Dawn of the Geeks

I decided to start up a Team Fortress 2 dedicated server at tf2.dawnofthegeeks.com. That’s hardly unique. What is unique is that it is running a very verbose stat generating plugin.

The plug in is a modified version of the N1G-TF2-RANK plugin which out of the box as given is pretty much trash. The plugin is supposed to generate the MySQL tables automatically which it does but incorrectly. So no stats get logged until you manually add default values for everything in the table structures. The biggest problem is that it only does cummulative stats and doesn’t tell you player v player stats. What that means is that you can’t see how well players fare against each other and you can’t view improvement (or lack thereof) over time.

So what I did is whip up an “action_log” table which collects raw data from the modified plugin. The modified version simply feeds the action log with things like “bob killed steve” and even tells me what weapon was used.

The result is that eventually the above listed web-site will be displaying some pretty interesting charts.

The one good thing about the given plugin is that it supplies a very good skeleton for plugging your own database queries into. So if you want to run a Team Fortress 2 server and have some good stats get the source for the above plugin and edit it to generate the stats you want. It took me only about two hours to get it generating more useful stats. With some more time I could clean up the code even more. There are some places where I think the code could be simplified.

The original plugin also allows you to see the top 10 players in game. I broke that with my modifications. Future feature, once data is being collected and charts being generated, is to put that back in. Although I don’t see the point of having that in game. What might be useful is telling the player who to avoid and who to go after based on previous encounters.

The possibilities are endless but I think I’ll give it at least a month of getting the basic stat collections taken care of before jumping in too far.