---------------------------------------------------------
NOP v1.1, 30jul99
written by denis moeller, panza@tic.de, www.dead-calm.net
---------------------------------------------------------

NOTE:
As far as I know, id will totally change the logfile in the near future,
this simply means that NOP will probably not run with a newer version
of Q3Test. I'll do my best to update NOP as soon as it is needed.


What is NOP?
NOP's a tiny tool to generate ranking-tables out of logfiles written
by q3test server logfiles (not client logfiles!). See above website
for example rankings.


Features?!
- reads log-files of any size
- generates ranking tables by calculating 'points' for every player
- saves the player information seperately, unlimited number of players
- reads a template-html file to generate the ranking tables
- you can change the table design via style-sheets
- uses a ban-list to avoid ranking of certain players
- strips color-codes from playernames and converts q3test's special
characters to ascii-characters
- you control the number of lines per page and the overall number
of users in the list
- re-run feature: e.g. let NOP update rankings every 20 minutes


Changes in version 1.1
- fixed 2 name bugs, which caused NOP to crash
- changed calculating of points, much better now
- added to new arguments: -mintime and -mingames, see "rank.bat"
- fixed the zero bug (doh)
- added overall display: Games, Players, Fraghits and Timehits
- added columns Ping and Games/Won


How the f?
if you are the guy running a q3test server, you just activate the
server logging of your server either in the console or a cfg-file
which is being loaded at startup. "set logfile 1" activates the
logfile. whenever a game ends, either by timelimit or fraglimit,
q3test appends the scores to a file called "games.log".

NOP then reads this log-file and generates the rankings. NOP saves
the player-information in a seperate database and clears the logfile
of the server.

here's a simple example of how to use NOP with your q3test-server:

1. unzip the NOP-archive anywhere you like
2. run the server with logfile set to 1
3. open a dos-box, change to the NOP-directory and run NOP:

NOP c:\q3test\baseq3\games.log htmlout/rank -time 20

in this example the first parameter is the path and name of the
server-logfile, the second is the html-output-path and name of
the html-file(s) that are generated. that means, NOP will write
rank0.html, rank1.html ... rankx.html to the path "htmlout/".
(which would possibly be the path of your webpage)

the last parameter "-time 20" makes NOP to re-run every 20 min,
doing the same thing over and over again: reading its player
database, reading the log-file, calculating the new scores and
updating the html-files.

i've made a file rank.bat for easier use of NOP. edit this file
to change path/options and run it instead of typing the above
line. see "rank.bat" for details.

[of course you can run NOP without any parameters. NOP will then
search for a file called "games.log" in the same directory and
write rankings to files "rankX.html" to the same directory.
this way you could copy all files coming with NOP into your
q3test/baseq3 directory and run it there...]


Banning certain players...

NOP uses a file called "banned.txt" to avoid certain players
from being ranked. each line of this file contains only one
name. you may add up to 100 banned names, but be careful:
NOP searches usernames via substrings and case-insensitive.
e.g. adding the name "ass" to the file, kills all names
containing the phrase: "asshole", "massive" and "MaSsIvE".


Editing the html template

the file t_rank.html is the html-template for the ranking
tables. it must be in the same directory as NOP itself.
you may want to change the colors of the tables by editing
the style-sheets - see the template file for details.

you may also add as much html-stuff as you like, e.g. info
about your server, webpage, name, links... do whatever you
want, but remember:

- do not delete the style-sheet part, it'll probably still
work, but don't look too good

- the ranking tables will be placed at the position of
this tag: "<--STATS-->" - so do not remove it!


A deeper view...

[Note: this has changed in version 1.1, let me know if you
need to know how the points are calculated]

Points is a value calculated by using the following values:

- Won games
- Number of players
- Percentage of frags of the game
- Frags per hour
- Avrg. Ping / Playerping


Future, ideas, bugs?

i'm not running a server, but NOP was tested with local files
which 'look' real. i've also tried NOP with a list of about
10000 players and it all worked great. the number of players
is limited by your system memory only.

Bugs:
please report any bug you're encountering, attach the files
that cause the bug (logfiles, NOP.dat etc.) if possible.
thank you.

Ideas:
- maybe add sorting by Frags, FPH, Time etc. not just Points
- more options (minimum Games for a player to appear in the
list?, minimum Time? would that make sense?)
- a cfg-file for the options, instead of typing a bunch of
parameters?!?

if you've got NOP running with your server, please let me know.
if you've got any ideas for NOP, let me know as well.
if you're able to make NOP compile for use under Linux -
LET ME KNOW!!!



EOF, 31jul99, panza@tic.de, www.dead-calm.net

Less Information

More Information »