Heatmaps!

I spent the last week or so working on all the pieces I need to get set up in order to have the data needed to create a heatmap. I first had to log out the data from our game engine, which I achieved by writing all the gameplay metrics to text files. The next step was to organize all the metrics from the log files into a database. The proper way to do this is to use an SQL database, but this was going to take me too long to learn and implement. So I decided to keep using a text file to store the organized gameplay metrics.

The next major step was to build a Maya GUI using Python that would allow me to generate my databases and generate a heatmap. It took me a day or two to learn both Python and the UI system in Maya for Python. Below is the current version of my GUI, it may not be perfect but it works.

Maya Python GUI

The heatmap right now simply shows the location of all the AI Agents using a log scale on the heat values. I had worked on generating heatmaps with Brian May (grad student) last year, and we found that this gave us an improved visualization over a normal scale. The plan is to be able to filter the heatmap based on the checkboxes in the GUI, but that requires more tackling of Maya’s GUI system. Below is an image from Maya of the current version of the heatmap.

Maya Heatmap