Quake III Heat Maps
Aug 16, 02:20 PM
We finally got around to improving on our visualization layer for GtkRadiant, the Quake III map editor. In particular, we added a sort of heat map to the visualization plugin that interfaces with our Aleph Metrics database.
What you see below is a beautiful set of images that Craig put together. It’s sort of a grab bag. Every image is of the Q3DM17 map, which features a lot of jumps and force platforms. Basically you bounce around the map a whole lot. There were four bots on the map. Some of the images (blue background) contain the heat map overlaid on the level map. Other images (gray background) don’t have the level map, but you can see the structure of the heat map better.
I discuss what the symbols mean and a few conclusions below these pictures.
Anyway, the red lines were there before, and they represent frag vectors: when someone is fragged, a line is drawn from the shooter to the victim on the map, with a red cube on the victim’s location. That’s old news, though. The purple dots represent locations where weapons were fired, and in the last picture you’ll see a version where the purple dots have lines coming out representing the vector of fire.
The important thing we added was a heat map based on where players spend time on the map. The opacity of each green square represents, for the area it covers on the map, how much time was spent in that square by the players. So you get a good sense of how much of your level content is actually used. It also revealed things about certain levels, such as areas where there is high traffic but very few kills tend to occur.
Especially striking is how the jump arcs end up rather clearly visualized.
Anyone out there care to chime in on what these heat maps might imply about this level? I’d love to hear some theories.
