Levelranks parser

[Bobogoobo]

This week I'm beginning to learn Visual Basic (partly for a class, partly for future life plans, partly for fun), and one of the first ideas I had for a project to do to learn my way around it was to make something that will parse levelranks and return various stats. I already have a basic structure and such, and many ideas to go forward.

I was wondering, before I get too far involved, has anyone already made something like this? Other than stuff that's already on the site, because I'll obviously improve on those with this program. Even if there is already something, maybe I could still make something better.

If you have any questions about this (I probably wasn't very clear, and I can give more detail if requested) or suggestions for things I should include, feel free to post! Also, I apologize if this is in the wrong forum, this seemed the most appropriate one in my reasoning.

[aperson]

Re: Levelranks parser

Here's some fun things to include:
- mean and median average rank; average rank standard deviation between songs
- same stats as above for FC / AAAs
- something to compare these between multiple users

How do you plan on parsing the output from the levelranks to be loaded into your program? Screen scraping?

[Bobogoobo]

Re: Levelranks parser

Ah, good points. Currently I just have the user copy the ranks into a textbox in the program, and it outputs a stats summary into another box. Assuming I continue that way, I can make another part that will output a comparison when given the original stats outputs of two (or more) different users.

I should also note that this is my first major programming project of this type, so any tips for such a beginner from more experienced programmers might also be helpful :P.

[MaxGhost]

Re: Levelranks parser

Btw I have a script that I made in java that takes in copy pasted level ranks from levelranks.php, and it formats it to look proper in notepad or any text editor that support tabbing. I should probably improve on this thing to also output a stats file. I can already think of how I'll do it, I'll make a level data class, it'll have score (perf/good/avg/miss/boo), total raw, total CS, combo, rank, etc. Store all the levels in a list or similar data structure, a map maybe... then do loops over a certain subset of the levels and get data, etc.

I haven't bothered to work on it yet though, school work comes first. I don't really have the time for it right now.

A few stats I'd want to see: fractions, lots of fractions. FCs per difficulty, % completed of FCs per difficulty, AAAs for each difficulty, etc. Stuff like that will simplify walking through level ranks and counting ho many AAAs or FCs there's left to do.

[igotrhythm]

Re: Levelranks parser

Avrank is pretty straightforward, but it would be interesting to see more advanced treatments like standard deviations. It would differentiate between people that don't play all the files and people that have played them all but have bad ranks.

Move to Bits and Bytes, perhaps...?

[Bobogoobo]

Re: Levelranks parser

I'm almost ready to release a preliminary version for people to try out, have incorporated most of the suggestions so far. Any more are always welcome. I didn't know much about standard deviation, though; can one of you explain what the optimal number for that would be?

Once I get a solid final-ish version done and out I'm going to look at analyzing the page's HTML (and that of the song pages) from within the program, that way hopefully I can get a ton more data and stats and such, but it'll take a while to implement so it's lower on the priorities than finishing a little less complicated version.