Thursday, April 08, 2004
Soul Calimeter: Automated stat tracking AND COLOR COMMENTARY for SoulCalibur II!
Found on Slashdot. This is absolutely amazing. Someone hooked his Gamecube video feed into a motion capture card, and wrote a program that does real-time image processing on the image to detect how well the players are doing (by watching health bars), win stats, character selections & random select detects, and such things. It uses this information to maintain tournaments between players, keep track of per-player win/loss stats in general and per character, and best of all, uses IBM ViaVoice to create real-time commentary on the match! The commentary is the coolest part, it seems well-designed and extensible.
In the future, I think games should make this information available in a raw, unambiguous data stream for this kind of program, but that degree of enlightenment among commercial game developers is likely years down the road. It might be worth looking into hacking into an open source game to provide that kind of data output, but if you're going to do that, why not just build the stat tracking and commentary modules into the game itself?
Found on Slashdot. This is absolutely amazing. Someone hooked his Gamecube video feed into a motion capture card, and wrote a program that does real-time image processing on the image to detect how well the players are doing (by watching health bars), win stats, character selections & random select detects, and such things. It uses this information to maintain tournaments between players, keep track of per-player win/loss stats in general and per character, and best of all, uses IBM ViaVoice to create real-time commentary on the match! The commentary is the coolest part, it seems well-designed and extensible.
In the future, I think games should make this information available in a raw, unambiguous data stream for this kind of program, but that degree of enlightenment among commercial game developers is likely years down the road. It might be worth looking into hacking into an open source game to provide that kind of data output, but if you're going to do that, why not just build the stat tracking and commentary modules into the game itself?
