Ladder Sigs

[babelphish]

Sup altitude people.

So I'm working on a way for people to have sigs that represent their ladder stats, kind of like those that exist for starcraft or warcraft or other crafts. I checked with nobo and he seemed cool with it, so here's my very rough first draft:



I can create and tweak the chart, and I'll probably add those cool "min" "max" markers that nobo has. I can layer any sort of images on such as the badges and mess with their transparency. I can put text wherever and color it, but I can't change the font and there are a good number of special characters that the text will barf on. Right now it's barfing on a number of people's names, so I'm going to have to either strip those characters out or figure out something else.

I'm definitely not in love with the way it looks now, which is why I'm hoping someone will throw me some ideas (or even better, mockups) of sigs you'd like to have.

A few things to note:

1) As mentioned earlier, some names don't work.
2) I'm using google app engine and not paying them anything, so who knows if I'll hit some monthly limit or another. This will be a good test.
3) Sigs may be up to three hours stale since I'm caching the results so I don't hammer nobo's server for updated stats.
4) I know this forum doesn't allow sigs, I'm thinking they would be cool on other forums as sort of altitude evangelism/bragging rights thing, and of course on clan forums.

Edit: Oh, and that image is legitly generated, it's not photoshopped or something. You could take the link and plug in your own vaporid/gametype, but ultimately there will be an easier to use page that will generate your sig for you.

STILL TODO:

Remove line from chart
Fix all chars in names(?)
More readable text
Auto refresh instead of refresh on viewing stale images.

[nobodyhome]

too sexy.



(note: pretty sure you won't hit app engine's use limit, appengine.google.com says "Every Google App Engine application will have enough CPU, bandwidth, and storage to serve around 5 million monthly pageviews for free.")

[classicallad]

oooo, nice job man.

[sunshineduck]

pretty cool!

a nice feature would be an implementation of a graphic of some sort (maybe a line running through the graph?) showing where acegunner is currently rated. it's commonly accepted that acegunner is the mendoza line of tbd ladder and it would be nice to know where i am in regards to him. please make sure the line is nice thick to represent how fat he is in real life as well. thanks!

[Tekn0]

Nice work

[Ajuk999]

This is sick!

[Premier Stalin]

How do you make your own?

[leggomyeggo]

Can't touch this.

[GGQ]

The image needs to distinguish whether it's Ball or TBD!

Here I have Ball first and TBD second... I blame a streak of anti-donk games for my bad tbd rating.

[GGQ]

Originally Posted by Premier Stalin

How do you make your own?

Open one of the images in a new tab. The URL will be something like this:

http://altitudesig.appspot.com/altit...7e4e&type=ball

replace the vaporid part with your vaporid, and the type with whatever game mode you want your pic to show. press enter and voila

[Premier Stalin]

Ah I see, I was clicking it but It just links to your profile :/

thanks.

[number 3]

Pretty sickkkk GOGOGOGO TBD!

[number 3]

we might be able to convince karlam to use these. not as if they are hurting anything, and since its related to alty

[nobodyhome]

Now that I'm seeing these things on the forums, it sorta looks like they are a bit thick. I would like to see them thinner (make it wider if you have to) with all the information on one line and the graph miniaturized.

[babelphish]

So I spent some time tonight fixing the server side caching, although there's still a bit left to do. Once that's done I'll add a ball/bomb logo for ball and tbd, and then see about providing different sizes.

[cipso]

I wonder how exactly do you get ratings to paint graph? Can you connect to ladder database from app engine? (I think that's not possible, right?) Do you get it from ladder website? Or... ? Great work btw!

[Void]

Wow this is nice.. great work!

[Ingbo]

how do i get one? :3

[cipso]

Originally Posted by Ingbo

how do i get one? :3

Link is:

http://altitudesig.appspot.com/altit...3be3&type=ball

just replace vaporid and type.

[Ingbo]

sweet looks sick imo

[banana]

Wow nice job, hopefully the finished product will be allowed

[babelphish]

Originally Posted by cipso

I wonder how exactly do you get ratings to paint graph? Can you connect to ladder database from app engine? (I think that's not possible, right?) Do you get it from ladder website? Or... ? Great work btw!

Nobo displays the ratings graph with a canvas based widget that gets fed data from a javascript array. I just fetch the user's ladder page, parse out the appropriate javascript array and feed it into Google's Chart API, which lets you generate chart images from urls.

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

I then take the image generated from Google Charts and composite it onto the sig image.

[nobodyhome]

slight correction for those who don't know: cipso does all the web stuff these days so the chart is actually his doing

[cipso]

Originally Posted by nobodyhome

slight correction for those who don't know: cipso does all the web stuff these days so the chart is actually his doing

The chart is not the same though, I guess that babelphish renders his own ... but I have no idea how he gets the data :-) (Not that it's impossible to parse it from profile page, I'm just curious how it is implemented).

[Solqom]

We can has sigs?

__________________________________________________

[babelphish]

Originally Posted by cipso

The chart is not the same though, I guess that babelphish renders his own ... but I have no idea how he gets the data :-) (Not that it's impossible to parse it from profile page, I'm just curious how it is implemented).

I replied earlier but for some reason the message got moderated, maybe because I included a link? All I'm doing is having app engine fetch the appropriate profile page and use regular expressions to parse out the javascript arrays used to populate the canvas widget. Then I format a url to make a request to Google Charts API, which is a Google service that generates chart images. That chart is then pasted onto the badge along with the text and other images.

[babelphish]

Anyways thanks for the nice feedback guys, I'm going to try and completely fix caching tonight and then we'll see what I can do this weekend about graphix.

Edit: Okay, caching should be good to go, although I may lengthen the time before they refresh stats depending on resource usage. I'm looking at other sig generators to see if I can find some ideas for spiffing up the graphics, although I have no skills.

[cipso]

Originally Posted by babelphish

I replied earlier but for some reason the message got moderated, maybe because I included a link? All I'm doing is having app engine fetch the appropriate profile page and use regular expressions to parse out the javascript arrays used to populate the canvas widget. Then I format a url to make a request to Google Charts API, which is a Google service that generates chart images. That chart is then pasted onto the badge along with the text and other images.

Would you be interested in more datapoints than available on profile page? There are max 50 ratings used on profile page to paint graph, simply because graph is too small to show more ratings. If you want, I can prepare page to output all ratings, possibly with dates, in JSON so that you can paint more detailed graph, since yours seems to be wider. (It may include all profile data you need to avoid parsing on your own)

[malakas]

That is actually a pretty cool idea!

[babelphish]

Originally Posted by cipso

Would you be interested in more datapoints than available on profile page? There are max 50 ratings used on profile page to paint graph, simply because graph is too small to show more ratings. If you want, I can prepare page to output all ratings, possibly with dates, in JSON so that you can paint more detailed graph, since yours seems to be wider. (It may include all profile data you need to avoid parsing on your own)

I'll send you a PM, but basically I'll take any data I can get.

[babelphish]

I'm a little stumped here and I was wondering if someone could help me out. I want to incorporate a ball image or a bomb image depending on the game type, but I can't get a good looking ball. I've got a decent bomb, and I'd prefer a red ball to use against the blue background. If anyone has any graphix, specifically a red ball png against a transparent background, it would be hugely appreciated.

[cipso]

Originally Posted by babelphish

I'm a little stumped here and I was wondering if someone could help me out. I want to incorporate a ball image or a bomb image depending on the game type, but I can't get a good looking ball. I've got a decent bomb, and I'd prefer a red ball to use against the blue background. If anyone has any graphix, specifically a red ball png against a transparent background, it would be hugely appreciated.

Idea: grab a screenshot, and use ball in "ball indicator" when someone holds it. It is nice ball on white background, you should be able to cut it out from there then.

[sunshineduck]

Originally Posted by babelphish

I'm a little stumped here and I was wondering if someone could help me out. I want to incorporate a ball image or a bomb image depending on the game type, but I can't get a good looking ball. I've got a decent bomb, and I'd prefer a red ball to use against the blue background. If anyone has any graphix, specifically a red ball png against a transparent background, it would be hugely appreciated.

i think they have a red ball .png in the presskit

[babelphish]

Originally Posted by cipso

Idea: grab a screenshot, and use ball in "ball indicator" when someone holds it. It is nice ball on white background, you should be able to cut it out from there then.

I actually did this to get the bomb image, and it turned out pretty well. I tried that with the ball multiple times and it always ends up looking horrible or at best meh. I don't have photoshop so I'm just using paint.net, maybe someone else with more skills could give it a try.

SSD, the press kit was great idea but I couldn't find a ball image anywhere in there.

[Solqom]

This is just a quick screen shot and edit. Its still not great, but hope it helps.

[Pieface]

[babelphish]

Originally Posted by Pieface

Haha, okay amazing. Is there a bomb image like that by any chance?

[babelphish]

Originally Posted by Solqom

This is just a quick screen shot and edit. Its still not great, but hope it helps.

This was way better than what I could make btw solqom. I resized it and did a test run which almost made it into production, but I wasn't happy with the layout so I reverted to the originals.

[Pieface]

Originally Posted by babelphish

Haha, okay amazing. Is there a bomb image like that by any chance?

Not that I know of. There are these two though:

[TRUEPAiN]

Mine's broken :-(