Extracting data out of a replay? Want to create informative stat screens

March 18, 2015 9:02 PM from

So I have a assignment from a data visualization course that basically requires me to critique and implement improvements on existing graphs and I realized the stat pages in Offworld Trading Company would be pretty interesting to work on. I was thinking of making up fake data to create some graphs but I'm wondering if it's possible to extract data off the replay files so I can actually explore a representative set of data? Does anyone know if it's possible to extract data off the replay.bin (I'm assuming) files? Even better, maybe the devs would be nice enough to throw some data my way?

Visualizing the data of this game is interesting because unlike most RTS where you can roughly tell what's happening based on the units or armies running around in game, it's not as simple to understand the state of the game because the focus on menu-based actions. Watching replays of this game should also be less effective compared to other RTS because it's quite hard to track player actions that are immediate, impactful, and does not have much visual cues. My current idea is to create graphs where it's more focused on describing the actions the players have taken in game, which can be as simple (yet complicated) as tracking buildings built throughout the game, with the hopes that such graphs would be more informative on what a player could have done instead to improve their gameplay.

Easier said than done of course, and this is definitely not a knock against the devs who are still building the game and have done a fantastic job so far to inspire me to think about the stat screens. So if anyone has any ideas on getting data out (or even making more informative graphs), please let me know. Thanks!

8,735 views 2 replies

Reply #1 April 4, 2015 2:23 PM from

Offworld Forums Top

Wasn't able to figure out how to extract data out of a replay, so I just took information watching replays by hand. Turns out it was way harder than I expected because there's no building cues for players aside from the person who recorded the replay. It was also difficult because players can build buildings anywhere on the map so I took a couple hours just to record details of one game. I think this also speaks to how we could use better visualization of a game rather than just viewing the replay.

Also discovered a bug where if a player was bought out by another player while the building is still in flight, the building and claim is lost forever.

Since I didn't have much data, I just built a concept of an animated time-based graph for buildings built during a game. It is pretty simple but I think much more effective than what we have now. It would be nice if we could view multiple types of information using the same time slider.

Here's a screencap of the visualization but the actual one can be found here https://totakeke.shinyapps.io/Offworld/.

The post I wrote for this project is also accessible here. http://totakeke.github.io/edav/2015/03/24/justin_blog/ It's mostly focused on building the visualization so don't expect much commentary on the game itself.

Reply #2 April 4, 2015 6:54 PM from

Offworld Forums Top

Amazing work - I'm going to send this thread to the team. I hope we can make the replay file more mod-friendly at some point.

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting and posting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!