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Show HN: A nom parser for the Starcraft 2 Protocol Replay format

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Re: Show HN: A nom parser for the Starcraft 2 Protocol Replay format

#21
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Broodwar replays were really cursed -- I remember that hilarious (perfectly reproducable) bugs of quickly replaying a game which resulted in a completely different replay then the actual game, apparently because the replay missed to integrate all replay information correctly and ended up in a different game state.

Most of game corruption wasn't the result of faulty replay save / generation. Most of game corruption was the result of replays only recording user actions, and when the game engine was patched and rules were changed, re-playing the same user action could go wrong: imagine the cost of Probe getting increased from 50 minerals to 60. You load a replay that contains a "Build Probe" command when the user had 50 minerals.…

Exactly. Divergence is immediate and you wasted your high waiting for something to happen, only to discover that replay was generated by another game version. There was no youtube at the time and downloading replays was the only option and the good players weren't exactly thrilled to share them.

Re: Show HN: A nom parser for the Starcraft 2 Protocol Replay format

#22
Thanks for sharing, very inspiring. I love Rust for parsing video game replays / save files. I've authored a Rocket League replay parser (boxcars) and an entire suite of web visualizations (via Webassembly) for EU4 called pdx.tools https://pdx.tools

It's not easy to work with proprietary formats, but they've both become pretty popular, so I would 100% recommend sinking more time into this project as long as it scratches your itch. Gamers are always looking for more stats and deeper insights

Re: Show HN: A nom parser for the Starcraft 2 Protocol Replay format

#25

Thanks for sharing, very inspiring. I love Rust for parsing video game replays / save files. I've authored a Rocket League replay parser (boxcars) and an entire suite of web visualizations (via Webassembly) for EU4 called pdx.tools https://pdx.tools It's not easy to work with proprietary formats, but they've both become pretty popular, so I would 100% recommend sinking more time into this project as long as it scratc…

Have you seen rerun.io? Also web assembly, sharing again the link from above https://sebosp.github.io/swarmy/public/0.5.1/2023-GSL-S1-RO1... Maybe you can use it too in your project! The guys from rerun are amazing and super helpful, had a call with them to discuss questions and possible uses too

Re: Show HN: A nom parser for the Starcraft 2 Protocol Replay format

#26
post #24

It'd be great to use a non-Blizzard property for this analysis since that company is outstandingly despicable. Plenty of other RTSes exist and I know that AoE2 has an extremely strong data analytics scene.

Where would I go to see some of these analyses?

Re: Show HN: A nom parser for the Starcraft 2 Protocol Replay format

#28
post #25

Thanks for sharing, very inspiring. I love Rust for parsing video game replays / save files. I've authored a Rocket League replay parser (boxcars) and an entire suite of web visualizations (via Webassembly) for EU4 called pdx.tools https://pdx.tools It's not easy to work with proprietary formats, but they've both become pretty popular, so I would 100% recommend sinking more time into this project as long as it scratc…

Have you seen rerun.io? Also web assembly, sharing again the link from above https://sebosp.github.io/swarmy/public/0.5.1/2023-GSL-S1-RO1... Maybe you can use it too in your project! The guys from rerun are amazing and super helpful, had a call with them to discuss questions and possible uses too

No joke, rerun seems perfect for visualizing a game like rocket league. Thank you for the recommendation!

Re: Show HN: A nom parser for the Starcraft 2 Protocol Replay format

#29

This is a super cool project! It would be especially interesting to use on pro-level games, maybe you could even sell services to pros who want to get better. Like being able to say "your baneling run-bys are most cost-effective with 7 banelings around the ten minute mark" etc. With a relatively larger dataset you could come up with some real interesting statistics on individual players performance, use of certain un…

Indeed, another thing is that imho, casters and you tubers are data scientists that have the indexed dB in their heads, they say "at second X in this map Y you would have Z upgrade" and they talk about efficiency of mining, but I always wanted to see these things as statistics visually, like, how much faster or slower is player X in this game compared to the standard? How does the meta evolve? Or worse... If I check your replays, and you never ever scout this area, I could proxy there. You could find the build that in this map you never prepare for because let's be honest we are much more predictable than what we'd like to admit... I hope this project unlocks these kind of possibilities

Re: Show HN: A nom parser for the Starcraft 2 Protocol Replay format

#30
post #24

It'd be great to use a non-Blizzard property for this analysis since that company is outstandingly despicable. Plenty of other RTSes exist and I know that AoE2 has an extremely strong data analytics scene.

Where would I go to see some of these analyses?

A few places but I'd suggest starting with AOE stats[1].

1. https://aoestats.io/

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