So, I’m working on a multiplayer game, and I want to extrapolate positional information for player deaths, so I can create a map that shows the hot-zones where people die. My first thought was to pull it directly from the client, but I’ve heard that it’s pretty much doomed to failure, because the system was designed before the hooks were implemented, so perf would be horrible. (In fact, perf testing builds with hooks in place for memory usage and so on spike the processing time from 16 ms to 40 ms and sometimes 90 ms. These builds are fine for employees to play on and hate, but clearly it won’t work for release)
demorecs seem like an obvious solution to me. Just grab a demorec of a match, and parse it for data directly. Failing that, rebuild the match and parse the replay itself.
I don’t really know that there’s direct value in the project, but I just feel like, having a mapping function, which showed where people tended to die (and by what manner of attack, eg: range, melee, DoT or environment) and who killed whom, would really help balance things, and we’d have data to go on in tuning that balance.
I don’t know that this exists, but it would be really helpful for me, and might be really helpful for a lot of people.
I’m using Unreal3, but I presume an external conversion would be applicable to all version of Unreal, unless you’ve been updating demorec code