I don't know if you know that Debian distributes a package named
popularity-contest that gathers information about what packages have been installed and which of them have been used recently in order to give some statistical data.
Please find attached the graph corresponding to the
simutrans package. Also attached is the graph of
openttd, to have a reference.
The color keys are:
- Red: People that have installed the package
- Green: People that have installed the package and use it regularly
- Blue: People that have installed the package, but don't use it regularly
- Purple: People that have upgraded the package
You can find this information in: http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php (http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php)
Interesting, both graphs show the same trends, I guess affected y the popularity of Debian itself. But I think we can infer that openttd has a bit more than double the users than simutrans. But I think both trends are similar, and both grow in the same order.
I always wondered how many Debian users participate in popularity-contest. I personally do not. And for the graphs - the spike seems to relate with new debian stable release, perhaps they changed the defaults to get more participants... And another thing - the simutrans packages get old quickly - I have stopped using it because many addons I wanted were compiled by newer makeobj... So that migh further reduce the numbers.
I don't participate either, and the packages do get old quickly indeed. That said I'd imagine the same is true for OTTD as well so when comparing the two numbers should be fairly reflective of relative use of the two programs.
Although the Debian package does get old fairly quickly I keep it installed for testing purposes.
In fact, I didn't install popularity-contest either. I guess it got installed in one of the updates. I discovered the process in a routine check and investigated it further. I use Xubuntu, btw.
Simutrans to OpenTTD is rather 1:8, thus this is favourable for Simutrans that it is more like 1:3 in those graphs ...
prissi, what is the 1:8 ratio based on? [strike]Sourceforge downloads?[/strike] (hardly any openTTD downloads at SF)
Various stuff: Google trends, downloads (when still at SF back then), number of subscribed/active users at forum. The core community is maybe 2-3 times larger only.