Session counters

How is the data collected?

Session counters provide a way to capture and display information for individual play sessions. Any time you enter a new game or start a quest, it represents the start of a new session. Any time you leave a game and enter the lobby or the title screen, it represents the end of the current session.

Session data adds two additional dimensions to the kill counter data.

• Quest number
• Time spent

In addition to those two additional dimensions, the Kill Counter addon is now also tracking meseta earned and experience earned for each play session. Meseta earned is calculated simply by subtracting the player's meseta at the end of the session from their meseta at the start of the session. The only caveat to this is when transferring meseta to and from the bank which does not affect the meseta earned during the session. Similarly, experience earned is calculated by subtracting the player's total experience at the end of the session from their total experience at the beginning of the session.

How is the data stored?

Session data is spread across two separate files. The first is the kill counters file which stores kill counters in the same format as is described on the How it works page. The second file is the session counters file, which stores a number of numeric values which are mostly self-explanatory. Below is an example of a session counters file.

difficulty=3
episode=1
sectionID=2
quest=1401
meseta=14334
experience=32263
timeSpent=1186
timeSpentInDungeon=1110

The timeSpent value represents the total number of seconds the player remained in the play session. The timeSpentInDungeon value represents the total number of seconds the player spent on Ragol during that session.

By default, the session data is not saved automatically by the addon as the saved data is currently not used by the addon itself. The user must opt in by placing a folder named sessions in the root of their PSO installation. If the addon detects that the sessions folder exists, it will begin to automatically drop both of these files into that folder for each play session. The addon follows a set of rules, described below, to determine whether to create or update saved session data.

• The first time the player earns meseta (or loses meseta), earns experience, or defeats a monster, a session identifier is generated based on the date and time of the start of the session.
  • The session identifier is a number generated by mashing the following values together into a single number: 4-digit year, 2-digit month, 2-digit day of month, 2-digit hour of day, 2-digit minute, and 2-digit second. For example, if the session started at 09:06:14 PM on June 3, 2017, the session identifier would be 20170603210614.
• Session counters are written to a file in the sessions folder named sessionid-session-counters.txt. Kill counters are written to a file named sessionid-kill-counters.txt. In both cases, sessionid refers to the session identifier generated above.
  • In our example above, the addon would generate the following two files: 20170603210614-session-counters.txt and 20170603210614-kill-counters.txt.
• Once the session file has been created, the addon will write to the file any time a change is detected in meseta earned, experience earned, or the kill counters. It will also update the files once every five seconds to ensure that the counters for time spent remain fairly accurate.

The session data is designed to be saved in a way that makes it easier for the user to organize and manipulate the data. Viewing and manipulating individual sessions can be done using Notepad or Excel, and deleting sessions can be done easily as well by simply deleting the relevant files. Unfortunately, this design is not ideal for doing analysis of data over multiple sessions. Currently, there exists a need for a separate application to be able to reformat the data for analysis or directly analyze the data in its current format.

How is the data displayed?

Two additional overlay windows have been added to display session data. The first is the Session Kill Counters window which displays the kill counter data for the current play session using the same logic described in the How it works page. The second is the Session Info Counters window which displays information about meseta earned, experience earned, and time spent.

In the Session Info Counters window, the first three lines display information about meseta earned. The first of these lines is just a flat number indicating the amount of meseta earned during the current play session. The second line displays the amount of meseta earned over your time spent in the play session. The third line displays the amount of meseta earned over your time spent in the dungeon. If you have lost meseta, these lines will all display negative numbers.

The next three lines display information about experience earned. These show the same three statistics as the first three lines, but the addon uses experience earned for the calculations instead of meseta earned. Since you cannot lose experience, these lines will never display negative numbers.

The next two lines display the amount of time spent in the play session and in the dungeon. These values are displayed using a standard hour-minute-second format (for example, 01:21:05 for 1 hour, 21 minutes, and 5 seconds).