A year ago, I launched Spawning Tool, and it’s grown tremendously in that time. It started out as an experiment in using Blizzard’s replay format to grab build orders. Since then, it has become a site for organizing and labeling replays not only to steal build orders but also to analyze replays in bulk.

So where are we now? By the numbers, Spawning Tool has:

1. 9,051 replays uploaded
2. 132,364 replay tags
3. 23,092 lines of code

I like to hope that Spawning Tool has contributed meaningfully to our understanding and analysis of StarCraft. Highlights are:

1. Comparing win rates by supply difference (part 1, part 2, reddit)
2. Putting PvT Blink Stalkers in perspective (blog)
3. Finding close/cross position win rates (blog, reddit)

I ended up going on hiatus for quite awhile around the beginning of this year, but I have cranked out a few changes recently to highlight as well:

1. Tags are now directly searchable so you can understand the hierarchy and dig down into specific builds and players
2. Added spawn positions for players to mark cross and close positions
3. Started using machine learning to suggest build order tags for replays
4. Added an easy accept/reject option for rapidly labeling build orders
5. Drag-and-drop file upload
6. and lots of other bug fixes, optimizations, and changes

Of course, I have an ask for all of you as well:

1. Label a few build orders just by accepting or rejecting suggested builds. The archive of replays is as good as its searchability, and build orders still require human expert knowledge
2. Fill out a survey about your experience with Spawning Tool. I would love to know where to take the site from here

Thanks to everyone in the community for their support. Specifically, I would like to mention GraylinKim (creator of the sc2reader library), dsjoerg (creator of ggtracker), and ChanmanV (host of so many shows) for all of their help in getting Spawning Tool this far. I look forward to seeing what else we can do in the next year!

In my mind, the heart of Spawning Tool is the extracted, readable build orders. To get to that point, however, there are a lot of replays to sort through, and I think that’s where the tagging system becomes valuable. Many of the tags are auto-generated from replay data or extrapolated from past data. The biggest area still requiring human analysis, however, is labeling build orders, which, judging from the front page, hasn’t been well-distributed in the community.

And I admit that the experience so far sucked. You had to find a replay on your own, and it was at least 4 or 5 clicks to punch in a build order. Hopefully, however, it’s a lot easier now with the new system for labeling build orders. There are a few parts to this.

First, you can now approve and reject suggested tags with one click. Previously, it was hard to know what taxonomy of build orders was, and it took too many steps. Now, there are a few thousand procedurally-generated suggested tags for you to approve. You can take a look at the build order and hit “yes” or “no” to determine whether the tag is appropriate or not.

Second, the interface to tag replays is up top on this page. Previously, it was hidden at the bottom of the page on the sidebar and took a click to open up. Now, you’re automatically focused into the box so you can add tags immediately on page load without having to click or scroll anywhere. Hopefully, you can pair up the action of approving or rejecting a suggested tag with more detailed tags on top of that.

Finally, you now see isolated build orders and can browse replay-to-replay. Previously, you had to bounce back and forth from browse (or open 10 tabs at once like me) to tag several replays in a row. In the build order labeling pages, you can jump from random build to build and stay on a roll.

The link to the build order labeler is on the front page, so you can hop straight into that and check out the world of actual in-game builds. Remember to login as well so that your tags are associated with you and counted in the leaderboard.

One more thing: my hope is that labeling build orders can become more and more automatic (though still with some human intervention). Machine learning is in the works and can generate suggestions, but it will only improve with more hand-labeled training data. I’m not sure where the tipping point is, but I’m excited to get to a point where that can take off on its own!

A few weeks ago, I sent out a survey (still open here if you want to fill it out) about how users use Spawning Tool and what they were interested in seeing in future development. Thanks to the feedback there, I have made quite a few changes recently. There are a few big ones I want to talk about in more detail in future posts, but here’s a list of some of the smaller ones.

First, the browse replays page now shows the names of tagged players. This happens to be on of the most important pieces of information to see at a glance, and it doesn’t clutter the interface. I would have liked to do map name as well, but the poor standardization in map names would be messy, and you’re better off using the hierarchy from the tag filters.

Second, I slapped race icons around on the site. One totally valid criticism of Spawning Tool is that it lacks any visuals. I’m not great with either visuals or data visualization, so I largely depend on text and numbers to convey things. I’m open to other suggestions on visuals as well.

Third, I opened up tag pages for all users. I was previously using this just as an administrator tool, but it’s a handy dashboard around a player or build order. Currently, it contains the list of replays tagged and the parents and children of the tag so you can see the hierarchy that exists behind the scenes. I’m a little scared of fleshing out the page too much since generating content is time-consuming and would probably look a lot like liquipedia content, but if you have any ideas on useful things for this page, I’m open to suggestions.

Fourth, there have been various tweaks to the research pages, which were largely inspired by my own annoyances in using them. You can now filter by build orders for each players, and the View Win Rates page has more data to read things off more easily. I think I buffed out the advanced research page as well, but you should consider that “under construction” even still.

Fifth, you can now drag-and-drop .SC2Replay files onto any page (other than the upload page) to instantly upload your replays. A common use case I see for replay sharing is getting feedback from others, and I wanted to make it as painless as possible for someone to share a replay and the build orders.

Those are the minor but not trivial updates. Look for updates soon on other features, and send along any feedback on these or other proposed changes for Spawning Tool.