our solutions
A Brief Look at the Aleph Metrics Suite
XML to API to database. It’s that simple
Our APIs are generated for target languages and platforms based off of an XML configuration file. In the XML file, what’s explicitly listed are the in-game events that the customer wants to record, and which properties they want to record about that event. The API that gets generated can be called from inside your game to store the data off into a database.
An Example
Here’s an example from the Quake III metrics modification we did. We want to know whenever a given player fired a weapon. Which means we need to track an object in game for the player, which we call the “Client”, since that’s what Quake calls players. Then we need to record an event every time a weapon is fired by a client, called “ClientFired”. The Client object just contains an ID number and the player name. The ClientFired event contains relevant properties like where the weapon was fired, which weapon it was, what direction the client was facing at the time of firing. We add this to the Aleph configuration XML file:
Then the Aleph generates an API function to create a persistent “Client” object, along with a function to call when a weapon is fired. So inside the code, when a weapon is fired, we just add this function call:
The data you put into that function then gets sent off to a database, and in no time, the data you’ve specified is available at the tip of your fingers:
At this point, you can use whatever front-end you're most comfortable with to generate reports based on the data you are recording.
For more information on the Aleph Metrics Suite, please send us an email at metrics@orbusgameworks.com and we'll get back to you pronto.
