TF2 Log Parser

This project was also a very exciting project for me to work on. My visualization class called for a project that either created a new visualization or performed a data analysis on a set of data we created. I thought it'd be neat if I used some data from the game Team Fortress 2, being hosted on the FUN-Gineers server, a gaming community I helped start. I didn't have enough time to parse out a years worth of data, but hopefully someday I'll be able to perform a more in depth analysis.

For this assignment, I used the largest log file we had for a single running time of the server. A log is generated as long as there is players on the server and than it stops when there are none. This Log ran for 32 hours or so before the server finally cleared out. I got some interesting results which allowed me to make this presentation located here: TF2 Presentation

There were more many interesting things I was noticing just looking over the data I had pulled from the log file, but due to time constraints I only made an analysis about the kills+assists to deaths ration by class, to determine the most well played classes. Here are some of the graphs from the presentation below.

Two things about the coding with this project that I had I never dealt with before, Python and Regular Expressions. Both of these things were a strong driver for writing my own code as I really wanted to learn them. My friend is a python guru and made the language sound so useful. RegEx seemed easy enough, but I only found after I finished my project I wasn't using them correctly and could've made string parsing a lot easier. By using "submatches" I could've saved matched strings to variables and than had access to those... Where as I did everything the hard way and used string functions like split to break down the log lines. Lesson learned however and someday I'll edit this code so it's cleaner and uses RegEx more effectively! If you would like the source it's right here: TF2 Parser.rar