Lastest Posts

• Sources now being counted properly 0 comments | Posted by ben 23 hours 50 minutes ago

  Yesterday Rob from Zethama: World of Games pointed out the number of sources listed in the main summary of games was not correct, the actual number of sources were a lot higher as seen in the source report.

  Turns out the log processing software wasn't correctly increasing the source count when it encountered new ones.

• An update on the reports 0 comments | Posted by ben 1 days 2 hours ago

  The averages and the comparisons (red/green arrows and percents) are now relative to the previous month's averages rather than the all time. This gives you a better feel for a game's performance based on closer data because it takes so long for all time averages to reflect the current situation.

  Hilariously this introduced not one but two infinite loops when applied to the individual country and source reports which resulted in some service interruption while I tracked down the error and pondered whether to fix it or call it a feature.

• Score tables can now be reset 0 comments | Posted by ben 1 days 4 hours ago

  If you're using Playtomic leaderboards you can now easily delete all scores in a score table now via the "Edit score tables" link in your game's settings menu.

• Flash games vs. the box office 0 comments | Posted by ben 01 Sep 2010

  A fun little infographic I made. The image has no chance of fitting here so here's a link.

• The game feed is live! 0 comments | Posted by ben 30 Aug 2010

  As part of the upgrades and new stuff I've been doing I introduced a great way for portals to find quality games without any of the garbage other feeds are full of. It's a week late but it's now live with over 100 high quality games available right now in the game catalog.

  Publishers can construct their own version of the feed with a stack of great options that let you filter the feed to make sure you get the categories you want, the languages you want and more on the feed page.

  As part of this move to open up Playtomic as a distribution platform there's also the Game Charts which is a list of hot games based on a rating determined from actual player data - a measure of how fun the games are.

  The charts can also broadcast that you have sitelocks available on FGL - just enter your FGL gameid on the games' setting page and your game will be a part of this big pile of sexy.

  Because of all the great games and the data coming through Playtomic I'm in the unique position where I can provide a definitive, trusted feed for publishers along with an amazing way to find awesome games to buy licenses for. Hopefully this will all result in more plays and more nonexclusive-licenses for all of us.

  Is your game missing from the feed?

  It's because you didn't bother uploading it so go into your games' setting page, upload the files and enter the information and you will go on the feed.

  Why does it use the Playtomic url on the feed?

  Because you haven't entered your URL in your account settings and your game URL in the game settings.

  Does the feed work with ARCADE_SCRIPT?

  Maybe. There are compatibility modes for both MochiMedia and FlashGameDistribution feeds that should make it as simple as changing the URL you download the games from but your best course of action is to ask the maker of your script to integrate it.

• Support tickets are now operational! 0 comments | Posted by ben 29 Aug 2010

  There were only a few tickets in the queue but to those who sent them sorry for the delay. I hadn't got around to setting up the administration side of the support tickets until today.

  Ben

• Some new cool numbers 0 comments | Posted by ben 21 Aug 2010

  It's been a while since I posted about the volume of traffic coming through here. On the 10th of June I posted about reaching 108m events in a single day. That record was very short lived though I was busy working on the new version of everything and making games and stuff.

  The total number of events today: 194,399,231

  To put that into perspective:

  • it's an average of 2250 events per second all day long

  • 34 gigabytes of logfiles recorded the events

  • about 100 gigabytes of data was transferred to/from, fortunately the new servers from Hivelocity come with a staggering 10 terabytes each of bandwidth

  The new log processing software I launched a few weeks ago performed admirably, reports updated 174 times during the day or about every 8.5 minutes on average. It's almost time to do another iteration of that software though, frequently throughout the day I could see a small number of files waiting to be processed in the queue. I have some ideas on how I can shave a few more minutes off the processing time, on top of which it's still single-threaded which means only one set of files are processed at a time so there's a lot of room to bring the lag between a player doing something in your game and that data hitting your reports down to the 1 or 2 minutes window.

  It's the biggest day so far although I doubt it will be for long, by the end of this month I expect our games will be sending more than 200 million events per day.

  Some of the culprits

  • Depict1

  • Solipskier

  • Raze

  • Crush The Castle 2

  • E7

  • and many, many more .... next month someone will add the 1000th game!

• The new Playtomic! 0 comments | Posted by ben 14 Aug 2010

  I've finally set up Playtomic which is the new version of SWFStats. The SWFStats domain will soon start redirecting to Playtomic but games will continue using the old subdomain.swfstats.com domains so they won't be affected.

  Some new features:

  • Attribution: You can add developers/artists/etc to the attribution. This means they get listed wherever game info is displayed and the attributed people have read-only access to the game's reports.

  • Sponsors: There's finally a mechanism in place for sponsors to also be attributed and they get full access to the game.

  • Non-exclusives: You can specify your FGL game id if your game's for sale in the gameshop and it will advertise that sitelocks are available.

  • Charts: A ranking of games to provide sponsors and portals a great place to find games to add to their website or to buy sitelocks for. Combined with the non-exclusives this is awesome. Some games aren't shown because they have less than 1000 views so I assume it's not launched. Soon it will be limited to only games that are uploaded but it looks crap with just my games.

  • Distribution: I'm creating a place where portals can get the best games delivered right to them with none of the shitty little jigsaws or other low quality games. There's a whole range of customization features available for portals to get whatever type they want. One-click installing is coming soon so portals will be able to post a game to their site from the game charts and game profiles. I've got downloading etc. wired up so it's collecting stats so there'll be some awesome stuff coming in the dev center soon for that.

  • Support tickets: If you have a problem and you don't know I live in chat you can log a ticket and I'll probably reply or something.

  • Community stuff: forums, user profiles and private messages. For flashers this is a bit redundant given FGL and Mochi but my aspirations go beyond Flash so feel free to use or not use that stuff.

  If you have games using SWFStats you should sign in to Playtomic and go into your game settings and adjust them to your liking - you can exclude games from charts/distribution and from your profile if you want, set the sitelocks up if you have them available, and upload your game files so we can get the game feed set up. If your game is sponsored send me a PM so I can set some extra stuff in to entice sponsors to come and be a part of this (and pay for the devs they sponsor when I set that up).

  What's next:

  This stuff will start appearing over the next week or two:

  • one-click installing for portals to publish your games on their site(s)

  • managing the levels in the quietly-launched level sharing API

  • resetting stats to a specific date

  • distribution reports

  • some awesome new analytics stuff

• Super fast log processing ..... with a few buts unfortunately 0 comments | Posted by ben 29 Jul 2010

  My awesome new log processing software went live the other day and it's caused a little bit of disruption. A lot of things went right but some things went wrong:

  What went right:

  A bunch of stuff went right and overall this new version of the software is a stunning success:

  • Logs are now processed about 30 - 40 times faster than before. The old software was getting bogged down and spending in worst cases almost an hour on a batch of files during which meant of course there were more files waiting for it when it finally finished. The new software can process a batch of files in as few as 2 or 3 minutes.

  • Because the new software's so fast I was able to reduce the log file size by 40% so they're completed and sent off for processing a lot sooner.

  • The negative bounce rate problem was fixed.

  • A not so obvious problem with timezones was fixed that properly aligns your stats with the timezone you select in your profile.

  What went wrong

  A bunch of stuff went wrong which has been a major pain in the ass to rectify:

  • To fix the negative bounce rates I decided to reprocess July's log files, and it took a few goes to get the software really working properly in reprocessing mode - it doubled some days and reduced some others.

  • A bug meant it assumed your metricid (regardless of type) was the last metricid it had encountered so people got some weird stuff in their reports.

  • The new software operates almost entirely in memory and I was using dates with different times as the key to the in-memory versions resulting in a massive 8 gigabyte swapfile from hundreds of versions of the day's data, which also messed up some stats.

  • Metric names weren't being unescaped resulting in duplicate metrics for 'some thing' and 'some%20thing'.

  What's happening now

  July is reprocessing semi-properly now, the unescaped metric names remain an issue that'll be fixed when it completes.

  July 25 hasn't been processed but will hopefully be done soon. Because the timezones are correctly applied now reprocessing 'a day' means examining the log files (over 20gb/day) of the day before and after. Because there's so much data it has to be compressed which makes it slower to read.

  Until it finishes this monster reprocessing job the reports are going to look messed up and some bugs are going to make some pages unavailable in the members system.

  Everything should be back on track hopefully within the next 24 hours but it might be the weekend before everything's fully fixed up.

  Meanwhile

  The donation drive is going great! Andy Moore made a massive donation that helps a lot, so did Hero Interactive, the guys behind Tumbleball, Thomas from PsyFlash Productions and Hybrid Mind Studios. My goal is to raise a couple to a few grand so I can get the API sorted out in a few extra languages - iOS, Android, etc - which means I need some hardware.

  Massive progress is being made on the next version of the website, it has forums, new blog software, support tickets, and a really cool new feature - charts that highlight the best games with ties to Flash Game License (or your site/email) to hopefully push nonexclusive sales and generally help with distribution.

• Super fast log processing 0 comments | Posted by ben 24 Jul 2010

  These last few days I've been working on the latest version of the log processing software. It's fast. Really, really fast. For the first time in probably 5 or 6 months now the log processing software has to wait for log files to come in for processing!

  The delay between someone doing something in your game and your reports showing that data should now be down as low as just 2 or 3 minutes.

  PS. There might be bugs so if your data's messed up let me know.

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