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+1 vote

Hi all

I am new to godot and I am doing a project where we are making a board game. I want to log events and also want to log the positions of those events for research purposes e.g if I drag a block onto the board so I want to log what type of event occured and at what coordinates that specific event happened.
I need a starting approach and how to integrate it within my game.

Thanks

in Engine by (46 points)

Where would you like the logs to be stored? Do you want them sent to a server somewhere?

On a local device, I just need a JSON or CSV file so that I can do research on the data.

1 Answer

+3 votes
Best answer

If you are looking to store the file on the device running the game, then you can do:

var data = {
    # your data goes here
}
var file = File.new()
var filepath = "user://data.json" # or whatever you want to call it
var json_string = to_json(data)
file.open(filepath, File.WRITE)
file.store_string(json_string)
file.close()

if you need to locate the user:// directory of whatever system you're on, you can use OS.get_user_data_dir()


Sorry, I forgot about the other part of your question. This should work I think, however it is untested so might need some tweaking.

# EventLogger.gd

extends Node

const SAVE_INTERVAL = 10
const FILE_PATH = 'user://events.json'

var events: Array = []
var dirty: bool = false
var timer: Timer = Timer.new()

func _ready():
    timer.wait_time = SAVE_INTERVAL
    timer.one_shot = false
    timer.autostart = true
    timer.connect("timeout", self, "save")

func log_event(event_type: String, event_data: Dictionary):
    var event : Dictionary = {
        'event': event_type,
        'data': event_data,
    };

    events.append(events)
    dirty = true

func save():
    # if we haven't logged any new events, don't bother saving the data
    if not dirty:
        return

    var file = File.new()
    file.open(FILE_PATH, File.WRITE)
    file.store_string(to_json(events))
    file.close()

    dirty = false

The main idea is that you add events to an array, which periodically get saved to file. I don't know how often you'll be logging events, so you probably don't want to write to file evey single time, so I have added a timer to do it every so often. You'll want to register this as an autoloaded script. Then from any other script, you can do:

func _on_dragged(block):
    EventLogger.log_event('block_added_to_board', block.position)

Of course, you'll have to set up the function(s) that will call this (not _on_dragged(block)), I don't know what your setup is like.

by (1,663 points)
selected by

Thanks, yeah it will work for storing data.

@hsn i updated the answer to include something for the actual logging as well. let me know if you have issues with it

Thanks alot for detailed response.

I won't be logging events after some intervals of time, rather I will have to store events whenever the position of block is changed (I will store the initial positions of all the pentomino blocks, as soon as they are dragged, their x and y coordinates are changed so on that change, I have to store new/updated xy coordinates along with width and height of a block to recognize what kind of block is it and also the timestamp that when this change in position happened). I hope you get what I am trying to say here.

This will record all events, it just saves to the file only every x-number of seconds so that you aren't constantly writing to a file.

if you really do just want to just save every time, then get rid of the timer stuff, and change to something like this:

func log_event(event_type: String, event_data: Dictionary):
    var event : Dictionary = {
        'event': event_type,
        'data': event_data,
    };

    events.append(events)
    save()

You may also want to use a timestamp in the json filename so that everytime you boot up the game it outputs to a unique file.

var file_path = 'user://events'

func _ready():
    file_path = "%s-%s.json" % [file_path, str(OS.get_unix_time())]

Well thanks again, this helps (y)

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