ShrimpWorks

In case anyone’s arrived here looking for my UT, Tribes 2, etc maps, mods, utilities, tutorials and things, you’ll find those along with downloads and things over on my ‘gaming resources’ site: http://www.unreal.co.za/shrimp/.

Technorati Tags: Maps, Mods, ShrimpWorks, UT, Tutorials, Tribes 2

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Yes, so everyone’s obsessed with checking their BF2 stats these days ;).

Anyway, I wanted to give my Supybot IRC bot (”Nooblet” on Shadowfire) the ability to check my own and other people’s stats whenever they felt like it. I came up with something like this:

import urllib2
from string import split
from time import time

# the columns you want to request data for. comma-seperated string.
info = 'per*,cmb*,twsc,cpcp,cacp,dfcp,kila,heal,rviv,rsup,rpar,tgte,dkas,dsab,cdsc,rank,cmsc,kick,kill,deth,suic,ospm,klpm,klpr,dtpr,bksk,wdsk,bbrs,tcdr,ban,dtpm,lbtl,osaa,vrk,tsql,tsqm,tlwf,mvks,vmks,mvn*,vmr*,fkit,fmap,fveh,fwea,wtm-,wkl-,wdt-,wac-,wkd-,vtm-,vkl-,vdt-,vkd-,vkr-,atm-,awn-,alo-,abr-,ktm-,kkl-,kdt-,kkd-'

# this is my BF2 ID. You can also query the stats server with "nick" rather than "pid", but I've had problems with some characters
pid = '43595724'

opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'GameSpyHTTP/1.0')]  # otherwise GameSpy's servers will block your request
webData = opener.open('http://bf2web.gamespy.com/ASP/getplayerinfo.aspx?pid=%s&info=%s&nocache=%s'%(pid,info,round(time()))).read()

statsData = split(webData, "\n")

cols = split(statsData[3], "\t")
data = split(statsData[4], "\t")

stats = dict(zip(cols, data))

# you now have a nice dictionary with a few hundred bits of stats data.
print "%s has %s kills and %s deaths and a score of %s" % (stats['nick'],stats['kill'],stats['deth'],stats['scor'])

Thanks to korpse and mithrandi for showing me the “zip” funtion. It takes the list from the first parameter, and uses those values as keys in a dictionary, the values from the second parameter are then used as values in that dictionary. I was using map(None, keyList, valueList), but zip seems cleaner.

Anyway, if you’re looking for more info on stats querying, try the BF2 Technical Info wiki, or check out SaladFork’s Guide to Creating a BF2 Stat Signature - although it’s in PHP, he does give a nice list of column names and their meanings, you can also grab lists of ranks, weapons, vehicles, etc.

Update: Also see: Battlefield Stats in PHP

Updated: Since this was written, some things changed with the stats system, and the GameSpy application requires you to pass a bunch of columns you want info for. This can help customise the data you get back, so you only request what you need. I’ve included all the columns in the info variable, which you can customise. Make sure it contains only valid columns, or you won’t get any data back at all.

As above, for info on what all the columns etc. mean, check out the BF2 Technical Wiki.

Technorati Tags: Python, Battlefield 2, Stats

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I decided it might be a good idea, from a debugging and administrative point of view, to save the reports people were viewing in my application at work. Since users are distributed all over the country, and I have to communicate with them over the phone with on-the-spot problems, it’s hard and very time consuming to get them to tell me all the parameters etc they’re using to generate a report which they are having problems with (mostly, the data looks like something they weren’t expecting).

Anyway, I thought saving the exact report they are viewing is much easier for me to simply call up while someone’s on the phone, than doing the whole ‘which options did you use?’ thing.

Option one was saving each report to a PDF file on the server, but, that’s pretty inflexable, and also, people can view more than just PDF files with my reporting options (emails can be send direct, zip files can be downloaded, and data can be downloaded in csv format), so that wouldn’t always work out.

So I looked into serializing the actual report object used to generate any of the above report types, since that object contains absolutely all data, totals, titles, info, etc.. Unfortunately, PHP’s built-in serialize() and unserialize() functions don’t work too well with complex data structures (arrays within classes, multi-dimentional arrays, etc, etc), and I couldn’t really work around all that without writing a few GBs of code onto my report class.

SO, I turned to XML. As it turns out, the PEAR ’suite’ of scripts contains a rather useful XML serialization class -XML_Serializer, which can turn any data structure into an XML string, and for reading those strings back to usable PHP variables and objects.

It’s really quite simple:

$object = new SomeClass();
$object->var1 = "Hello World";
$object->etc();

$serializer = &new XML_Serializer(array("indent" => "  ", "typeHints" => true));
$serializer->serialize($object);
$xml = $serializer->getSerializedData();

$xml now contains the full definition of $object in XML. You can write $xml to a file, save it in a database, whatever you like.

You can then come back later, and load the file/database record/etc into a string, and unserialize it…

$unserializer = &new XML_Unserializer();
$unserializer->unserialize($xml);
$object2 = $unserializer->getUnserializedData();

echo $object2->var1;
$object2->etc();

Quite fun actually :D. You can obviously do a lot of error checking, and other things, but that’s just the basics.

Technorati Tags: PHP, PEAR, XML

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I sat down this afternoon and had a bit of a play with Gran Turismo 4’s Photo Tour option within GT mode. I must admit I’m rather impressed, and although it’s seemingly boring, it turned out to be a rather entertaining exersize.

It basically presents you with a couple of venues from around the world - Venice, Tokyo, New York, the Grand Canyon, etc, which are pretty much static scenes, with pre-defined car and camera ‘zones’ within which you may arrange things to you liking. You control the vehicle location, rotation and wheel rotation, and camera location, height, tilt, zoom, focus, etc. After you’ve got your scene arranged just right, you can fiddle with things like colour balance, saturation, etc to get the scene just right.

You then get to take your photo in a lovely high resolution, and save it to a USB flash disk! WOW! Someone finally found something useful to do with the PlayStation 2’s USB ports, aside from whacky controller contraptions. Anyway, once saved, you pop off to your nearest PC and offload your pics (which are saved in JPG format).

A few of my results (I only have cheap cars in my garage at the moment);
Toyota RunX
Mitsubishi 3000GT

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