3 big updates for Spawning Tool this week.

First, you can see units killed and units lost in the research tab. For example, you might be curious to know how many Marines a certain player killed during Dreamhack Valencia or how badly their workers are harassed on average. These stats, of course, are very dependent on how long a game goes and what units composition are, but they’re in there and maybe fun to consider.

Second, I split out the win rates data onto its own page from research, so for any of your favorite filters, you can see how the games go. The most obvious use is to see how a player does in different matchups. It may be unsurprising how good JvZ is (the other numbers may be a bit off because of GameHeart replays; more on that next paragraph), but you might be surprised to see that TLO wins 80% of his games from 21 to 25 minutes long, but only wins 16.7% (1-5) of games longer than that. How strange.

Third, GameHeart support is coming soon. GameHeart games are unusual for a few reasons. First, the players and teams aren’t reflective of the actual matchup because the actual players are only picked in the in-game lobby, so the observers are mixed into the data and races may not be accurate. Second, all events are mistimed because the actual game doesn’t start until the in-game lobby is set. Finally, because the teams are misaligned, the winner may not be marked correctly.

So the fix is coming soon, which I can explain the process of. I mentioned before that Spawning Tool is actually built on top of an open source replay parser. Well, Spawning Tool is actually built on top of sc2reader, an amazing open source library that literally turns 1s and 0s into comprehensible data structures. Since many people may be interested in having GameHeart replays normalized to work like standard replays, this functionality should be added to sc2reader (not spawningtool) since it will have better reach that way. sc2reader was cleverly built to allow for plugins for specific functionality. Since sc2reader is an open source project, I wrote up a plugin to normalize GameHeart replays and submitted it to the maintainers of sc2reader to be incorporated into the primary project. If they like it, they can accept the request, and it will be available for everyone (including me) to use. Anyways, get excited about that because there are a lot of Spawning Tool replays that aren’t quite working correctly.

And on that note, if you’re interested in working with StarCraft data (whether replays, profiles, or anything else), I recommend you check out the new API and Data Analysis Forum that Blizzard made. As you might have guessed, the StarCraft developer community has some amazing people at the forefront, and I think it’s a supportive and generous group of people. If you’re interested in contributing or have an idea, chime in there or check out and contact someone else with a project in this thread. No matter where you’re coming from, we could always use a helping hand.