Number of users/players: TDM,DR

[mmij]

I was pondering something earlier this week. They're just some academic questions that came to mind, and they have left me quite curious.

1) How many players (outside of the people active in the forum) are there of Darkmod?
   A) How many inside the forum?

2) And who else aside from TDM modders use DarkRadiant?
   A) What is their use of it?
     A.1-2) I believe DR might also be used by Doomers[1], and if this is true, how many[2]?

_B) How many active modders of TDM and of other softwares are there?   

Still pondering,
mmij

 

PS. I hate these [insert seven-word, obscene English intensifier] emojis that keep replacing typed material. Can we shoot the program and kill it forever?

[STiFU]

Those are all interesting questions that nobody can answer, as we do not deploy any tracking software.

Maybe _B could be answered: Two are working on and off again on DR and the number of active devs for TDM itself ranges from 5-10 accross a year. And how many activate mappers are there? Hard to tell. My gut says about 10-20?

[OrbWeaver]

With regard to 1), I suppose it would be possible to track the number of requests to the mission server from the in-game menu (without logging IP addresses or other personal information of course), and use this as crude measure of current player activity. It wouldn't be possible to derive actual numbers of unique players, just overall trends, but it might be interesting to see how the player activity varies over time (e.g. are there big spikes after a major release, has there been more activity during lockdown, etc).

[Bienie]

53 minutes ago, OrbWeaver said:

With regard to 1), I suppose it would be possible to track the number of requests to the mission server from the in-game menu (without logging IP addresses or other personal information of course), and use this as crude measure of current player activity. It wouldn't be possible to derive actual numbers of unique players, just overall trends, but it might be interesting to see how the player activity varies over time (e.g. are there big spikes after a major release, has there been more activity during lockdown, etc).

Agreed, that would be interesting and should be within compliance of any data regulations. I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to have a little download counter somewhere that can track each individual FM and/or the mod as a whole.

[Amadeus]

10 minutes ago, Bienie said:

I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to have a little download counter somewhere that can track each individual FM and/or the mod as a whole.

That reminds me of those old tickers that counted how many visitors came to your webpage. That would certainly be a pretty neat feature to have here

[STiFU]

In this thread, we analyzed the number of downloads of a single release of TDM a cool ten years ago!

There's also the moddb download statistic:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/stats

The statistic is a little weird, 'though, because it shows 1.3k Downloads in total at the top, whereas our files section on moddb lists 63k Downloads.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/downloads

[wesp5]

I think the ModDB statistics would make sense if 2.09 is released with the new installer and not the old updater. Then we would get a number of all people running it...

[mmij]

This thought came trickling through my head when I was contemplating educational games, and I wondered: This is a low-violence, imaginative, and stimulative game. There should be more people (mainly parents) interested in this game. How many of them know about this as an alternative to the genres they dislike?

[AluminumHaste]

LOL low-violence

 

[mmij]

Compared to the ultra-violence that people are complaining about, yes.
I'm ex-military, among other things, and I don't have an issue with the murder/raider themes. These follow the rules of storytelling.
But when we're talking about dragging an NPC/player under a car with points for distance, or shooting a recently "loved" prostitute in the head to avoid payment, then I think we're talking about excessive violence and poor thought.

More John Wayne, less Natural Born Killers.

Mainly, I would like to see TDM more popular. It's a great game. There's wonderful stories, nice graphics, and it's thought provoking. Teens to adults looking for something different would love this, if they knew. Plus, with DarkRadiant, it's a great way to teach game creation (a real job), architecture, physical security (yes, I know that's sorta reaching), geometry and trig... a lot of things.

[AluminumHaste]

Ah, ok. Low-Violence is a relative term.