Gamevis

Gamevis is an open-source Electron application for visualising gameplay data developed by Saul Rennison as part of his degree dissertation.

Gamevis is unopinionated and easily fits many genres of games, and includes importers for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2.

Screenshot

Screenshot demonstrating two layered heatmap visualisations:

Installation

1. Prerequisites

Node & npm are already expected to be installed:

brew install libpqxx
npm install -g gulp # required for building
npm install # install app dependencies
gulp # compile JavaScript and stylesheets

2. Database

A Postgres server is by default expected to be running on localhost. The config.json file can be updated at the root of the project to specify a non-default database IP/port.

By default the server is expected to have a database named gamevis with a username and password of gamevis.

Note that no tables need to be generated - the application will automatically generate.

3. Run the app

The application can be started with npm start. However, no sessions are available by default. The importers (see below) can be used to import game sessions into the database.

Visualisations

Multiple visualisations can be show on a single visualisation (as shown in the screenshot):

• Heatmaps
• Timeline events (e.g., round start)
• Discontinuous points (e.g., death location)
• Continuous points (e.g., player movement)

Importers

Game	Path	Comments
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive	importers/csgo	Run import.js with the path to the demo file as the argument.
Dota 2: Reborn	importers/dota_reborn	Run import.go with the path to the .dem replay file as the argument.

Release log

Gamevis is still a work-in-progress and is not expected to be in a production-ready state until Summer 2016. However, changes are committed frequently and any issues should be raised as bugs. Of course pull requests are welcome!

Database

Gamevis expects to connect to a Postgres database of version 9.3 or later due to JSONB querying features. This section details the structure of the database tables, that are automatically generated by the game client.

session

Column	Type	Value
title	string, not null	User-friendly session title
level	string, not null	Name of the level/map/world this session was recorded from, e.g., de_dust2
game	string, not null	Short name of the game this session is associated with, e.g., csgo. This name will be used as the subdirectory to find the level overview data.
data	JSONB	(Optional) Custom data associated with this session.

event

This table represents events that occur throughout a game's session. Events are optionally associated with one or more locations within the game world, and optionally associated with one or more entities.

Column	Type	Value
session_id	foreign key	→ session
tick	int, not null	Game tick that this event occurred
name	string, not null	Name of the event
data	JSONB, not null	Event-specific data. The data keys for a particular event name are expected to be constant across all instances of it being fired in a particular session
locations	JSONB	(Optional) All locations associated with this instance of the event. Keys should be a user-friendly string, and the value a Vector2 object, e.g., {'player': {'x': 500, 'y': 250}}
entities	JSONB	(Optional) All entities associated with this instance of the event. Keys should be a user-friendly string, and the values pointers into the entity_props table, e.g., {'grenade': 175, 'thrower': 11}

entity_props

This table represents the entity properties throughout the recorded session.

Column	Type	Value
session_id	foreign key	→ session
index	int, not null	Entity index. Does not have unique across an entire session, just for this entity at this tick
tick	int, not null	Game tick that this update occurred
prop	string, not null	Name of the property that was updated (e.g., health)
value	JSONB, not null	JSON object of the format {'value': newValue} representing the new value of the property.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license, see LICENSE.md for the full legalese.

Acknowledgements

• Logo derived from Pao Media's gamepad logo, licensed under Creative Commons (Attribution 3.0 Unported).