Orbus Gameworks

Quake III Arena Metrics

Apr 17, 05:28 PM

So we decided that we needed to put together a demo for our metrics product. The question was: what game do we choose to record metrics about?

After about 5 seconds of long, hard deliberation, we decided on Quake III. This is because, although the game is 8 years old, it has a few things going for it:

1. The game’s source code is available for free.
2. The gameplay has aged well. While it doesn’t have all the features of a Battlefield:2142, a Halo 2, or a Gears of War, many hardcore tournament players still swear by it. And yeah, it’s still lots of fun to play.
3. It’s relatively simple to modify, and since it’s 8 years old it does have a fair amount of “documentation” out there in terms of forum posts and whatnot.
4. Did I mention it’s open source?

So, thanks to Jeff (who figured out the QVM nastiness) and Craig (who actually wrote the hooks to grab the data), we’ve got the game taking some basic metrics and recording the metrics off into an MS SQL database. I was able to take the data and mash it into Processing in about 2 hours to come up with this overlay for a multiplayer map known as q3dm7:

Now, this is going to look cooler once we overlay it on a map of the level, but for now, you can squint at it and see the shape of the level. Green dots are health/armor pickups, blue dots are ammo, and red dots are weapons. The white lines you see represent frags: we draw a line starting at the position the killer was in, and ending where the victim was killed. And then we put a little triangle where the player died, so it makes a kind of wonky arrow.

There’s one particular area that’s pretty neat. In the middle-right of the picture, you see a bunch of horizontal lines. There’s a lot of killing going on in this hallway, particularly with shots that start near the red dots and end near the green dots. I’ve annotated the chart here:

What you see if you look at the level is that the red dots I’ve circled are a rocket launcher pickup. The green dots are some generic health. And there’s a choke point in the hallway. What’s happening is that the players (or bots, in this case) grab the rockets and immediately frag whoever is grabbing the health over on the other end. Roughly 1/4 of all frags happen here.

Anyway… there you have it. Metrics at work. Obviously this was something we whipped up in about 2 days, including time to make sure our metrics libraries worked with the QVM. We’ll continue to collect cool Quake III metrics, we’ll continue to make neat visualizations, and I will continue to post them here!

— admin