Ever since I saw Valve's heat maps for their games I wanted to see some of QuakeWorld. Yesterday that itch returned and I decided to give it another go.

This is what I ended up with (each frag is plotted as transparent dot, so if there are many frags in an area it will show up more bright/solid):


400 4on4 games, 120000 frags on DM3.


170 4on4 games, 70000 frags on DM2.


140 4on4 games, 60000 frags on E1M2.


That boring map I hate so much (1on1, 8000 frags).


DM2 with smaller points, I think it is the same 70000 frags but I am not sure. Did not matter much though when I tried with ~10000. I like how this shows how deaths are likely to happen next to walls.


This is very not scientific. For example some frags from baldm3 and even ztndm3 matches did sneak into the DM3 one because I did not care. Also since the demos came from 2002-2009 there's got to be rule changes involved. Anyways, the majority should be good and thus those good frags easily outnumber the bad ones. Yay for stochastic(?).

If you have a specific request, just provide me with urls to the (mvd) demos.

How to do it yourself (on Linux)
Warning: This is very very ugly. Manual work is needed way too much. If you plan to do more than 4-5 I urge you to write a quick shell script.

Prerequisites: gnuplot 4.3+, imagemagick and some knowledge of your shell.

1. Get and compile Cokeman's amazing MVD Parser. svn co http://qw-dev.net/svn/mvdparser mvdparser

2. Get bsp2bmp (is there a official host of it?). Set maxX, maxY and maxZ to 4096 and minX, minY, minZ to -4096 by uncommenting the for loop after printf("Collecting min/max\n"; and, well, setting those fixed values instead. Compile bsp2bmp then (and I recommend renaming the binary, I called mine bsp2bmp_spiritugh).

3. Get the demos you want to use and put them to mvdparser and its .dat files. Smart people would modify the template.dat now so it only outputs the *events.log files with the coordinates as "xxx yyy zzz" (or even "xxx yyy 15", see below). I noticed that possibility way too late and cannot be arsed to play with it now. Well, run mvdparser for each mvd you want now. I used find . -name "*.mvd" -print0|xargs -0 ./mvdparser

4. cat *events.log > map_events.log

5. Remove all the unneeded stuff and set all Z values to the same (15 is good for the render later). The view is from above so only X and Y are interesting. Gnuplot treats the Z value as actual value of the XY point which is why you want the same value for them all. I used my precious jEdit for this step. Using sed would be much much better...

6. Now create the map outline with your fresh bsp2bmp hack. ./bsp2bmp_spiritugh -p0 -s4 map.bsp map.bmp. p0 means no padding, s4 sets the scale.

7.
8. This is ugly. First the cropping to remove the clutter on the plot. Then I flip and flip because I couldn't figure out how to do without. Well, it works, so ... party!


9. Crop the image and give it a more verbose name.


TODO for smart people:
-Create a tailored template.dat
-Write a bash script that takes a map name (AAA.bsp) and does the rest all by itself....
-Crop the end image automatically.
-Pick two players and a map they frequently play(ed), then paint them in different colours.
-Create those really gorgeous heatmaps by using a raster on the map and counting frags per square (that's how I would do it).
Further links that might be of interest:
http://hlstatsx.hlds.pl/hlstats.php?mode=mapinfo&map=dmc_dm6&game=dmc
http://forums.interwavestudios.com/topic/265-heatmaps/page__p__1336&#entry1336 (talk to Cokeman if you want to give this ago)

Special thanks for their help to Cokeman and _KaszpiR_.

Really nice stuff! Nice to see someone else playing with stuff like this Wish I had more time to satisfy the statistic nerd in me... Anyway, as you say, a custom template.dat would be nice (maybe I should do it since I was the one that wrote the idiotic parser for it ... Rewriting the mvdparser to not be as nasty would be even nicer + you could get heatmaps for a bunch of other stuff (other than kills that is) with it.

HLStatsX CE is a project that parses logs from Half-Life 1 engine based games (like Deathmatch classic/ Counter-Strike) and Source engine based games (like Counter-Strike:Source, TeamFortress2,Left4Dead).
It consists of mysql database for data backend, log parser in perl and php scripts that stuff data from mysql and show it on WWW.
Heatmaps are quite 'recent' addition, they are generated by php script ran in cgi cause its time and resource consuming task, so it should be done once in a while (read, in the night).

Maybe if there would be a template.dat with defined kills messages with coordinated in it of the victim and attacker, then hlstatsx could just parse text logs and do the rest.

No one has ever died in tele-up or gl in dm2??

if you see precisely, they did
but there are extra fragments of map drawn and nobody actually can reach that area, so it should be removed from view to not confuse

I would like to know where I've been dying the most in all my 2on2's

This is kinda confusing for me, maybe is for my lack of english, but when i read this i understand that the less red dots, the more frags, because the map looks more transparent, more solid, less painted. I think will be better to say "each frag is plotted as RED dot" instead.

And, that last dm2 image looks much more better, imho should be all like that one.

Anyway, really cool stuff ^^

The dots are transparent and red. The more of these red dots you have on top of each other the higher the opacity gets, resulting in solid red areas.

I know, but i had to look at the images, just got confused when i 1st read that. But anyway as i said, maybe is my lack of english.

for Windows users i've compiled bsp2bmp and mvdparser:
http://kaszpir.hlds.pl/index.php?path=quake%2Fbsp2bmp/
http://kaszpir.hlds.pl/index.php?path=quake%2Fmvdparser/

get the zips seen in directory listing, there is packed source files and .exe

notice - i do not have antivirus at home so keep in mind to scan the files!

hm. What about the periodicity that is apparent in some of the first set of images. If you look at DM2 RL room, I would expect that to be uniformly red (naive), or at least transition gradually from the spawn (or walls) at high density towards the RL (high densitity again) across a lower density zone. But the first DM2 image shows concentrations within the low density zone between the spawn and the RL. Something (maybe) similar can be seen getting away from the RA teleport in DM4. I wonder if the distance between the hotspots might be correlated to RL or SG reload time or something like that...

Then again, if you look at the 2nd DM2 image, the effect seems to have vanished, so it might just as well be an artifact of the sampling/colouring itself?

Hey.
Thanks for figuring this out as this is great a addition.

but I have a problem i am using windows so I downloaded the two windows exes above and tryed that way.
I got the .bmp of the map no problem but I cant get the events log.
But I cant get mvd parser to work, I keep getting cant load template.dat even tho the template.dat is in the same folder as the .exe.

Any ideas what im doing wrong?

Thanks for reading.

Some observations I found 'interesting' (although probably not that surprising if I give it some thought):

-A lot of frags in dm3 water (perhaps because weak players go there fishing for weapons)
-As mentioned frags tend to be concentrated around walls.
-SNG on dm3 has a relative low volume of frags
-Because the map is 2d, you may get slightly misleading concentrations in some places i.e. people died at different heights. This partly explains the concentrated blotches on the dm3 lifts.

To state the obvious; frags are concentrated around walls cause players get hit by rockets or shaft and fly against them. Just saying this so we hopefully won't be seeing players avoiding walls at all costs around servers soon

ps. I want bigger pictures!

i don't think it records the place where the body lands but the place where 'death set in' ie where the frag occured. so the many frags near walls are likely to be related to the splash damage of the rocket launcher.

I'd like to see a 3d version of this, you add demos to the playlist and it gruns mvdparser, or loads death locations from a file already created, and you could represent the deaths with a zombie gib or a nail or something tiny and maybe (if fps feasible) you could make red light spheres with r_rocketlight .05 gl_flashblend 2 r_rocketlightcolor (red) or something. Or maybe a semitransparent sprite.

This is pretty nice but the concentration of the dots was kinda expected after having played dm2, e1m2 and dm3 for over 10 years

That sng part in dm3 is kinda low on frags and that can be experienced in games, there is no spawn in the actual room for fraghunters to guard and there is no major weapon or powerup. Instead the room is used to stock up on health and ammo, hide from strong enemies and to some extent sneak attack players coming from lifts or ra.

The many frags in dm3 water is not that unexpected either just think about the massive spam of quadrockets and pines and add all the discharges and lower tier weapon battles in there

I just changed the plot line in the gnuplot file. I think it did not work previously.

More things to try:

Use the coordinates for spawning items. I created an mapname.ent file with a couple of thousand deaths.

scale works in Darkplaces. Sadly the items are dropped to the floor, I could not find a workaround. Use r_showbboxes to see some fancy miasma.

Try hacking the engine to make the bboxes less opaque so you can use more kills. You can use about 15000 maximum.

I also played with http://code.google.com/p/image-tempest/ today but this is the best I came up with. Meh.

Argh, screwed up when saving. This is 10000 frags. Took 35 minutes to render...

1000 kills. Ugly grey tint.


I used the test/pil.py and commented the weird test functions. You have to convert Quake coordinates to a 0,8192 range (from -4096,4096). And you better scale down. Rendering 4092x4092 was impossible for me, it ate RAM like crazy. The size is determined from the input image you give it.

.ent file again with a mod that stops the keys from dropping (thanks Supa!):
http://imgur.com/i49UM&WPJ8A&4bc2V&xHJ5E (click the First, Second etc Image links)

edit: meh, second image was during flicker. Dunno what causes it.

edit2: http://www.quaddicted.com/stuff/killmiasma.zip (noclip, r_showbboxes 1 (or 0.x)).

that dm3 for some reason looks like it needs a horizontal flip badly.

ach gottdammit!

nice heatmap still. looks like something straight from valve!

3d boxes look amazing
maybe instead of boxes it could be possible to render flat semi transparent sprite?