HalfLife/Cstrike monitorring

[Erik Max Francis]

Steve Lamb wrote:

>     Not true.  Psycho stats does not, for example, take the details
> given by
> the connection and translate it into something MRTG or LRRD can parse
> for a
> general graph of players per time unit.  Furthremore Psycho works on
> the logs
> not on the udp interface.

At this point I don't know what the original poster wanted; he said he
wanted a "monitor, to make some nice statistics for an upcoming
LAN-party."  He certainly never said anything about requiring MRTG or
LRRD capability, and I don't know where you're getting that.

PsychoStats and similar log processing packages will be more than
sufficient for the task of giving some interesting statistics during a
LAN party.  The fact that he started talking about trying to get UDP to
work doesn't necessarily indicate to me that's a coherent solution to
his problem, just that's the road he took.

If he wants to analyze the status of the game in realtime, i.e., ping
the current server activity to see what's happening, he can use qstat (a
standalone application), for which I've already written a Python wrapper
(PyQstat):

	http://www.alcyone.com/software/qstat/

Although you can get information like how long players have been on the
server, what their current scores are, etc., you simply cannot get the
level of detail involved in actually processing logs.

Even if he were to write a complete dummy client from scratch that
merely spectated in order to try to collect as much information as
possible (which is not a trivial task), it's unlikely he would get the
level of detail he would be satisfied with, since information given to
an individual client is in some sense "unprivileged," whereas the server
logs are by contrast "privileged," since the server knows everything
that is going on in the game.  The server logs will contain more
information than he can get via any playing around with UDP; if he wants
pseudorealtime status, he can just run the log processor on small log
files (not a problem since it's going to be for a LAN party) every
minute or so.

-- 
 __ Erik Max Francis && max at alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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