GizmoLA.com

The Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC) is one of a number of Massive Multiplayer Online Role playing games (MMORPG) available for people who like those types of things. Mythic Entertainment, the company behind DAoC decided to offer an xml feed with various statistics about the game including the number of active players. From April 2002 to July 2005 I used a cron job to query the xml feed once every 5 minutes, parse the results and store the statistics in a database table.

I made a graph of these statistics available on a fan site I operated. The graph used the open source PHPlot graphing class in order to draw a line graph charting the number of players playing the game by hour for a 24 hour period. Visitors to the site would see the line graph shown here, plotting the number of players per hour against a second line showing the day's average. Like many PHP graphing libraries, PHPlot assumes that you have the GD library installed and available to PHP on order for the graphs to work.

This was one of my early experiments with PHP, and illustrated its power and flexibility. Now that the site where the graph appeared is no longer online, I figured I would provide the code, and a small subset of the database, for people interested in how to program with PHPlot. At the time I created this code, PHPlot didn't have much documentation and required some trial and error experimentation. Of course, since then (several years now) PHPlot has been improved, and should definately be considered if you want graphing in your application. Because I don't want to spend time debugging old obsolete code, I've provided the library I used in the download along with the graph script. It would probably work with the latest release, but I don't have time to test it. You can download my example database, version of PHPlot and script here. The database contains one months data, so you can play with the script and explore the class.

Read on for some brief instructions and an explanation of the code. Continue reading "PHPlot, MySQL and the Dark Ages of Camelot"

I have had two hobby sites up for a while one here and the other here, both devoted to the Massive multiplayer online RPG Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC). These games have guilds (similar to a team) and classes (which are the types of characters you can create). One site is for a Guild on the server I made my characters on, and the other site is devoted to one particular class (The Cabalist) which happens to be the one I initially picked when I started to play the game. The class site has been relatively popular, garnering around 200k page views in the month of August. Like Ultima Online and Everquest, DAoC boasts thousands of subscribers worldwide (they say 250k as of Sept, 2002).

I managed to find an excuse to experiment with some interesting technology for the sites, including PHP, Mysql, xml, phpBB2, phpWebsite and phpNuke among others. Several months back i wrote a script that began to pull the number of active users on a regular interval from an xml feed provide by the publisher of DAoC. I use this data to create a graph of daily user activity using a php graphing library called phplot that wraps support for GD a c language open source graphics display library. Although the program appears to be an image (as least that is what's returned to your browser) it's actually a php script that queries the database and returns the plotted information for that day. The program takes a few of paramaters (daocdate, width and height) in case you're interested in playing with it.