http://skycharts.beyondludus.com/

Like the new Dailies pages, I am scraping DynaRank on an hourly basis for a list of stats. In contrast to Dailies, I am aggregating these stats based on faction and plane type, to give you a general idea of the state of the game. For example, you can view a chart of the number of players flying all different plane types over the last week, and detect if Bolos suddenly became popular. There are tons of different graphs to check out.

I update the graphs every hour. I have it set to archive stats for 5 years, but currently you can only display out a month, I may change that later.

One graph I'd really like to add is the number of players flying around each skyland, but that will require some more work. If you have any other requests or comments, please post here! You can also email me, my contact info is posted on the site.

Enjoy!

(EDIT: You can see a huge drop in CR-4P flyers at midnight on Wednesday, this is because I started actively throwing away data from players with less than 10 hrs flight time. I stop gathering data when flight time goes below 10 but previously I was getting a few extras here and there around 9 hours.)

For graphs like "all-plane-popularity" with a lot of lines, I have a really hard time telling the colors apart.

For graphs like "browns-plane-popularity", a bunch of lines are stacked on top of each other, so that some of them are completely lost.

Possible UI fix to both: Somehow attach lists of labels to the right ends of the lines?

I am quite open to suggestions about color schemes with 35 uniquely identifiable colors

The graphs are made directly from a program called RRDTool, and I don't think I can customize them with labels on the end like that. What I can do, it seems, is change the color and width of the lines, and modify the dash sequence. I played around with this some and this is the best I came up with. In terms of overlapping lines, it's easier to tell them apart with more data - hopefully over time this will make the weekly and monthly graphs make more sense.

Really though, if anybody knows of a way to get RRD data into a better graphing solution that isn't painful (I spent a full day going through alternatives like graphite and collectd and hitting a wall on each one), I am all ears.

I should mention I am using Ruby for all of this stuff, and the graphs are generated on the server side. I suppose it would be okay if they were generated by the client in javascript.

You've got 9 tiers (10 counting the junker) and 5 plane types. Maybe a unique and distinctive color for each tier, and a different dash pattern for each type?

It's a good suggestion, I will try to play with it some more. The main issue is the legend. Any lines with a dash, regardless of the type of dash, have the same legend icon.

Here's a quick example of what you suggested:

I think the problem with the legend is that it's so scattered. How about a column that gives the line styles, then a column that lists the plane styles, then a column for each tier, with the planes in the appropriate rows?

...or separate charts for each tier or type (Trade/Stock/Upgrade/etc)?

I thought about that too, and its certainly possible. The number of graphs and the amount of work my server has to do to make them goes up by a huge factor as you can imagine, and the UI gets more complicated too. So the question is, do you actually want to see that?

If enough people do, I may add this sort of thing as a separate service where you have to actually wait for the graph to be rendered.



The legend lists stuff in order of tier, but I can probably draw a separate legend myself that does what you're suggesting...

A couple new charts today.

The first one is now the one that comes up when you load the site by default, it's the count of players by faction.

The second one (which is available for factions and planes) is "trade_income_as_percent_of_total_income" and this takes the "highest_profit" value and divides it by the "revenue" value.

(this represents my discovery of how to speak RRDese and tell it to do math)