Character Blogging and Metrics
Jul 16, 07:32 AM
An upcoming update to NCSoft’s Dungeon Runners will feature automated character blogging, according to developer Matthew Weigel. It’ll live blog things like quest completion, leveling, death, etc, and so on. This leads into what I think is a great example of how you might get extra mileage out of a metrics system.
One thing I notice about their blogging system is that it’s entirely event-based. This is an assumption, but I would guess that what happens under the hood is that when a character dies, it triggers a blogDeathEvent() command or whatever, which then talks to a web service and causes the blog to update.
One of the nice things about a well-implemented metrics system (like ours, cough cough) is that it will use a message queuing system. We use JMS and ActiveMQ, and one of the great things about those technologies is that it’s very easy to basically route the messages through a reader that talks to a web service that could be built to trigger blog posts based on messages that come out of the game server. So assuming all your metrics are in place, you wouldn’t have to write a lick of game code to get an autoblogging system up and running. You’d just be triggering off of the existing messaging system! Pretty cool stuff. (As a side note, we will be adding MSMQ support as well, but for our current clients we’re using JMS.)
Also, Matt was gracious enough to point out that Vanguard has a similar character blogging system in place.
Out of curiosity, how would you do screen shots via that system? :-)
— Matthew Weigel · Jul 16, 12:39 PM · #
Tricky :)
You could always send binary information through the JMS, although it would be better to write some game code that uploads the screenshot and sends the URI for it via the messaging system.
— Darius K. · Jul 16, 01:29 PM · #
Trickiness aside, you hit the nail on the head in one respect: this stuff is just metrics. There are different technical concerns related to different USES of metrics, and you can get bogged down in the details, but really the only difference here is that we’re letting our players see more of it. :)
— Matthew Weigel · Jul 16, 02:47 PM · #