About a month ago, a good friend of mine, showed me a game called Travian. You can check it out at http://www.travian.com/ but I cannot really recommend it either way. It is decent enough but it isn't all that entertaining. In any case it is one of those ongoing slow-time games that requires a single action a day type deals. For all the information about the game their webpage is sufficiently informative. The reason I bring it up is, the company that makes it does do one really cool thing. Each day they back up their server and then post the SQL calls to their webpage, so people can download all the game data each day in the morning. Naturally with all this beautiful data just hanging around I could not help but make a visualization or two with Protovis.

This past spring I took two visualization courses at UNCC and one of them was basically an introduction to Protovis and so it was only natural to make use of my newly gained skills. As a result I created the two visualization tools via Protovis.

The world map shows the global population, basically every time a new player joins, the game places them on the edge of an ever expanding circle, which is visible when you look at the world map. The local attack map is a more functional tool, written mostly by a friend of mine, but I polished it up, and it is used for identifying good opponents to attack. All in all it was nice to find an interesting data set and make use of Protovis, something I learned in class, to create something which at this time might be unique.

On a last note, if you visit http://imagine.kicbak.com/Travian you can access the general folder and see the available files, which include all the code I wrote for Protovis. That way if you are interested in learning protovis these visualizations may help, but I recommend starting with the simple tutorials available from the Protovis site.