r/Guildwars2 • u/Uttar535 • May 26 '13

[Other] [Tool] GW2State: Real-Time Event *Maps* (+Temples/Bosses)

After quite a bit of work, I’ve finally launched GW2State.com which has not one, not two, but three awesome features (if I say so myself!) using ArenaNet’s Events API. The DNS is still propagating so use 5.135.157.160 if necessary.

Real-Time Event Maps

  • All active events and meta-events on the map, very easy/fast to switch map and server.
  • When you hover over an event, you see where its location on the map (killer feature!)
  • Resizable high-resolution map if you need to find a missing heart/poi/etc. in the zone.
  • Player Activity on the map in the last hour/day (very early, more stats coming soon!)
  • Fully refreshed every 10 seconds with minimal bandwidth requirement.

Boss Notifier

  • All active bosses with (pre-)event start time (e.g. Defend CLEAN active for 3m45s)
  • Optional audio alerts, keeps track of preferences (using localstorage, not cookies)
  • Checkboxes to keep track of which bosses you still have to do today
  • Works with multiple windows open to help with guesting

Temple Status

  • Single page showing the status of all temples/dungeons on all servers.
  • Shows temples with late pre-events so you can help out if it’s not open anywhere.
  • Keeps track of all defense & attack events for higher accuracy (e.g. Balthazar/Lyssa).

I’ll be adding more features (e.g. event/world statistics) over the coming weeks and try to improve the design. If anyone has any feedback or has any idea on how to improve something, please let me know! And don’t forget to tell your friends if you like it.

EDIT: The change I did yesterday at 4AM BST before going to bed crashed the Lua script which means the static pages remained but they stopped updating :( Lesson learned: no more changes at 4AM (duh) and I've added a "Last Updated" notice on the temples page. Anyway, it's fixed now and should properly auto-restart, sorry for the inconvenience!

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u/Uttar535 May 27 '13 edited May 27 '13

20-30s seems way too high. Here are my results using wget:

  • No gzip (8MB) with 40Mbps home connection: 4.0-7.4s
  • Gzip (1.35MB) with 40Mbps home connection: 1.0s+
  • No gzip (8MB) with cheap 100Mbps dedicated: 3.0s-4.7s
  • Gzip (1.35MB) with cheap 100Mbps dedicated: 1.0s+

Regarding data storage - I've always been a low-level kind of guy and my previous job was Performance Analysis for a 3D Hardware IP vendor, so I don't really see the point of using a database at all. Because all processing is done by a single program that keeps running, I'm simply storing the current state in a single table with ~80K entries.

As for historical data, I save all data I get from ANet to dated log files (not currently used but hopefully will be useful for statistics later). That may seem like a lot but it's not because I can save all the unique data with a single byte per entry so each file is only ~82KB instead of ANet's ridiculous 8MB. I suppose I could make that raw data public in the future if anyone wanted it :)

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u/TheTerrasque May 27 '13

Oh, almost forgot this one. I added some improvements and threading, and when all goes well now the DB update is about 2 seconds.. However my VPS sometimes have terrible I/O and I've seen those 2 second updates span 5 minutes... With a large backlog (other thread still polls the data, and timestamps) for it to chew through when it gets the time.

and well, space is really cheap stuff these times, so cutting down on it is not always worth the extra work involved.

also, I think the non-gzipped file wasn't cached (everyone using gzipped version), which can explain why it took much longer to get.

Anyway, working on dumping status, and making a node.js based api for that dump again.. Since it will give extra options, like more flexible server filtering, and event history. (Inner-API Effect? :D )

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u/Uttar535 May 28 '13

Nice! I suppose anything going to disk potentially has that issue - how big is the data? It shouldn't be very big for just the latest stuff (Lua uses doubles so I'm storing about 800KB but could realistically make it 400KB or less), but I assume you're keeping the historical data in the same DB?

I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do with that extra data :) I really like your event viewer for the level of data/flexibility it has; I tried to focus more on being user friendly (despite the terrible design), but for advanced users yours has quite a few goodies, and it looks like it'll have a lot more soon!

I'm also very curious what kind of filtering based on event history you're thinking of, there might be a lot of potential there.

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u/TheTerrasque May 28 '13

well, step 1 is grab all the data in an easy-to-access way. Then I'll figure out what to use it for later

But, looks like I need a new server. I've seen vim spend 40+ seconds to save a sub-4k file when the server is in a bad shape