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Those are all good ideas, SyX. What I'm trying to keep in mind at all times is that choice breeds indecision. The more options you give people, the less they will do. If it is possible to come up with a way to get what I think, or is generally accepted to be, the most important information on there first, and then possibly add more options to change it away from that, then I think that would be best.
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True, but I am trying to look at it from the perspective of a high level, proffesional caster, like those working for GOMtv. I believe that they are experienced enough to know what they would like to see. Having said that, there is definitely no harm in creating the best possible non customizable one first, and then adding options later.
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Ultimately, the difference between a good technology and a good product is a user interface that guides even a clueless first time user to interesting results. (If I knew how to specifically do that, I'd push Apple out of the market. :-)
However, this whole idea of dynamic maps and graphs for RTS plays is still very new. So an interface for mere mortals should probably not offer a whole lot of options. But in order to help this new technology to maturity, another interface should exist for experts. Who other then them could play around with the possibilities and ultimately find the metrics that offer the most insight to the non-expert users?
In other words, there should probably be a "raw" toolbox for map makers, or for a tactical coach of a team of progamers, with a lot of options. This could then be hidden behind an interface that offers just 3 or 4 "cooked" templates of basic statistics to a more casual user (or to a live caster, who does not have the time to flip many switches and fine tune the output).
(This indirectly touches on the question if you intend to get rich with this new technology. If you want to claim it for yourself, you'll need to have all the good ideas by yourself, and must hide the internals of the software. If you want to evolve this technology as quickly as possible, you'll want to open it up so that as many others as possible can contribute. The choice is yours, and my suggestions are free to you and any competitors in either case.)
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Looks nice! But in terms of composition I believe that I'd have a lot more use of a chart like this:
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Really cool, this is something that could be super useful. It would be nice if the heatmap showed which player started in which position.
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Nice job. Stuff like this should be Blizzard's job though. This belongs to the post game screen instead of a third party software running off of map triggers.
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Impressive, really. Hope to see that after games during some tourney, might be useful.
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Amazing tool I can see a lot of potential for this.
On February 06 2012 05:39 Grumbels wrote: I don't want to be mean, but what use would this serve ever? Viewers have just watched the game, they know where the majority of the fights and such happened. It's not even interesting information, because it only gives you a vague idea of what kind of game just happened anyway. People can make those observations for themselves. I really don't want starcraft casts to end up with endless talk about pointless statistics.
A lot of people like the above poster simply don't get the point of this at all. You need to have looked into the structure of the replay file to understand the point of this. At the current time it is impossible to do any accurate replay analysis since the replay files are simply a list of actions (both valid and in-valid actions) this means you cannot accurately determine the current game state from the replay at any point in time.
Another reason why this is important is that with this information a tournament could in real-time display a number of new statistics including heat maps etc... that would take SC2 statistical analysis to a new level likely on par with other sports such as football, tennis, baseball etc...
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I see huge potential for statistics like this as a crawl or text based tournament updater. If you could manage to get these statistics to report live and include appropriate triggers like "TLO takes down Huk's 3rd" you could create an amazing app for people who can't watch tournaments. There have been so many times that I've been at school or work and wanted to know what was happening in a tourney, but I couldn't watch the stream. If there was an automated way to report significant moments like engagements or major harass you could create a simple automated text information stream so that even people who can't watch can keep up. I have no idea if this is within the realm of possibility, but having something equivalent to "Patriots score a touchdown" automatically pushed to your phone would be amazing!
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combat heat map ... im having the wierdest boner right now
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Unit composition / Unit type graphs are decent, but these heat maps are extremely cool! It would be cool to see data from a ton of these stacked together on a given map with regard to every matchup. That way we could see who the aggressor is mostly, and who is doing most of the attacking, and where! It would also be cool to make a more diverse heat "color" spectrum, one to designate one player from the other in a 1v1 scenario.
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On February 06 2012 05:43 a176 wrote: You say this is for casting, but I hope you may realize how absolutely invaluable this will be for map makers!
Yea, this is a sick tool for analyzing map balance.
Beyond that, as a broadcaster, I can see some very handy ways for using something like this in a game analysis, or when talking about finer points of map-based strategy.
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On February 06 2012 02:56 BoxedLunch wrote: it will never cease to amaze me the kind of information and statistics the community comes up with.
that said, what purpose does this serve?
None. It's statistics made into colors for the sake of........ statistics in colors.
*edit* I have nothing against attempts to analyze maps to study balance and whatnot, but this is not the answer we're looking for.
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Canada13378 Posts
On February 07 2012 15:26 MrBitter wrote:Show nested quote +On February 06 2012 05:43 a176 wrote: You say this is for casting, but I hope you may realize how absolutely invaluable this will be for map makers! Yea, this is a sick tool for analyzing map balance. Beyond that, as a broadcaster, I can see some very handy ways for using something like this in a game analysis, or when talking about finer points of map-based strategy.
Look all I know is based on the screenshots provided that third TLO v Grubby game must have been ridiculous!! The TLO vs Real game at a glance not so much
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Nice work, Gowerly. I guess the biggest hurdle here is that each map has to be prepared beforehand to be able to output the needed information during the game, what with so many map versions floating around already.
I never got around to asking you this while sitting next to you at the HEAT Charity event, but how exactly do the triggers work? I take it they persistently write data out to harddisk during the game? Could this potentially be a concern for lag? And what qualifies as significant "combat" to show up on the heat map?
In what way exactly does the map have to be prepared with such triggers? Is it a lot work? Also, every time Antiga Shipyard came up as a map at the tournament you sighed and said it doesn't work with that map. Is it simply because that map was not prepared to output data? Or is it a special kind of map that could not be prepared?
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I think this could be a tremendous help with the balance of maps used in tournaments. By utilizing the "battle hot spot" features in coordination with the outcome of games, mapmakers would be able to discern what features they should and shouldn't use when creating their maps.
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Thanks for the responses so far (positive and negative alike. It's good to get the spectrum of opinions on this). I thought about the stacked graphs in the style above. They each have their benefits and drawbacks (one is sometimes hard to read, the other makes it difficult to show exactly how large the total army is - I'm looking for a way to get the best of both there).
To answer the latest round of questions: Does it cause lag? Currently, Stargraphed captures and outputs the following: - Number of every type of unit per player (once every 5 seconds I think. Maybe even once every 2 seconds) - Positions of every unit that has died in the last 5 seconds (output once every 5 seconds) - Player Names/Player Races/Map information (name, size, etc) (output at the start) - Total resources harvested per player (once every 2 or 5 seconds again)
It is ONLY output to the observers. The Players do not get any output. I spoke to some of the HEAT players and they did not notice any lag. The only time the framerate dropped for Tarson we weren't even playing one of the StarGraphed maps!
How much work is it to change the map to make this work? As long as your map - Supports Spectators, and - Works normally as a multiplayer map then you should be able to enable StarGraphed on it. Currently there are 5 triggers and some variables that are added to the map I enabled all of the HEAT Tournament maps in about 30 minutes. It was simply a case of copy/pasting the triggers in to the map and publishing them. The data is then output into the bank directory as some other custom maps that save data do.
What happened with Antiga? No idea. I downloaded it in the Editor, updated it, re-uploaded it and then it was magically a single player game. Possibly due to it being a blizzard map? It'll probably be pretty trivial to fix, I'll look at modifying the MLG Antiga one and seeing if that fixes it. I just didn't have enough time to figure it out on the day.
What makes a blip on the heat map? Any unit being killed that isn't: - Natural expiration (hallucinations, zerg eggs, broodlings from expiring, etc), or - Killed by your own team (unless it's by storm, siege tank splash or nukes)
Could it be modified to do live output? If I can get the triggers that do that kind of thing into a map, then I don't see why not. That one may take a bit of time, though! Watch this space, etc.
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Love it, great work
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Interesting project, and yet another example of the great things our community can come up with.
I added a link to this thread in my list of related links in the Ui discussion thread. Hope you don't mind .
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