fgx / crossfeed-dailies

Daily summaries of FlightGear Multiplayer flights
https://fgx.github.io/crossfeed-dailies/
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Crossfeed Dailies Read Me

This is an effort to gather some statistical information about FlightGear MultiPlayer Server usage, through sampling the json feed from a crossfeed client, connected to server mpserver#14...

At present this is achieved by running a perl script, cfjsonlog.pl 24/7, sampling the crossfeed json each 5 seconds, some filtering for movement and time, but each flight is written to a daily csv file.

Thanks to @pedromorgan this script is kept running by supervisor in his freeflightsim server.

The CSV header line is -

fid,callsign,lat,lon,alt_ft,model,spd_kts,hdg,dist_nm,update,tot_secs

where the fid is a unique flight ID issued by crossfeed.

The CSV records need to be thought of as a json blocks of flights, sampled each 5 seconds, thus each daily CSV will contain 17,280 such blocks of flights. The block can be separated on the value of the update, the UTC date/time that the json crossfeed sample was taken.

The size of each json block will depend on the number of multiplayer flights, visible to crossfeed at that time. At any moment this could be zero, but to date the lowest value seen was 3... so far the maximum has been up to 54 active flights. So the number of active flights per block times 17,280 means each CSV daily file will contain 300 to 400 thousand records, a total of 25 to 40 MB per file.

These daily CSV files are written directly to a local clone of this repository, and there is a cron job set to run at 2:10 AM UTC each day to push the latest CSV to this repo.

Summary of Data

In an attempt to make this mass of data collected more meaningful, the CSV daily logs can be processed with a WIP perl script, cfcsvlogs.pl, which outputs a crude HTML summary.

Presently, this WIP script, can summarize one file, or a group of csv daily log files in a directory... and generate HTML like flights-2016-07-30.htm, for 1, or 20160806.htm for a group of file...

While the above will always work, gh-page has it own (minimal) web server, and you can use - https://fgx.github.io/crossfeed-dailies/ - where there is now a beginning index page, leading to most other pages available... this will develop, over time...

WARNING: The times and distance flown can be greatly influenced by sim time warping, and sim time speed up and slow down, so are always only estimates! And this is only the results of one particular, specific crossfeed. That is, no prizes will be awarded on these results. ;=)) And as such, also should not be taken as an general indication of FlightGear usage, and is just a sub-set of MultiPlayer usage.

Other Views of Data

Do not forget Hazuki's great tracker where you can review multiplayer tracked flight by various criteria. And there is an API to get the tracker information programically, from the postgresql database kept.

@theo-armour has created an interesting 3D Globe view of the flights for each day here globe-crossfeed-daily-all-flights. You can select any particular daily CSV file, and the flights of that day will be shown. Given the volume of data, take care this can be a heavy load in your browser.

Of course you can view all the current crossfeed flights LIVE in this map. Selecting a flight in the table, and a new window will open specifically tracking that flight, where lots of navaid data is added. This feeds directly on crossfeed json data each 1.8 seconds.

And there are others... write us if you have something you want added to this impromptu list...

Enjoy...

; eof - 20160907