This topic should be used to discuss development of the generator.


Phase I - API Changes [Complete]

API details: http://eu.wargaming.net/developers/

The new World of Tanks API requires more work to obtain the data required for each player, but is now mostly working. Each player requires 3 API calls; ratings, which has the minimal ratings place and value; info, which includes the achievements, clan ID, and more detailed stats (broken into "all", "clan", and "company" sections); and tanks, which contains the per-tank statistics and the "tank_id" to link it to the centralised tank encyclopedia. (Tank stats are currently all set to zero, awaiting Wargaming.net to fix this).

Once these three API calls have been completed, if clan data is required then another API call for the clan data needs to be made, as the player info only includes the clan ID number and data specific to the player; the clan API call is used to get the name, icon, and other central clan information.

Finally a call is made to retrieve the overall tank data, which is only changed for each release of the game and so is only required when a new version is released. This file contains the name, tier, type, and nation for each tank.


Phase II

To be started this week, the next round of changes will include:

• Clan icon fixes: Clan icons are currently missing as this requires a little more API work and storage of clan data in the cache. [Complete]
  
• Mastery badges on tanks: the mastery level is available in the new API and small badges could be overlaid easily on each tank icon. [Complete]
  
• Medals/achievements: This would require some careful planning with the layout of the signature elements, although if the tank icons were removed from the bottom it would be possible to put small versions of many of the medals along the bottom. Ranking of the medals by importance, then count, would be used to push the epic achievements for inclusion before other medals. [Complete]
  
• Player name searching: Allow searching by name rather than entering the player ID and name from the account profile URL. [Complete]
  
• Missing tank images: in some cases the tank icon is missing due to inconsistent naming of images in the WoT tank encyclopedia. As each missing icon is identified the images will have to be downloaded manually. For instance, the IS-6 is named "ussr-is-6" in the internal JSON data, but the icon file is named "ussr-object252". So far 18 tanks have been identified with this issue, but more may appear as they are requested in signatures as the icon retrieval is only done on the first request for a signature with that tank included. [In Progress]
  
• Signature options stored once per player. All signatures for that player will then be in the same format no matter where they are requested from and what the options in the URL are, and the new URL format will be much shorter requiring only the player ID and the server. [In Progress] Single image per player implemented, still need to store settings and modify URL.
  
• Implementation of WN8 efficiency calculation. This is the latest version of the "WN" rating system, and is still in development, but the calculation seems stable and will likely not change much, if at all, in the future. UPDATE: now using updated tanks CSV file (current version 14) from http://www.wnefficiency.net/wnexpected/ . [Complete]

The Future

A number of new feature are being mulled over for inclusion, but will depend upon whether anyone thinks they will be useful. Here is a list of possible additions, but I would welcome any other sensible suggestions - please post a reply to this topic.

• Per tank XVM/WN efficiency rating: a coloured box around each tank related to the colours XVM uses, or a rating displayed instead of battles/wins in white or coloured. Awaiting WoT API to include per-tank stats, WG apparently adding in a future release. [In Progress] WG API updated
  
• Display of tanks in garage only: awaiting WoT API to correctly identify tanks currently in the player's garage, WG apparently adding in a future release. [On hold] WG API removed "in_garage" flag
  
• Tank and/or efficiency rating based on past X days: another new feature of the WoT API is being able to request data for a specific number of days. This could be used to adjust the XVM/WN7/WN8 ratings to reflect the most recent activity and so filter out old data where the player is still learning the game (for instance, for my own player ID according to Noobmeter, at the time of writing my overall WN7 rating is 1124 (good), but my last 1000 battles rating is 1396 (very good)). API methods required to do this are not yet publicly available ... [In Progress] Last 10 changes are recorded, recent ratings based on differences between files
  
• Per player customisable backgrounds: This would be an option intially for Age of Strife long-term forum members, but could be rolled out to the public later, possibly as part of a nominal subscription option. Custom backgrounds would be uploaded to the server, and once approved by a moderator be available for that player to use, and optionally made public for other users to select.

Mockups

These are Photoshopped mockups only, and may not reflect the final version of the signature options.

Mastery badges:




Achievements, second one has a 66% black strip behind the medals to help them stand out from the background image




Tank rating colours: boxes, gradients, names with rank colour, ratings with rank colour

Looking good. I like the ideas under future direction. I would be interesting in the Mastery icons and XVM colorings per tank. Sometimes I have noticed a player may overall be great, but in a certain tank they are terrible, or more often they are average(as myself) but really good in certain tanks.

Agree with jlong. Also like the idea of tanks/ratings based on the last X days or battles. I know it's a grind to improve your play and get better at the game, but like Spack, my first couple thousand battles weren't so great. My WN7 is improving, but not nearly as fast as I would like!

And thank you Spack for working on this.

I'll initially post some mockups of some of the options to see how they look and if everyone (you two at the moment!) is happy with them. Should be pretty simple to add the mastery, the achievements may take a little longer as some of them require a counter which will be about the size of the existing tank battles/wins figures.

As you can see, my WN7 doesn't show up, and the size of my sig is different than yours and jlongs. Any suggestions?

You didn't pick the options to turn them on. I'll mod your sig for you

Thanks!

Mockups added to first post. Let me know what you think.

I've not included Special Achievements or Step Achievements in the achievements mockups, but the intention is to include them in the final version. Should the achievements be sorted by group first (list of groups here: http://wiki.worldoftanks.com/Achievements ) such as Epic > Commemorative > Special > Battle Hero > Step, then by number awarded? Any other suggestions for ordering? Should they be spaced out a bit more?

I think it should be; Mastery Badges, Battle Hero, Epic, Special, Commemorative.

If they're spaced out more, you'd never see half of them, would you?

timewizard wrote:I think it should be; Mastery Badges, Battle Hero, Epic, Special, Commemorative.

If they're spaced out more, you'd never see half of them, would you?

By "Mastery" do you mean "Step"? The ones ranked I to IV? The Mastery badges are the per tank ones, either 3, 2, 1 or M (for Ace).

I prefer the mastery badge on the tanks with the win7 xvm color background gradient. can we get one with the gradient and the rank number also. like a mix of version #2 and #4?

Yes, I meant the step badges. Sorry for confusion.

Managed to do some of this at the weekend, but was so ill yesterday I didn't get chance to post details up. Still feeling bad today, but well enough to at least post this and let you tinker with the test system.

The test generator is at wot/index_test.php . This has options for adding mastery badges and achievements, but these features are only enabled for "Gold" members (which at the present time is just those on the forum I've added to the list of users who do not get AoS ads on their sig). The new options are at the bottom of the advanced list. Careful which options you tick - you can have tank icons and medals, but if so the medals will be a little smaller if you have stats ticked, and only a few of the stats will be displayed.

Current sort order for medals is Epic > Memorial > Group > Special > Battle > Class, and in each section are sorted by count. The Step medals are difficult to make out differences when small which is why I put them at the end. You can also choose which type of medals to display, so you could enable Epic & Battle and lave the rest disabled, for instance.

The fonts have also been unified on the tanks so that it is the same one as the rest of the signature (Calibri) rather than the basic font used before, except for the Class medals which use Lucon as roman numerals look better with a serif font.

There might be some weird glitches with images overlaying text or other oddities in the test version, but hopefully I've nailed all of them. The changes will be added to the live version once i'm happy that they won't break anything.

Here are some images with the new options enabled.

The last one looks best for me but no tank names!!!!

Ps. Couldn't find it at wot/indext_test.php

Jeez Nige, can't you even click the link? It's not indext_test.php, it's index_test.php - you put an extra t in when you typed it. If you just clicked the link it would work. And the last image has tank names turned off, but you can turn them on if you want - I couldn't show every option as otherwise there would be hundreds of pics!

Fonts have been replaced with Lucida Sans as Calibri has odd anti-aliasing issues at sizes between 10 and 15 that I couldn't solve so the fonts on the tank icons looked different to those in the stats, and the stats fonts were not smooth. Lucida looks pretty close, and has no anti-aliasing issues.

Medals are now sortable, simply choose the sort order by picking it for each type of medal in the interface. Within medal sections they are sorted so that achievements that can only be gained once, such as the tank expert and engineer ones, are sorted first, and those that represent a series such as armour piercing are sorted last, with the "normal" medals in between. This only affects the Special achievements where there are these three different types of medals together in one section.

Login name colour is now the goldish orange as used on the WoT website, rather than white. Clan name is still white. I could make this optional if users prefer white for the name though.

The user ID handler has been adjusted to deal with people accidentally putting the entire URL to the account page in rather than just the bold part. This will now strip out the ID down to the required value. A future version will have a player search option so just the player name can be typed in without needing to get the URL to the profile page first.

Length sorting has been added to the stats to try to keep the number of columns and the space required to a minimum, although I've forced percentage values to the end so it can still have the odd effects with placings enabled.

With the introduction of the "Gold" membership options, I'll be looking at formalising at 3 tiers of membership options as well as the free option. Not sure exactly what will be included in each yet, but Gold will be everything enabled and access to all future features including custom backgrounds. The Free signature will have the AoS link and a slow refresh rate (either the current 7 days, or possibly 3 days once I've had chance to figure out if the server can sustain that amount of traffic). Bronze will provide 1 day refreshes, but no other features above the free one. Silver is where I'm still trying to figure things out - some of the new options will be included, but I'm not sure which ones.

Nige, don't use the test signature anywhere yet - just use the generator for testing to see how it looks with the options you want. Once a few people have said the current test version is good to go, it'll go live and then you can use it for your actual signature.

Spack, I tried it out. Most of it worked fine, but when I checked off the medals section (which did say gold membership required or something like that) the preview did not show any of my medals.
I didn't copy the sig to use here because I figured it wasn't ready to go until you said so.

Mine showed medals, not that i will be using that. One thing I did like from before was the XVM colors behind the tanks displays at the bottom. That was awesome, but no longer an option it seems.

TW, try it again, it should work. You should also get a gold star at the top left corner, as will all gold members. Do you think I should make this an option?

jlong, those were rough mockups in Photoshop, I haven't got around to the per tank colouring yet. It's on the list Unfortunately while the new WoT API has placeholders for all the per tank stats required for this, every value is set to zero so it will have to wait until that gets fixed.

UPDATE: Few more changes - players can now enter just their name and search, rather than needing the ID+name from the profile URL; medal default sorting adjusted to match order on the WoT wiki page for achievements.

Thanks Spack, works now.
Can it be used now in AoS or is it still in testing?

It's now live. Fixed a couple of bugs in the generator interface, I think it's now working correctly. You'll need to rebuild your signature to add any of the new options.

I think the next change will be having the settings server-side so that you only need to use the generator to change options and have that immediately reflected in the sig images without having to change the HTML/BBcode for them, which will mean a unified sig for all the sites it's used on (I use mine here on AoS and also on the WoT EU forum). Does anyone need to have multiple images available at once? Would one image across all instances be acceptable? Or do I need to look at an instancing option, so the generator would allow up to say 5 versions and editing of each one being separate?

Works great Spack! Many thanks.
In my case, I don't believe I'll need multiple images.
But if others need them, is it very difficult to put together?

Bring back the pixel limiter/proportioner??

Working for me also it seems. I agree with TW. I don't need alternate images. Can you though put code change to boost my stats??

killmaimburn wrote:Bring back the pixel limiter/proportioner??

Don't need to bring it back, it never went away!Limiter is working, the image isn't larger than the limit

Had another look, the only image limiting is on the width to ensure it remains smaller than the centre content width. The javascript thing was with the old old forum, and has never been on this one.

Still working on reducing the amount of traffic, as it looks like a number of forums having signature size checks - every time someone views a topic with sigs included, those forums request the images in each signature to check that they are no larger than the predefined size allowed, and do so without any caching checks of any kind. This results in a huge amount of traffic to the generator that uses up bandwidth (for example, in the past 30 days the WoT forums have pulled about 2GB of images, and the one at relicgaming.com has pulled almost 500Mb). At the moment my estimates from the reporting I've put in place show around 4GB per month of data is simply other forums checking the image sizes. The more users have sigs, the more data is pulled by the remote forums, the more my VPS bandwidth use goes up and the more risk there is that it hits the monthly limit and so the hosting price goes up. In order to reduce the impact this has, I've put in a place some tests to see if the request looks like it's from a real browser - if not then a blank image is being sent instead, which reduces the data transfer on a 400x100 signature from around 75,000 bytes to 200 bytes. This should result in a massive reduction in data transfer, but still allow those forums to retrieve the dimensions of the signature. I did try simply blocking the WoT forums yesterday as a test and it switched some signatures to a link for a short period.

The signature size checking used by IP.Board, SMF, and other forum software used by these sites is very sloppy - with no caching, and checking on almost every request by every user. Grr.