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Tracking Gaming Stats With Video Capture Devices
galtish writes "M. Schrag has put together an amazing PC stat tracking system called 'Soul Calimeter' for use with the GameCube version of fighting game Soul Calibur II. The software is as yet unreleased, but uses a cheap video capture card to analyze the video feed from the console and create a stat database. It's not just stats, there's also a web browser-based front-end for analyzing the stats and starting circuit matches, and voice synthesis using AT&T Natural Voices for in-game commentaries on the action. His website includes pics of the stats screens, and samples of the synthesized audio commentary. Pretty sweet - I'd love something like this for the weekly Halo LAN matches..."
http://www.schaefer.nu/mirrors/homepage.mac.com/ms chrag/SoulCalimeter/
Reading the descriptions, it watches the health bars and the squares at the character select screen. Which would be simple enough image detection, since they're always in the same x,y coordinates.
It would be really cool if it could grok the movements of the fighters and say things like "Kilik delivers a fierce scissor-kick to an uppercut combo!".. But you cant have everything.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
its not a hoax. this guy is a very credible programmer for java rio apps who has reliably put out new releases of his software. there's no reason he'd fake something like this, he's a grown adult with better things to do than make a bunch of nerd believe he's doing something he's not.
If you've ever released an open source app, you know you can't just toss it out there. You have to package it, document it (at least enough to get people going), and support it. None of these are particularly enjoyable. Especially for an app like this -- video analysis is really finicky (at least mine is :) ). In fact, when I brought it to work after working on it at home, it just didn't work. It took me a good 45 minutes of screwing around to realize that somehow the color calibration got messed up on the card (the red was pushed way up).
.
Secondly, the whole point of that page (if you read to the end) was to see if there actually was any interest in such a beast. We love it here, but it's sort of a dorky niche product. I wasn't going to go through the pain of all the things listed in the first paragraph if there was one other dude in the world that was even mildly interested in it.
And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, is that I used some of the libraries from work to speed up development, which means I have to rewrite those parts of the library before I could do any sort of release.
By the way, the low level video capture interface is released under LGPL at http://jmds.dev.java.net
Oh yeah -- One last thing. That someone would spend three weeks of free time developing an app to track stats for a videogame is pretty sad. That someone would instead spend their free time making up a story about spending three weeks of free time developing an app to track stats for a videogame is REALLY sad. I like to think I qualify for the first sad and not the second.
- Mike