A Content Tracker for VDrift

[BiGBeN87]

Hello Forum,

I recently had the idea of tracking the content installed with VDrift to enable reccomendations based on popularity in the updater/manager in VDrift Core.

An issue was created for this: https://github.com/VDrift/vdrift/issues/52

[joevenzon]

Sounds like a good idea, my comments:
1) requiring a central server set up for this might be problematic unless we can host it easily on vdrift.net
2) I don't think this should be used to determine what data set to include in releases; the whole idea of the car/track downloader/updater is so we can distribute a very minimal data set for releases and allow people to simply update their existing data from an old release or download new cars/tracks

[BiGBeN87]

Sounds like a good idea, my comments:
1) requiring a central server set up for this might be problematic unless we can host it easily on vdrift.net

I see a central server as the most obvious solution. How else should a statistic over global data be generated if not on a central server?

I was thinking of creating a simple service for this in Java or Python running on Google's App-Engine. A custom solution written in PHP that could run on the same server as the forum and website might be viable as well, though.

The free services at GAE are quite expansive if used sanely. Do you have any idea of how many installations of new content per day we are talking about? http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdrift/stats/traffic suggests that it may be not too many.

2) I don't think this should be used to determine what data set to include in releases; the whole idea of the car/track downloader/updater is so we can distribute a very minimal data set for releases and allow people to simply update their existing data from an old release or download new cars/tracks

One should only see the statistics as a guide, of course. I would like to see the minimal set of content to have a reasonable high rating, once the population has reaches some size, though.

[joevenzon]

That sounds good. Using GAE for free hosting is a good idea.

[Nicky]

Great idea! I think it would be a pretty cool feature. I agree that the best way to go about it would be to use an external server. I had actually gone through something similar to this with a game that I had developed. It was quite a pain, but it was worth it in the end. Maybe you could look into cloud computing leaders for the server space. I have never used them myself, but was thinking that it might be a good option.