Rankz

It’s time to disclose a secret. Something I already mentioned marginally here and there. I’m talking about Rankz – a high speed ranking calculator we’ve been working on for the last few weeks. In short, it’s an application that can be used to support press coverage and commentatorship at a sports event such as a triathlon.

Originally, when we were students, we wrote a similar piece of software which was the goal of a student’s project at the CTI. It was basically a web based solution for some ranking calculations. With Rankz, however, we took it one step further. It is now a highly flexible standalone ranking calculator which supports different plugins for input, calculation and output.

Rankz

One of the output plugins, for instance, is a web server, but others provide CSV output as well. As for the calculation plugins (we call these “stats plugins”), a bunch of different calculations are done such as the overall ranking, ranking per split or ranking in the athlete’s age group, plus – and that is a very important feature – the relative ranking based on certain splits. And most important fact: it’s superfast – nearly live during the race, a great way to track athletes.

Tomorrow, Rankz will experience its first live action test at the Kärnten Ironman Austria 2006 in Klagenfurt. After this beta test it will – hopefully – succeed in the calculation of rankings for the Ironman Germany in Frankfurt, next Sunday. We’re very excited about that and I hope we can get some more facts posted here…

6 thoughts on “Rankz”

  1. what a surprise! but – let me be a bit pedantic – Rankz does not seem to be a game at all.. “Rarebyte-Game Developement” or have you just changed your name?

    however: grats for yor first official beta thing!

  2. Rankz is in fact no game at all. However, we’ve not changed our name ;) Now that we have Rankz halfway out the door, that doesn’t mean that we lose our focus on game development. Anyway, we try to be open-minded and if there is demand for software such as Rankz… ;)

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