I just fixed problem on Gamingstats that affected all of the users. This time invalid username was filtered to empty string, causing updating process to halt. Problematic user is now removed from the system, but the bug is still there. I try to fix it tomorrow or something.

I am not sure if I continue to support this project. It has way too many problems. First is that changes to Steamcommunity usually breaks up my system and I have to find out the changes and it takes lot of time. (this time the problem was my fault, but yeah). Another thing that kills my motivation is that I don’t use this site anymore myself. So it isn’t anymore so fun to work with it. It is more like a job that I don’t get money for.

Most likely I am going to close the application, release it under GPL license and move forward. There is only couple of users that uses the service and I think that the system is way too buggy. I had to rewrite the parser because my webhost didn’t had all the plugins and stuff that I used when I coded on local development server. Because of that, the updater doesn’t have the best stability with bad input…

I was going to sleep one hour ago, but because the system didn’t work as I expected I wasted one hour trying to fix it. And my website also went down once when I tried to fix it, so I am not very happy with this project currently.

So yeah back to sleep now… ->

I found couple of good videos from the UDK wiki. I decided to download the UDK and try to make something with it. As I have used hammer before and I have experience on compiling source sdk, it wasn’t hard to learn with the videos.

Comparing to the hammer editor, UDK can be harder for first, but after while the UDK has many advantages over the Hammer editor.

Hammer editor is much easier to start with, because on UDK you need to use one special box to insert every brush. It is bit confusing at first.

But after I realized how the brush stuff worked, UDK became much easier. Inserting materials is awesome. Content browser is much better and faster than the Hammer browser. And lining materials automatically is just so useful feature.

Kismet is also much better way to create scripts/events to levels than the Hammers own I/O system. It is also very easy to make animations with Kismet+Matinee.

Only problems that I have with the Unreal editor is mostly just the amount of features. There is just so many options to setup

The play in editor feature is also nice, but it is not so awesome as it could be. It makes developing faster, but it won’t remove compiling…

On the code/mod side. UDK is MUCH easier to start with. With Source SDK you need to install Visual C++, extract the source, configure it and compile. With UDK you can code with unrealscript and compile that. Unrealscript is much easier than c++ and it won’t explode the whole game if you forget one variable somewhere.

Valve has to make some serious upgrades to Source to get more developers to use it. Unreal engine is very popular engine and there is only couple of non-valve source games.

I am going to play with the UDK some more. Maybe make my own mod or something. But only problem with UDK is that I don’t want to make maps for UT3 only I have to use Hammer if I want to make maps for my favorite games.

For couple of weeks I have been coding Gamingstats. It is simple website/webapp that collects information from users steam profile daily and then generates statistics for user. Collecting and generating stats all happens on the servers background cron script, so user just needs to enter his/her steamcommunity url.

Because some users have lots of games (100+) It creates lots of data to database. (Played time for every game, every day = lots of data) And because it generates lots of data, I have created steamgroup. To enable time tracking for games, you need to join to the steamgroup. This way I can control growth of the database.

Project is still in beta and there can be some bugs. I may add some more stuff to it in future, like better layout/design and forums signature system, but now I just want to make sure it works.

System doesn’t currently work with the steamcommunity profile id’s (eg 76561197974577294), but it works well with the custom profile urls.

http://gamingstats.pelikoira.net/

I am currently building my first game/game-engine with c++. Before even thinking too much about the actual game idea, I want to make sure that the engine I am creating is good and works as I want.

I am building my engine very object oriented way. This way it is easier for me to manage the system, and makes it faster to create complex code at the later process of the development. But I also want to make the system flexible enough to allow me to change the way how the engine works if needed.

I have just finished cvar system that the engine can use. (get,set variables) In future I will add ingame console that can change these variables. I will also add way to store the variables on config files.

Right now I am finishing logging system. It is not very complex system, but it is very important to have. The logging system takes advantage from the cvar system I have build, storing filepaths and settings there. It can log events to console, file or both.

To filter important messages from random game events I have designed 4 level system to filter messages.

• 0 = debug message (Example: ai debug messages, small changes, etc. Can be bit spammy)
• 1 = game events (Example: kills, deaths, inventory changes. Good information for statistic parsers)
• 2 = engine events (Example: map change, engine start, etc)
• 3= Critical error (Example: missing textures/files, failed to init SDL/engine. Game crashing bugs)

User can choose level for the logging. Example if user wants to only see engines messages, he could choose 2. Then he would see engine events and critical errors.

Some users may want to see more information on the console they can choose 1. With filter level 1 user can see everything else expect floody debug messages.

When debugging error, developer can set the level to 0 and get all information game can give. Making good log file to analyze later.

The project is currently under heavy development. I will post more when the project goes forward.

I recreated the TF2LogAnalyzer. It no longer tracks stats for individual users, but it tracks global weapon usage.

I removed whole authentication system and player profiles, now the system only shows the information that was the only part I actually used on the system, weapon usage statistics.

As now I don’t have to collect stats for users, I can collect stats for every user that is on single server. So I get around 50-300 kills to my logs every map. Previously I got only about 7-20 log events per map per user.

Client is now much easier to use, just add the path and you are submitting stats to the server. You can download the client here and stats are at the same place as previously, here.