Psychostats

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Psychostats
Developed by	Jason Morriss
Initial release	March 2001
Written in	PHP, Perl
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	Video game statistics
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://www.psychostats.com

Psychostats is a video game statistics program meant especially for Half-Life and Half-Life 2 based mods. Latest stable version 3.1 has been released on May 1st 2008. Psychostats is implemented in PHP and Perl using MySQL database as storage for statistics. Psychostats is open source software released under the GNU General Public License. The backend program (using Perl) can be run on all platforms where Perl intrpreter is available. The backend requires either local or remote connection to MySQL database where stats will be stored. The frontend (using PHP) can be run on all platforms and requires either local or remote connection to MySQL database. Often all three components are run on the same computer along with the game server.

The statistics are generated by scanning through log files created by the game server. From events stored in the log files Psychostats can compute, store and display variety of different statistics ranging from individual players to global server stats.

Psychostats is continuously developed and new updates have been released often couple times a year. It is possible to acquire Psychostats nightly build from Psychostats SVN server.

Player statistics sample page

1 Features
2 Support
3 Supported games
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Features

Psychostats can track players according to their SteamID, name or IP address. For each player following stats are available

Ranking, skill value, clan ranking
Kills, deaths
Victims list
Accuracy, headshots, shots fired per kill, damage given
Weapons used
Maps played
Online time
Team preference
Total rounds played
Total games played

Psychostats tracks similar information based on each separate playing session also. Depending on modification there might be also some other events which are being tracked, such as

Bombs planted, bombs defused
Flags captured, flags defended

Stats can be viewed also categorized by weapons, maps or clans. Awards are computed weekly and monthly for best players. Amount of connection and players' countries are shown in the server overview statistics. Live server view shows current players on the defined game server. Optionally Google map can show where players are physically located in the world.

It is possible to set Psychostats to process statistics from multiple servers by assigning multiple log sources. This way only single installation is needed to combine statistics from many game servers.

Since version 3.1 Psychostats introduced heatmaps in addition to other statistics. Heatmaps are intuitive way to represent spatial statistics graphically. By storing location information of game events it is possible to later construct heatmaps based on that information. Example of heatmap would be for example to plot locations where players die. Any single death isn't going to be important factor but having thousands of death events the death locations are likely to form clusters. These clusters can be interpreted then as the heatspots in the heatmap. More advanced rules can be used to form heatmaps, for example subtracting kills heatmap from deaths heatmap to see which are the best places to be in respect of getting lots of kills with small risk of dying.

In the combined map the blue spot is good place to be and the red spot very bad. The places which "cancel out" are neutral because players both die and get kills from the same place.

[edit] Support

Open source nature of Psychostats has allowed users to create custom translations, themes and addons. Psychostats forums are a common way to ask help.

There exist user made addons using the data gathered by Psychostats. Common use of addons is to access the statistics other way than the web interface provided by Psychostats front-end. That kind of usage is for example accessing player specific statistics in-game or having banner signature on forums.

[edit] Supported games

Other modifications are partly supported too although there can be some events which are not properly tracked. Such examples could be ZombieMod or Hidden which mainly are based on kills and deaths but also employ other game events.