Two Visualizations
Jul 25, 03:07 PM
So, Craig ran a bunch of Allegiance games on Sunday where we collected a lot of gameplay data. In case you forgot, we modded Allegiance because even though it’s pretty old, it’s the only open-source MMO we know of that currently has a strong player base.
Anyway, we’re working on visualizing the data. I decided to fire up Processing once again, whereas Craig is developing a Silverlight application.
The first thing we’re trying to do is recreate a mini-map of the sectors where the gameplay takes place. This is effectively a graph), so I poked around and found a forum post where Owen Densmore made available the source for a program he put together for 3D graph visualization. I modified his code, adding in the JDBC MS SQL Server driver and then basically using that and java.sql to put together a reader that would look at our Aleph Metrics database for Allegiance and build out the nodes and edges.
Here’s a screenshot of my efforts:
It’s visually kind of impressive, especially since Owen’s code included lots of nice camera features, including zoom. But it’s also pretty incomprehensible.
Craig, on the other hand, is building out his Silverlight demo to do more or less the same thing. But he’s doing it in 2D, and building it all from scratch (because he’s a programmer, and I’m not). Here’s what he has so far:
This is in super-draft mode right now, and the program doesn’t even attempt to do a smart mass-spring graph layout yet. But it’s still far more readable, and I think it’s a better way to visualize a small graph like this, especially when you consider that we’re going to be adding event overlays (of who went where, and where battles happened).
