. She's the one who keeps track of it all. She's amazing at it.
|
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
|
@Quentin: my reason would be, because sometimes plans change. You're signed up for a game, but it doesn't go through, but it's in your history as "played", and for some reason you figure out until lots of time later every time there's a "to be determined" game, that scenario is unselected.
I think a more graceful solution is needed. On the one hand you want to move "upcoming" games to "played" automatically, on the other hand you want some sort of check to ensure the game was really played. The obvious solution I can think of is to allow noting scenarios as "will be played on date X", and on date X you get an email saying "the game you were signed up to play has now been noted as having been played. If you didn't play it after all, you should change your 'games played' list." I'm not wild about that solution but it's something.
|
Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Ergh, thought it might be something like that, but I couldn't phrase it well enough. It's late. >_>
An ideal option would be to be able to link your account to your Paizo account, where whenever your GM fills in his session report, it'd automatically update the tracker. But I guess that's not feasible until Paizo buys out the tracker and implements it into the main site.
|
|
Ergh, thought it might be something like that, but I couldn't phrase it well enough. It's late. >_>
An ideal option would be to be able to link your account to your Paizo account, where whenever your GM fills in his session report, it'd automatically update the tracker. But I guess that's not feasible until Paizo buys out the tracker and implements it into the main site.
That also assumes no bobbles in reporting. I still have at least one session from 2008, IIRC, that is not reported. I also got hit with real life at one point, so I wound up not reporting a session I ran for 3 or 4 weeks...
I am also not sure how it would respond to situations where someone's GM records show they ran evergreen (or non-evergreen) game 6 times.
|
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
|
I don't see the Paizo DB becoming accessible in any fashion useful for these purposes. Last time they tried to implement more integrity constraints caused so much trouble, and it seems the Paizo web team has its hands full doing existing work on updating content.