Button Mashing Meter

[Mr Rob]

Theoretically speaking, has anyone built a 'thing' that counts key presses and outputs the results in a pretty graph/bar chart/presses per minute? Possibly map them to the active game? I think it would be fun to actually crunch the numbers and see which Pandora games are the button-mashingest games of all time.


I know such a thing is possible (I've essentially described a keylogger, but with different intentions); it would be fun however to take that aggregate data and do cool stuff with it.


Thoughts?

 

[AquaAnalogue]

Theoretically speaking, has anyone built a 'thing' that counts key presses and outputs the results in a pretty graph/bar chart/presses per minute? Possibly map them to the active game? I think it would be fun to actually crunch the numbers and see which Pandora games are the button-mashingest games of all time.


I know such a thing is possible (I've essentially described a keylogger, but with different intentions); it would be fun however to take that aggregate data and do cool stuff with it.


Thoughts?

There is literally, absolutely no point to this whatsoever.


I love it. Let me know when it's available

If it's still not around when my Pandora comes, I'll code it up.

 

[Nintendo]

Button presses takes battery life, right?

 

[Mr Rob]

Button presses takes battery life, right?

Umm, possibly. Either button presses take battery life, or or the Pandora sending electricity to the buttons to sense whether they have been pressed or not takes battery life (ie, the keyboard is active and draws energy, whether you're pressing anything or not as opposed to a sleep mode -- the keyboard is inactive).


Perhaps my idea is unclear. I'm not talking a stand alone application that runs that you just watch, press buttons, and watch a meter going higher. I'm thinking more of a tiny daemon written in C or something that just runs in the background. I fire up Cave Story, I take my chances Running Hell, and naturally when things get interesting I start pressing the buttons like a madman because it's just sooo damn chaotic.


So after I win (naturally), my button pressing would be logged and you could view it in something. Line graph against time, chart, whatever.


Maybe it's a wacky idea and not useful, who knows, ha ha. Maybe take periodic screenshots of the game too, so you can map time to an actual part in game for the peaks to make more sense. Of course the main requirement is that it doesn't slow down gameplay.


And of course this would be useful for action games (Cave Story, Super Geometry Dust) and less useful for RPG/strategy games (Wesnoth, Dragon Warrior, etc.).

 

[-Tj-]

Actually, it might be quite the opposite for strategy games, if they're of the RTS type. I noticed people around the office talking about KPM or something like that in StarCraft 2, and sure enough, the game logs key presses. There, I suppose it's so players can see how fast they are at executing actions. Useless in non-realtime games (turn-based is going to tell you nothing lol).


It's a neat idea, would be nice if someone was interested enough to code it.

 

[Nintendo]

Button presses takes battery life, right?

Umm, possibly. Either button presses take battery life, or or the Pandora sending electricity to the buttons to sense whether they have been pressed or not takes battery life (ie, the keyboard is active and draws energy, whether you're pressing anything or not as opposed to a sleep mode -- the keyboard is inactive).


Perhaps my idea is unclear. I'm not talking a stand alone application that runs that you just watch, press buttons, and watch a meter going higher. I'm thinking more of a tiny daemon written in C or something that just runs in the background. I fire up Cave Story, I take my chances Running Hell, and naturally when things get interesting I start pressing the buttons like a madman because it's just sooo damn chaotic.


So after I win (naturally), my button pressing would be logged and you could view it in something. Line graph against time, chart, whatever.


Maybe it's a wacky idea and not useful, who knows, ha ha. Maybe take periodic screenshots of the game too, so you can map time to an actual part in game for the peaks to make more sense. Of course the main requirement is that it doesn't slow down gameplay.


And of course this would be useful for action games (Cave Story, Super Geometry Dust) and less useful for RPG/strategy games (Wesnoth, Dragon Warrior, etc.).

That clears things up for me.


If I leave a graphical game on, on demo mode or on idle it will use less battery life than me actually playing that graphical game in real-time.


Thank you.