is there any possibility to get exact time spent on a certain level in a game via firebase analytics? Thank you so much 🙏
I tried to use logEvents.
The best way to do so would be measuring the time on the level within your codebase, then have a very dedicated event for level completion, in which you would pass the time spent on the level.
Let's get to details. I will use Kotlin as an example, but it should be obvious what I'm doing here and you can see more language examples here.
firebaseAnalytics.setUserProperty("user_id", userId)
firebaseAnalytics.logEvent("level_completed") {
param("name", levelName)
param("difficulty", difficulty)
param("subscription_status", subscriptionStatus)
param("minutes", minutesSpentOnLevel)
param("score", score)
}
Now see how I have a bunch of parameters with the event? These parameters are important since they will allow you to conduct a more thorough and robust analysis later on, answer more questions. Like, Hey, what is the most difficult level? Do people still have troubles on it when the game difficulty is lower? How many times has this level been rage-quit or lost (for that you'd likely need a level_started event). What about our paid players, are they having similar troubles on this level as well? How many people have ragequit the game on this level and never played again? That would likely be easier answer with sql at this point, taking the latest value of the level name for the level_started, grouped by the user_id. Or, you could also have levelName as a UserProperty as well as the EventProperty, then it would be somewhat trivial to answer in the default analytics interface.
Note that you're limited in the number of event parameters you can send per event. The total number of unique parameter names is limited too. As well as the number of unique event names you're allowed to have. In our case, the event name would be level_completed. See the limits here.
Because of those limitations, it's important to name your event properties in somewhat generic way so that you would be able to efficiently reuse them elsewhere. For this reason, I named minutes and not something like minutes_spent_on_the_level. You could then reuse this property to send the minutes the player spent actively playing, minutes the player spent idling, minutes the player spent on any info page, minutes they spent choosing their upgrades, etc. Same idea about having name property rather than level_name. Could as well be id.
You need to carefully and thoughtfully stuff your event with event properties. I normally have a wrapper around the firebase sdk, in which I would enrich events with dimensions that I always want to be there, like the user_id or subscription_status to not have to add them manually every time I send an event. I also usually have some more adequate logging there Firebase Analytics default logging is completely awful. I also have some sanitizing there, lowercasing all values unless I'm passing something case-sensitive like base64 values, making sure I don't have double spaces (so replacing \s+ with " " (space)), maybe also adding the user's local timestamp as another parameter. The latter is very helpful to indicate time-cheating users, especially if your game is an idler.
Good. We're halfway there :) Bear with me.
Now You need to go to firebase and register your eps (event parameters) into cds (custom dimensions and metrics). If you don't register your eps, they won't be counted towards the global cd limit count (it's about 50 custom dimensions and 50 custom metrics). You register the cds in the Custom Definitions section of FB.
Now you need to know whether this is a dimension or a metric, as well as the scope of your dimension. It's much easier than it sounds. The rule of thumb is: if you want to be able to run mathematical aggregation functions on your dimension, then it's a metric. Otherwise - it's a dimension. So:
firebaseAnalytics.setUserProperty("user_id", userId) <-- dimension
param("name", levelName) <-- dimension
param("difficulty", difficulty) <-- dimension (or can be a metric, depends)
param("subscription_status", subscriptionStatus) <-- dimension (can be a metric too, but even less likely)
param("minutes", minutesSpentOnLevel) <-- metric
param("score", score) <-- metric
Now another important thing to understand is the scope. Because Firebase and GA4 are still, essentially just in Beta being actively worked on, you only have user or hit scope for the dimensions and only hit for the metrics. The scope basically just indicates how the value persists. In my example, we only need the user_id as a user-scoped cd. Because user_id is the user-level dimension, it is set separately form the logEvent function. Although I suspect you can do it there too. Haven't tried tho.
Now, we're almost there.
Finally, you don't want to use Firebase to look at your data. It's horrible at data presentation. It's good at debugging though. Cuz that's what it was intended for initially. Because of how horrible it is, it's always advised to link it to GA4. Now GA4 will allow you to look at the Firebase values much more efficiently. Note that you will likely need to re-register your custom dimensions from Firebase in GA4. Because GA4 is capable of getting multiple data streams, of which firebase would be just one data source. But GA4's CDs limits are very close to Firebase's. Ok, let's be frank. GA4's data model is almost exactly copied from that of Firebase's. But GA4 has a much better analytics capabilities.
Good, you've moved to GA4. Now, GA4 is a very raw not-officially-beta product as well as Firebase Analytics. Because of that, it's advised to first change your data retention to 12 months and only use the explorer for analysis, pretty much ignoring the pre-generated reports. They are just not very reliable at this point.
Finally, you may find it easier to just use SQL to get your analysis done. For that, you can easily copy your data from GA4 to a sandbox instance of BQ. It's very easy to do.This is the best, most reliable known method of using GA4 at this moment. I mean, advanced analysts do the export into BQ, then ETL the data from BQ into a proper storage like Snowflake or even s3, or Aurora, or whatever you prefer and then on top of that, use a proper BI tool like Looker, PowerBI, Tableau, etc. A lot of people just stay in BQ though, it's fine. Lots of BI tools have BQ connectors, it's just BQ gets expensive quickly if you do a lot of analysis.
Whew, I hope you'll enjoy analyzing your game's data. Data-driven decisions rock in games. Well... They rock everywhere, to be honest.
I am thinking about how to best represent a certain data structure efficiently in Swift using CoreData. What I need is work with accounts (like savings, earning etc.). So what would probably make sense is an account class, where each account instance might have multiple characteristics like e.g. ACCOUNT_TYPE_ID which do not change. The core however is the VALUE attribute, which would hold the value of the account at a certain point in time. The complex thing here is that this value obviously might change over time (lets say on a daily basis, abstracting for intra-day changes) and I would need to be able to get the value of each instance for any given date. E.g. I might have my savings_private for which I would want to get the value at each month-end. This value might have changed, but as well could stay the same for various days/months. How could this most efficiently (when it comes to used space but - and that is even more important - be able to access computationally efficient) be done with a CoreData Entity/Class? I was thinking about maybe always starting with zero and then only somehow save the changes plus the date of change and then have some method for the call which would add all changes up to a date parameter - but was curious about what a best-practice might be here, as I guess I am not the first one trying to solve this.
I currently try to solve the following issue in Tableau:
In the end, I would like to have a Tableau dashboard where the user can select a Customer, and then can see the Customer's KPIs. Nothing spectacular so far.
To obtain a Customer's KPIs, there is a CustomSQL query with a parameter "CustomerName" (that returns the KPIs for that Customer).
Now the thing:
I don't want to have a hardcoded list of CustomerNames, as it would be possible with Tableau Parameters. Instead, the CustomerNames should be fetched from another datasource. I did not find a way to "link" a Parameter to a DataSource, and/or inject something other than static Parameters into CustomSQL.
My Question: Is there really no solution for this, or am I just doing something wrong (I hope so).
I found this workaround here https://www.interworks.com/de/blog/daustin/2015/12/17/dynamic-parameters-tableau that seems to work, but that looks like... a workaround.
Few background info:
I have to stick to using a CustomSQL because
It is not viable for me to calculate all KPIs for all CustomerNames
and then filter by Tableau, since the data amount is too big.
It is not viable to replace the CustomSQL with Tableau Calculations
and Filters (already tried that, ended up in having Tableau pulling
too much data instead of pushing the work to the database).
I cannot believe that Tableau does not offer a solution here, since the use case is pretty common I believe.
Do you have some input for me?
Thank you for your help in advance!
Kind Regards
have you tried using rawsql() functions together with stored functions on the database side? I found it pretty useful when needed to load single value from the dataset completely not related to currently used datasource.
For example, running foo stored function which accepts 2 dates and calculated sum of something, Syntax should be something like:
rawsql_int(your_db_schema.foo(%1,%2),[startDateFieldTableau],[endDateFieldTableau])
but you can access it directly:
rawsql_int("select sum(bar) from sales")
but this is bit risky.
Drawbacks:
it relies on the current connection (you create a calculated field (duh!)
it will not work with extract (but you are using custom sql anyways so I believe you are more into live connection
How can I make my Crystal Report look like the attached image? I have had no success creating it with a crosstab.
The short answer is that Crystal Reports isn't really equipped to handle the format you're dealing with. And here's why:
Let's assume for a moment you've already figured out how to interpret your query into something usable. Since we aren't using a Cross Table, the best you could hope for would be setting a Details section for each individual time slot and arranging a large number of formulas into a grid shape:
The problem is that every Formula would need to be unique; interpreting whether there is a Class at that Time and Date, and which Class it is. There would be up to 168 of those formulas and you'd have to manually go in and modify each one to check for their own unique combination of Date and Time. Which defeats the whole purpose of using a computer - to make repeated tasks easier.
Plus you'll have difficulty with the formatting: You'd need to program every "cell" to use a unique set of colors based on the displayed Class. That part is technically doable, but there's no way to "merge the cells" when classes last longer than a half hour. You'd end up with something like this:
So don't torture yourself trying to make this happen in Crystal. Even with all the time and effort it would take to formulate the grid, there's no good way to make it look like your screenshot.
That said, it looks as though you managed to put a schedule together in Excel. Is there any reason you can't use Excel instead? It's a much more powerful tool, and a cursory Google search suggests it can handle queries as well.
I have an OpenOffice Calc spread sheet that I'm using to track some data. I have three charts made from the data. I periodically add more data to the spreadsheet. My current way to propagate this to the chart is to alter the data ranges manually of each chart. I'd like to automate this, or at least not have to redundantly change each chart separately.
My current idea was to do something like $A$1:$A{$F$1} for the ranges where $F$1 holds the current last line. Unfortunately, OpenOffice doesn't recognize this, but I thought there might be a function or work around for it. I haven't been able to find one yet.
So, is there a way to execute my idea, or perhaps a better way to do it?
There is a very similar question to this, but the asker asked for many more features and the answer was to use something other than a spreadsheet. It was never answered whether this specific feature was possible.
Also:
First method is to extend the range of the graph way down, with lots of empty space.
Second method is to include only one extra line of data in the graph and when you add data, always insert it above that line.