Presenting: Altitude Heat Maps / Traces

[General Gee]

Background
A long time ago a command was added in a patch to log the plane positions server side. JWhatever and I have discussed for a while the possibility of using this command to make something akin to the heat maps in CoD and other games. I modified some of the code that was running on the smile servers to achieve this and we showed it to Sybernaut who is hosting the <Vlix> servers. He took the basic idea we had and ran with with, making his own code. What you see presented here is entirely his work based on our idea.

Concept
The 2 vlix pub and 2 private servers currently log the position of each plane every ~100ms. This is stored in a database linked to a website, which updates at least at the end of each game. The website can then be used to display the routes that each plane flies during the game. Not only this, but it also allows you to animate the traces so you can replay a game.

You can go and play a game and as soon as the game is finished head to the website and check your flight history

How do I use it
1. Go to http://cmu.rr.nu/altitude/HeatMap.php?
2. Select the server that you wish to look at
3. Select a map
4. Select a game number. They should be sequential, so the newest one will be the highest number (May have to wait a while at this point for it to load). You can select the specific goal or specific person if you like.
5. If you want to animate it you need to play with the yellow double ended slider at the top. Try setting the two ends somewhere around 10 seconds apart and then you can click start/stop animation.

Caveats
1. This is all built from scratch by Sybernaut. All praise should be aimed at him.
2. This is new to all of us and we are still learning.
3. This is therefore work in progress.
4. We do not have access to plane type, plane speed, plane direction, plane health, ball location, ball speed, whether someone is firing, whether someone is carrying the bomb etc etc and hence at this stage this cannot be turned into a full replay system.
5. No promises are made about the future development of this project.
6. The data currently takes up a fair bit of space and hence cannot be stored forever.
7. Some maps do not yet have a background image.

The project is currently in PHP, with the website in java and html. If you think that you would have the time and willpower to help out then let us know.

Have a play and please let us know what you think. We are especially looking for lavish praise and constructive criticism / ideas.

[General Gee]

<Reserved>

[CmdrNoval]

Awesome piece of imagination... Coupled with some inventive code...



This sh*t is maptesting gold!




On another note, and if you are bored or motivated enough:

I would be curious to map out each plane's death position, upon each death.

Outside of the normal "deathzone" around each goal, it would make for better obstacle/channel placement during the map tuning process...

[Aki1024]

This is really cool. It appears that deaths or goals scored are not realized as a reason for "teleporting" back to spawn, and it draws a line between the last life location and the respawn.

[CmdrNoval]

The only way I can figure that "death points" could be calculated, would be to use the snippet of code that ticks when HP=0 and then pinpoint plane location at that moment.

Not even sure that would work... But if it did, we would be able to identify those irritating little places where 'spam deaths' occur on any given map.

Following that with some obstacle or channel adjustments that would make the map more challenging.

[ex~]

this is nifty, kudos to you guys

[Tekn0]

The colon is missing from the link when clicked (http://)

[[hlx] entr0py]

Very cool. This could actually evolve into a very powerful way to balance planes and maps. Could you instead plot the location of plane deaths, kills, and goals? This would essentially give you a visual representation of where the action is happening on a map and how this changes based on the team, the plane, or the player.

It would take 100s of games, but we would have some solid data on plane performance on each map. Perhaps if something like this could be implemented into the ladder servers.

[General Gee]

Updated OP with a working link. Not sure what went wrong, it certainly worked for a day or 2.

Thanks for the feedback. Death maps would be an interesting alternative, but Im not sure if the death location is recorded. Teleport back to spawn seems to be fixed now.