Support for Other Platforms, Longer Match Retention & Identifier Improvements

[Boop]

The anniversary is here and apparently it’s put me in a good mood because I’ve just released this update which includes what I think are about the three most requested additions/improvements to NightLight.

Beta Support for Other Platforms

Starting now, you can upload screenshots taken with other methods and platforms than Steam. Note that I said you can upload them, not that they will be detected as matches - this is a rather experimental beta support phase. Some screenshots will work but there will almost definitely be issues with UI locations - whatever happens, I’ve got systems setup to keep track of what works and what doesn’t and I’ll be working on adding official support as screenshots are uploaded.

There are some limitations of the beta support which I’ve written up in this post: Beta Support for Other Platforms and I’ll be adding updates to it as I work on this feature further.

Longer Match Retention

Thanks to the support of several amazing people on Buy Me a Coffee I’m extremely grateful to be in a position where the physical costs of running NightLight are covered. When I first released NightLight I was concerned about ending up with a bill that was greater than I could justify or even potentially afford. Because of this, I’ve held off on adding certain features and added what I think was a somewhat low but still reasonable limit match retention.

Now that I’m at a point where the costs are not only covered but exceeded, I’d like to give something back by of doubling the period matches are stored for. That’s right, matches will now be retained for 60 days by default and 360 for supporters. If for whatever reason support for the project drops too much or usage rises disproportionately in the future I may have to lower this back down but for the time being, enjoy and thank you.

As a bonus, for a couple of reasons including technicalities relating to match sharing, the system that deletes “expired” matches hasn’t actually affected the live NightLight database yet. This means you’ll be able to see any matches that were outside your old retention period but inside the new one.

Identifier Improvements

Ah, the thing that results in me vanishing into the world of tiny icons for many hours every time I go near it. For a while now there’s been issues with the recognition of certain icons, Small Game being the most noticeable on the perk side and certain killers, ranks, and statuses along with it. In this update are some fairly significant improvements to the identifier and I thought it might be interesting so share some numbers.

From the subset of about 1500 matches I tested with these were the recognition rates:

Pre-update identifier

Perks 98.00% identified
Ranks 92.06% identified
Killer 83.73% identified
Status 93.72% identified

Post-update identifier

Perks 99.14% identified
Ranks 98.00% identified
Killer 99.31% identified
Status 95.96% identified

As you can see, there’s a fairly nice increase in recognition rates. Interestingly the Dev’s seem to have flipped Nemesis’ killer icon from the PTB which accounted for a bit of why the killer recognition was so low. I’d also like to apologise to people who hover around particularly curvy numbers like 3 or 8 as image compression combined with the darkness of the ranks in DBD results in those ranks going unidentified more than others.

Changelog

Changes

• Added support for uploading screenshots that are taken through other methods and are from other platforms than Steam. (Note that there are some limitations of this which are listed here: Beta Support for Other Platforms)
• Increased the upload retention period from 30 to 60 days for everyone and 180 to 360 days for supporters.
• Improved the recognition of many icons

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug which could cause the duplicate status of an upload to be ignored
• Fixed an issue causing killer’s names to be hidden on the Kill Rate graph
• Fixed an issue causing the grid lines on graphs to be slightly darker than intended

[Norseman]

I’ll support this app for sure, eventually. Love it too much.

Here’s a suggestion for the long term data: Why don’t you allow people to download data into their local storage? Maybe also for to the HD as a backup.

Given the app works client side and it only goes to the server to get data (not 100% sure about this), maybe it could use data from the local storage directly, thus removing load on the server. Maybe this could even be done as part of the normal process to reduce the strain on the server.

Keep it up! Cheers!

[Boop]

@Norseman

I’ll support this app for sure, eventually. Love it too much.

I really appreciate that!

@Norseman

Here’s a suggestion for the long term data: Why don’t you allow people to download data into their local storage? Maybe also for to the HD as a backup.

Given the app works client side and it only goes to the server to get data (not 100% sure about this), maybe it could use data from the local storage directly, thus removing load on the server. Maybe this could even be done as part of the normal process to reduce the strain on the server.

So, as I sort of said in the post above, the retention limits exist basically because I didn’t/don’t want to end up with something I can’t afford to run. That concern originated from a time where I was expecting to pay for the site myself and was before I thought about adding any sort of support/donation type thing. In addition, even when I did eventually decide to add it, I didn’t expect anywhere near the interest it has actually received. That is to say financially speaking, storing the data is a lot less of a concern than it originally was.

As for downloading the data for reducing load on the server - the nature of the data and how I built the site means that it very much relies on the querying ability of the database. That is to say, storing the data client side and being able to query it in the same way isn’t something I could easily do (at least in anyway I know of). In addition, one of my main motivations for the site is to create and provide a source of aggregated stats from a lot of people/matches - something which requires me to store the matches in some form anyway.

As time goes on I’m learning more about how the database and site scales and with some improvements things are looking a lot better than they did at one point. I’m still rather cautious given the sites proven ability to gain a lot of interest in a very small amount of time as the last thing I want to end up with is a site that is overloaded and unusable. In the future, I’m certain I’ll come up with ways to extend the retention period (I already have some ideas, it’s just working my way through the list to them) and maybe one day I won’t need a limit at all.

I hope that explains things a bit more and thanks for the reply.