Psychostats

Infobox Software
name = Psychostats


developer = Jason Morriss
released = March 2001
frequently_updated = yes
programming language = PHP, Perl
operating system = 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. The latest stable version, 3.1, was released on May 1st 2008. Psychostats is implemented in PHP and Perl using a 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 interpreter is available. The frontend (using PHP) can be run on all platforms and requires either a local or remote connection to the MySQL database where statistics are kept. 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 several times a year. It is possible to acquire the Psychostats nightly build from Psychostats SVN server.

Features

Psychostats can track players according to their SteamID, name, or IP address. For each player, the 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. Depending on modifications, there are also other events that may be tracked, such as
* Bombs planted, bombs defused
* Flags captured, flags defended

In addition to individual players, stats can be categorized by weapons, maps, or clans. Awards are computed weekly and monthly for best players. Number of connections and players' countries are shown in the server overview statistics. Live server view shows current players on the defined game server. Optionally, Google maps 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 a 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 an intuitive way to represent spatial statistics graphically. By storing the location information of game events it is possible to construct heatmaps based on that information. An example of a heatmap would be 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 to having a low risk factor.

Support

The open source nature of Psychostats has allowed users to create custom translations, themes and addons. [http://psychostats.com Psychostats forums] are a common way to ask help.

There exist user made addons using the data gathered by Psychostats. One common use of addons is to access the statistics outside of the web interface provided by Psychostats front-end. This would allow, for example, accessing player specific statistics in-game or having a banner signature on forums.

Supported games

* "Call of Duty 4"
* "Counter-Strike 1.6"
* ""
* "Day of Defeat"
* ""
* ""
* ""
* " Natural Selection"
* "Soldat"
* "Team Fortress 2"

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

See also

HLstatsX

References