HaloCharts.com is designed to enhance the stats collected by Bungie.net for the game Halo 3. The goal of this site is to provide players with their game stats tracked over time, for example, to show how slow or fast a player improves at the game.
There's a lot we plan on showing on HaloCharts.com, so keep checking back to see what's new. Statistics are collected every day.
Staff
HaloCharts.com is designed, developed and maintainted by firestream, who is reminded everyday at how much he sucks at Halo.
History
Development began in October of 2007. The site was released to the public on November 7th, 2007. When it was first released it only had a small amount of stats and leaderboards. It has grown considerably over the last few months with updates nearly every day. In January of 2008 the site moved to its own dedicated server. It has grown from about 100 tracked players to over 60,000 players and continues to get new players each day.
Technical Stuff
The site runs on about 10,000 lines of PHP. The web server is Apache. The database is MySQL. The OS is Windows Server 2003. The text editor is SciTE. The server is a fully dedicated server with two dual-core Xeon processors, 3 gigs of RAM and 500 gigs of disk space. The server is on a network with 2 TB of bandwith. The code behind the site is completely custom written by firestream.
Challenges Faced
A lot of people email us and ask when their player page is going to update. This is probably the single biggest challenge we have faced since the site came about. How long does it take to update 75,000 player pages? A long time. Because of this, most player pages will update every 3 days if they are looked at. We would love to update everybody everyday, but there's only so much the server can do in a single day.
Another challenge is loading games for all players. With over 2 million Halo 3 games played per day, we decided it was impossible to keep up. Early on we attempted to load games in for all of the players on the site. That quickly became a daunting task that would only get worse as more people joined the site. We ended up having to switch to a supporter model so that we could still load games, just not for every player. Its a nice benefit of being a supporter though.
Thanks
Bungie - For making the Halo series and for providing so many stats on their website. I wish other game developers were as cool as Bungie.
Daniel - For his help with the weapon leaderboards and for his constant nerf gunning while I work.
StaticFlatLine - For his help with testing new functionality and providing ideas for the site. And for being a frackalak.
Turian209 - For his help with the chatroom and rules.
Benderischaotic - For all of the great suggestions he has had for the site and for setting up the HaloCharts MySpace
Pure Fire X2 - For all of the great suggestions
Pete VenkmanPHD - For all of the great suggestions
OH SHEEP DIP - For all of the great suggestions
Ice Devil 13 - For all of the great suggestions
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