Unreal Visualisation Toolkit

Name: Unreal Visualisation Toolkit (UVT)

Version: 1.2

Website:http://%7boption%7d

Description:

Generate heat maps, and other visualisations, of player behavior and navigation in a similar manner to that for Team Fortress II and Halo 3. Specifically designed to help level designers gain valuable, structured feedback about how their level performs and how it plays. The UVT allows modders to log player data from any gametype and any level, although large open maps work best, by using a simple “Data Logger” mutator. This mutator creates a player behaviours data log file (.pbd) in your “logs” directory at the end of each round, which can then be loaded into the main Win XP application to generate the visualisations.

A separate “Screen Capture” mutaotr allows easy camera positioning to help create a good screen shot to use as the base for the visualisations. When a screen capture is taken, a screen capture data (.scd) file is also saved in your “logs” directory”, with the main screen shot being saved into your “ScreenShots” folder.

Once you have all of the required files, you can easily filter the data to show a variety of data combinations through heat maps, scatter maps or flow maps. For starters, you can show death locations and kill locations as well as player positions. You can also filter to show position, death and kill locations on a per weapon, player or team basis, and you can also filter for bot only results.

Instructions can be found here download here

Features

• 
  [*:14pergcf]Compatible with Unreal Tournament 3 Path1.2, UT2k4 soon to follow.
  [*:14pergcf]Help identify campings spot, filter for all kills with weapon “Sniper Rifle”, for example.
  [*:14pergcf]Help with general game/level balance.
  [*:14pergcf]Show weapon imbalance, see if one weapon is dominating the map.
  [*:14pergcf]Automatically identify and visualise repsawn kills.
  [*:14pergcf]In CTF games, see which routes each team took. See where the flag carriers went.
  [*:14pergcf]Show areas of level with high actively, as well as rarely used sections of a map.
  [*:14pergcf]Show bot navagation. Easily identify difference in bot navigation and human player navigation patterns.
  [*:14pergcf]Export data into Excel so you can easily chart weapons usage and player kills.

Comments:

I’ve been working on the Unreal Visualisation Toolkit for some time and have just about reached a stable, usable stage in development! I thought I’d do a small release to the community to help track down bugs, and hopefully get some feedback as to what works and what does not, and identify any features you guys may want in the future versions! I already have a big list of bugs and features I need to tackle, but any new feedback is always appreciated. This is also my first ever(ish) time releasing some software so expect a few mistakes along the way!

It is my intention to keep gradually updating the toolkit and adding new features as I go, so if there is anything you would particularly like to see please speak up! I've already started on the next "google maps" style version and there should be plenty of improvement! Hopefully one day I plan to open source all this, and branch out with plugins for Source, Cod4, BF2, SupCom and so on, generally try and create a gamepaly visualisation and data mining/metrics suite for the most popular games.

The basis of the UVT was part of my dissertation and final project at uni, Games Software Developemnt at Glasgow Caledonian University, and I’d like to say a quick thanks to those who helped me develop this, and for the feedback I received from a few level designers I contacted through mapcore away back in November, cheers!

You can get everything you need from the downloads section on my site, along with enough sample data for you to have a go with.

If people could keep any comments to this thread, and not my broken forums, that would be a real help. You can email me direct at a_hebso_10 AT hotmail .co .uk if you feel the need.

Tested Win32 XP only. Some success with Vista, although not fully tested.

Known Issues:

Many, although the mains problems that I’m currently working on are:

• 
  [*:14pergcf]Some conflict with other mutators. BattleMod, DropItAll...
  [*:14pergcf]Flow map only works with first row of filtered data.
  [*:14pergcf]Occasionally some deaths are not logged properly.

Examples:

Interface:

[Blocked Image: http://digitalfootprints.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/dfuvt.jpg]

Heat Map: Torlan, all player postion

[Blocked Image: http://digitalfootprints.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/playerpos.jpg]

Heat Map: Torlan, death locations all players

[Blocked Image: http://digitalfootprints.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/heatdeath.jpg]

Scattr Map: Torlan, player postion, all players

[Blocked Image: http://digitalfootprints.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/scatter_all.jpg]

Flow Map: Torlan, average player direction

[Blocked Image: http://digitalfootprints.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/flow2.jpg]

Edit: Not sure of the best place to post this, I think this is right?

Thanks for all the positive feedback, it’s appreciated! The flow map was kind of an experiment, just to see if I could make such a visualisation, it can be fairly quick to generate so I was hoping it would be more useful when you have lots of player data to work with. The current enemy position idea is quite interesting; it should be fairly straightforward to show a selected player in one colour, and all the opponents in an other, at specific instances in time, as well as some basic field of view info as well… I’ll investigate!

There’s already weapon stuff in there, you can filter for death, kill or position locations on a per weapon basis, so you can easily find the locations of deaths caused by the sniper rifle for example. I think I’m going to try and implement some analysis features so that that app can automatically identify camping spots and areas where the player stood still for extended periods of time. If I can I’m also going to add features that would suit single player far better, although I’m moving city, graduating and starting a job all this week so we’ll how I get on time wise!

Yeh, the source thing is a bit more tricky than with unreal. Basically, using unreal I can write some mutators that log out data from specifics parts of the code and identify when a kill has occurred and that kind of thing, and using mutators means I don’t access or modify the source. If I want to log similar data from a source game, which should be entirely possible, I’d need to access to parts of the game code which as far as I can gather is only possible through a mod, which TF2 is definitely not! In short, I could get the toolkit working with a source mod very easily, if any mod team wanted it that is, but getting it working with standard source game is a no go I’m afraid!

EDIT: Actually, if there's anyone working on a mod and fancys it, I'd definitely be up for working together and getting something sorted out so you could make visulisations for your mod as well as track some basic gameplay stats. It'd be pretty straightforward and only a little coding involved, let me know!