Allicorn's Outfit Reporter

The detailled stats breakdown on our outfit members is generated by a little program I made called Outfit Reporter. If you'd like to use it to generate a similar report for your own outfit, you can download it here.

Outfit Reporter is written in Java and so it requires a Java Runtime Environment to be installed on your computer in order for it to work. Luckily, you can download and install OR and the JRE all in one action. If you're running Windows, and you don't have a JRE, don't know what version you have, or don't know if you have one at all, you should go for the "Recommended Win32" download

Linux users will need to have JRE 1.4.2_07 or higher already installed as I'm not currently providing the Outfit Reporter in a JRE-package bundle.

If you have problems with the "JRE Included" versions, or if you're absolutely certain you have an offical Sun Java Runtime Environment of at least version 1.4.2_07 already installed, then you can save a bit of time and download one of the "JRE-less" versions.

I can provide some limited support for the Windows version if you run into problems, but ultimately, if it don't work... it don't work. I won't be producing individual re-writes customized to your particular OS install. And I'm sorry but I can't provide any help at all for the Linux install.

Updating from an earlier version?

If you're updating from an earlier version please ensure you go into the directory where you installed the Outfit Reporter and run the Uninstall program before you install the new version. You may get unexpected results if you don't do this.

Basic Operation

Once you have the sofware installed, you should get an icon on your Start Menu and you can run the thing up. The only real thing you need to know about it is that you have to supply your Outfit ID. You can get this number by pulling up the page showing the members of your outfit on www.planetside.com. The Outfit ID is a number that appears as part of the address to that page. Here's a picture showing how to spot it:

The 6711 number is the Outfit ID for Starwolf, yours will be different. Once you've found out what it is, you can switch back into the Outfit Reporter program and enter it as shown below:

All that remains to do is to pick the server that your outfit plays on and click the Make HTML button. The program will then fetch the webpages from planetside.com of your outfit and of every member. If you're a big outfit this can take quite a few minutes... be patient! Once its finished it'll create a nice HTML report on your outfit and give you a Save dialog for you to choose where you'd like to save the report. Give it a name like My Outfit.HTML. You can then open that file up in your web browser and have a look at your stats. Of course, better still, you can upload it to your outfit's website and let the whole gang have a look at it. The reporter will also generate a second file with the same name but with .JS on the end instead of .HTML. The second file is a Javascript source containing string arrays, named for each of the Key Roles in the main stats and containing the names of all your active players who fit those roles. The Javascript doesn't do anything in itself, but if they can be useful to your webmaster if he wants to make automatically updating tactical notes pages for your site that always list the correct players that can currently fill certainly tactical roles.

Version 2.9

Due to SOE's long overdue partial redesign of the PlanetSide website, previous versions of Outfit Reporter will no longer work properly. Version 2.9 has been updated to cope with the new layout.

New features in Version 2.9.

There are three new stats template elements added in V2.9:

• $$e1kills; and $$e2kills; show leaderboards based on the number of kills on each enemy faction.
• $$e1e2; shows the ratio of enemy factions represented in your members kills.

Version 2.7 bugfix

As of 05/Feb/05, a new build of Version 2.7 that fixes some bugs in the database statstics generation routines that could cause crashes when generating reports for your outfit for the very first time.

New features in Version 2.7

Version 2.7 contains all the necessary Cert updates to present meaningful stats based on the Aftershock certification tree, including BFRs and the Armored Assault tree.

There are a few new Statistical Awards in 2.7, including the Professional Rifleman for infantry kills by members without HA or SA, the Empire Strategist award for CR5s with a high Facilities Hacked count, some new Awards to cover BFR pilots and various others.

There are new Signature Medals for BR21, 22 and 23.

There are also some new leaderboards, including Weekly Leaderboards for Kills and Hacks. Please note that, if you've only just started using OR, most of the 7-day stats will probably be fairly crazy until you've got a full 7 days of data. You don't necessarily need to run OR every day to generate reasonable 7-day stats, so long as you run it at least twice a week, OR will try to extrapolate 7 days worth from numbers from two or more datasets.

The new Outfit Assigned Awards feature allows you up to 16 totally arbitrary awards which can be assigned by your outfit to members who deserve a bit of extra merit that can't be granted by the statistical awards. Click the Configure Outfit Assigned Awards button to set up these new medals.

The new Alt-Accumulation system allows you to produce leaderboards of Outfit Points, Kills, Hacks and Kills-per-Hack based on player members, rather than player characters. You can define up to 16 members that have up to 6 alt-characters each. The various Accumulated leaderboards will show stats for those players with the numbers from each of their alts all counted as a single player.

New features in Version 2.01

The Version 2.01 release doesn't add any new features but includes the missing install file from the Version 2.0 release shown below and also includes a bugfix for an error in parsing WorldID numbers after the Battle Concentration Initiative changes.

New features in Version 2.0

Outfit Reporter no longer shows Standard Armor, Agile Armor or Standard Assault certs on the cert distribution, since everyone has them automatically, showing them was kinda redundant and just took up space. Also the Advanced Nanite Transporter (ANT) cert which is automatically gained with any other vehicle cert is no longer shown on SOE's player stats pages so that's been removed here too.

WorldID box has been updated to reflect the Battle Consolidation Initiative.

Outfit Leaders now have a little crown icon on their sig images. The Artillery icon has been removed since Tank Driver and Artillery Driver are the same thing.

Sig images can now have selectable backgrounds. Just pick one from the list. The original plain looking empire logo version is still available, plus split ones showing an empire-specific trooper, tank, or buggy,

The program now supports Multiple Outfits. Just click the Add Outfit button to open another tab and enter the usual details there. You can have as many outfits configured as will fit in the window (about a dozen, but I haven't tried it). When the outfit is first added, the tab will say "Outfit #n", but once you generate stats for that outfit, its tab will be permanently set to the outfit name.

The new Activity Days Cutoff field sets the number of days within which a player must have logged on to be considered active. This value effects all outfits configured and cannot be set differently for each outfit.

A dynamic new Awards section of the stats grants accolades to players based on a variety of conditions, such as highest kills in the last 7 days, or biggest investment in utility and support certs. Many of the awards now also place medal icons on your sig images. Gold icons represent the "overall" type awards while silver ones represent the temporary ones based on actions in the last seven days.

As well as the Awards section the stats output now also includes a list of all recent Promotions in your outfit and a section showing some outfit-wide statistics such as your average BR, CR, OP, percentages of players within certain rank groups, and other details.

The stats.js file now contains two new javascript functions you can call to add extra dynamic content to your outfit website:

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">featuredPlayer()<SCRIPT>

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">dailyAward()<SCRIPT>

Starting the program with the -auto or -autoquiet switches set will generate stats for all the outfits that are configured, and run any FTP uploads or local file saves that have been set up.

The ability to use text config files is currently disabled while I work on a tidy way to run it with multiple outfits.

Most powerful of all amongst the new features is the ability to base the output report on an HTML template. This means that you can make your stats page generate automatically in a style consistant with your outfit website. A default template which generates a report that looks like that produced by previous versions of Outfit Reporter is included as a useful example.

Some notes on creating custom templates are available.

New features in Version 1.7

Outfit Reporter has been updated to reflect changes brought in by the Player Re-Certification patch.

Outfits with less than 10000 total outfit points, and therefore no outfit logo, are handled correctly.

Slight changes to some of the signature image Role Icons which hopefully add a little clarity and which also further differentiate "Grunt" roles into Rexo-HA, Rexo-SA and the extra-heavy grunt Rexo-HA-SA.

This is the key to icons appearing on the signature images.

An additional Command Line Switch has been added which makes Outfit Reporter read from a text config file on startup. The new switch, -cfg=filename.cfg, in combination with the previously described -autoquiet switch allows you to run and entirely control Outfit Reporter without ever seeing the main program GUI. To use this feature, fetch the Example Config File from the downloads list above, place it somewhere convenient (eg the directory in which you installed the program) make a copy, and edit it. The config file contains explanations on all the fields it contains. Then set up a shortcut (or a Windows Scheduler entry) for Outfit Reporter that has the command line:

By setting up multiple config files and scheduling Outfit Reporter to run with each of them in turn you can now conveniently produce reports for multiple outfits. For instance, your Outfit may have recently created an "Alt-Outfit" version in other empire due to the Server Consolidation patch.

OutfitReporter.exe -cfg=myconfig.cfg -autoquiet

When the program runs with this command line, you won't see anything on screen, but the report and signature image creation processes will run silently and either save locally or FTP upload the results as specified in your config file.

If you prefer to see the GUI while the program runs, replace the -autoquiet switch with the -auto switch. The program will read the config file, run the processes and exit.

The last new bit is that the .JS file now contains a function called writeAllSigs() that'll place an image link to each and every active player signature image you have in an HTML file. To use it, you'll need to add two lines of code to an HTML file on your site (it may be a good idea to create a seperate page to show all your sigs). In the HEAD section of your HTML document add:

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" SRC="stats.js"><SCRIPT>

Of course, you might need to change stats.js to point to somewhere else if you've named your stats differently or placed them somewhere else in your webserver's folder structure. Then, add this line at the exact position in the HTML that you'd like your images to appear, in one giant column:

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">writeAllSigs()<SCRIPT>

New features in Version 1.5

I fixed an issue with the naming and calculation of roles and cert percentages involving the Lightning cert. Lightning driver numbers and roles should now appear properly in all stats and sigs.

The new bit in 1.5 is an update to the sig image generation. The layout of the images has changed slightly and they now include a strip of icons representing the player's Key Roles (note, thats Roles, not Certs!). Hope you like it.

New features in Version 1.4

Ok, now onto the new features in version 1.4. Most conveniently you'll be glad to know that all the fields in the Outfit Reporter are now remembered from session to session, so you won't need that little yellow post-it note with your Outfit ID stuck to the side of your monitor anymore. The new V1.4 Outfit Reporter can upload all of its output to your outfit website automatically by FTP. It can also generate a folder full of images, one for every active player in your outfit. The images include the avatar face, outfit logo, and all the stats for that player that the reporter puts into the main stats page. One last thing is that you can now get the Outfit Reporter to run automatically or even invisibly; tie this in with the Auto FTP feature and you have fully automated outfit stats updating for your website.

Automatic FTP Upload

To enable the automatic upload of stats output by FTP to your website, start by checking the Automatic FTP box. Now just fill in the necessary details (the same ones you use in your FTP program). Only one thing here really needs pointing out and that is that the FTP Path field MUST end with a slash. If you want to set a root path put a slash. If the box is left blank, it won't work.

Generate Stat-Syndication Signatures

Funkiest of all in Version 1.4 is the ability to generate the kind of Stat Syndication images so familiar from PlanetSide forums everywhere. The difference with these is that they include every one of the detailed stats for your character that the Outfit Reporter puts in its main report, and that they also allow you to specify your Outfit's website and a common outfit "tagline" to appear on the images.

To use this feature, just turn on the checkbox, enter a tagline and the address of your outfit website.

When Outfit Reporter runs, it'll make a new directory called sigs in the same place as it puts the HTML and JS files. If you're using the Automatic FTP feature, it'll work there too, making a new directory on your FTP server called sigs and uploading all the images to it.

The images are created with the exact name of the player they represent and the end with .jpg. So, for instance, if your player name is BigBob and you're part of MyOutfit who's website is www.myoutfit.com then you'd access your signature image at http://www.myoufit.com/sigs/BigBob.jpg.

Here's a look at what the output of the signature generator is:

Automating the Outfit Reporter

The main Outfit Reporter program will now take two switches. The first is -auto which'll just make it load up, do its thing, and exit without bothering you. The second is -autoquiet which is the same but the Outfit Reporter won't even open a window on screen, meaning it can safely run without popping you out of PlanetSide if you're currently playing when it fires off.

With these switches you can set up an entry in CRON or in Windows Task Scheduler to run the Outfit Reporter at a scheduled time every day or week and never bother you again with the chore of updating outfit stats for your website.

Some notes about the report's contents:

• Active Players
  
  The program ignores all players who haven't logged in for 14 days or more. Thats why the "active players" is often much lower than the number of players listed on myplanetside.com.
  
  
• Cert Distribution
  
  "Tank Light" is what Sony calls the Lightning.
  
  Anyone who had Wraith / Basilisk before they were merged into ATV and still hasn't dropped them will be listed as having the ATV cert.
  
  
• Kills per Hack
  
  This is not particularly meaningful, but I thought I'd throw it in anyway. Just because someone has a KPH of 50 doesn't mean they're a great player, it might just mean they're always ignoring their squadleader and roaming around outside the SOI. It might also mean they're a Ninja Assassin type character or a Reaver pilot, etc.
  
  
• Key Roles
  
  The requirements to appear in any particular Key Role are shown underneath the role name in bracketed small text.