FA Companion / Training Tool

Sheppy

So I was also bored 9 months ago and I have been cooking on something else since then.

I had a bunch of new players in the 0-1200 rating range and I realised everybody keeps making the same mistakes. While telling them in real-time would help them improve quite fast, reviewing replays was way less effective. I think this is because getting yelled at in real time, while making mistakes just hit differently than looking at it after the fact - for most people.

So I present the beginning of the Beta of the FA-Companion, a Tool which I envision to eventually help all new players to quickly react to their mistakes and improve, but it can also give valuable learning information to established ladder addicts. I personally still find the tool quite useful up to the 1.8k global range, which realistically the vast majority of the community.

Live-Game Companion

If you run the Mod and the Ingester as described on the Live-Game Page, this will automatically open and select the correct map, based on the Information the Mod/Client transmits, alerts will be generated, optionally as TTS and inform you of common mistakes in real time.

Post Game Analysis

The post-game analysis will show you a timeline of your alerts/mistakes as well as various stats about the game which are not normally available. There is still work to be done here, more metrics will be added and yes, reclaim & income need to be split at some point. The red line is not in the online version yet and will be a reference line either an average of your recent games or a certain rating range. If you are tracking a livegame it will automatically put you in Analysis after the game exits.

Gamelobby Tools/Connection Matrix

I implemented this mostly as a gimmick because I liked the component library, but I still like it. It will show your connections and track the amount of players in a lobby. I have already implement Webhooks/Push notifications via NTFY but it's database-edit only at the moment and has no UI. It will be generally available eventually though. The idea is that you can write !notifyme players 10 in a bad lobbysim and leave the PC to work in the house and get a notification to your Phone automatically. Yeah idk it was a gimmick.

Alert Information

Each Alert (more or less) has a explanation Page which explains the concepts and ideas related to the Alert.

Buildorders & Guides

Buildorders are displayed in the Livegame, but obviously more complicated Guides require more space, so there is a Subpage which displays all available Buildorders and guides. I have done most of these so far/transcribed them from replays of top players also zwaffel helped me :>. The Guides will be open to everybody who wants to contribute. They are currently written in Markdown. I am experimenting with structured YAML-BOs but it's experimental.

Your own configuration

You can configure which alerts you want to have pop up and also if you want to provide your game data to anybody who is interested live. Eventually there might be API-Tokens for Integrations, I already created a css-class obs-transparent to be able to overlay alerts in Streams, but this is experimental. Also I want to eventually have people create their own alerts based on data.

I really believe in this project, even though it is still rough around the edges, it also was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about databases performance (well we will see about that if 50 people use this at the same time..).

I'm starting the public beta today: https://fa-companion.services.atlantishq.de
The mod is available in the modvault under the name: "FA_Metrics_Exporter"
While this hasnt happened to me in a while I suggest setting the unload hotkey to disable the mod should it ever lag the UI.

Please have patience with the project, it was a quite massive undertaking with almost 10k lines of code with rather dense logic.

Thank you so much for all the patient people in #modding (looking at you @4z0t) and all my alpha testers: @noxie, @uney, @morax, @bekama & @iTrash and also @indexlibrorum

magge

Congratulations on this milestone. It looks very promising, and I will definitely test it out.

The map meta build orders are a nice touch. GJ!

Deribus

Cool tool! Got one minor bug report and one question

Bug: These aren't %

Question: Does each player need to be using this tool to get the comparative graphs you had? I can only see my own charts

Sheppy

@Deribus The reference Data Graphs are not deployed to live deployment yet

Sheppy

@Deribus
I pushed the reference functionality to master now:

You can select 1-X games to compare to now. Predefined selections like 1.5k avg, your last 10 games etc are wip on the dev branch.

Also floating 700 mass on artic tz tz tz. . :d

NomenNominandum

Can you add an APM graph?

Sheppy

@NomenNominandum No, not planned in the near term. There is already a Tool for this https://fafafaf.github.io/ . I also don't see it as a very useful statistic by itself "be faster" is usually something comes naturally by fixing your mistakes.

Skrat

@sheppy This is a very cool job! Thank you! This is a really useful tool for newbies. The statistics and maps section is great!

Tell me please, do I understand correctly that this mod will give you tips online during the game? If this is the case, then I would suggest making this mod unrated.

Sheppy

@Skrat said:

Tell me please, do I understand correctly that this mod will give you tips online during the game? If this is the case, then I would suggest making this mod unrated.

Yes. I have talked to the FAF Mods about this before and I am still massivly irritated by the fact that higher level players concurrently tell me that it needs to be unrated and how useless it is for high level play.

This is a UI Mod which extracts information that are synced to UI and are intended to be used, it is rated and it being rated is fundamental to its purpose, because it will allow people who are not 400% invested in learning and playing training games to improve. It does nothing a backseating trainer in the Dojo Discord doesn't do every single day, probably more effectively. It just does it in a way that is more scalable.

If it were a cheat tool or intended as such I would not have shared with the community in the first place. My vision is that this will elevate players more quickly and easily up to the 1500 1v1 range, after which I belive the live alerts become less useful and the post-game analysis becomes more interessting.

I would suggest you try it yourself before directly calling for it to be unrated, which would be nothing short of a catastrophe for the project.

I'm sorry thank you for you praise and belive that this can be a powerfull tool. It's just this duality of people shitting on me, saying it's useless, and others saying needs to be banned/unrated has become a huge trigger for me, especially if people haven't tried it.

Should individual alerts ever become too powerful. They will be changed.

Deribus

@Sheppy said:
I pushed the reference functionality to master now:

Oh I misunderstood what these show. I thought it'd be a comparison between two people in the same match. Would that require both players to upload separately? It can't pull data on multiple players from a single replay?

Skrat

@Sheppy I understand that your goal is to make our community a better and I am grateful to you for that! And I'm not blaming you for creating a cheat mod.

I don't think real-time alerts are more useful for learning than replay analysis. But they can give a specific advantage.

The situation with this mod reminds me a big discussion about Eco Manger and the automatic shutdown mass fabricators. Part of the community thought it was auto-clicker, while the other part saw nothing wrong with it. Finally, this feature was added to the game for everyone.

Too fine a line between notifying "Your team relies on your energy" or "View Reclaim" and notifying about your scout has noticed a nuke/exp or notifying that a TMl has been spotted on an enemy ACU (visually). And such notifications should not be in the game.

I don't see anything criminal in those notifications that are in your mod now.

If the notification types are agreed with the moderator team, then I see no reason to make this mod unrated.

Sheppy

@Deribus you can pull the data from the replay or both need to submitt it. But currently pull from replay is not really "frictionless". You need to use the --no-ignore-replay command line option and switch army once at the start of the game. Also I think the ref game currently excludes Submissions with the same gameid but thats an oversight on my part.

Sheppy

I don't think real-time alerts are more useful for learning than replay analysis. But they can give a specific advantage.

All sub 1k/500 players who tried it disagree with you on this, and I do too, learning in real time is so much easier for low level players that learning from a replay. This is the fundamental thesis of this project. And yes this will also give an Advantage to lower rated players - which is the whole point.

The situation with this mod reminds me a big discussion about Eco Manger and the automatic shutdown mass fabricators. Part of the community thought it was auto-clicker, while the other part saw nothing wrong with it. Finally, this feature was added to the game for everyone.

This mod doesnt click anything for you. It is also open to everyone. Again I dont see a single game from you in the DB. How about you try it before spreading opinions that are not based on experience

Too fine a line between notifying "Your team relies on your energy" or "View Reclaim" and notifying about your scout has noticed a nuke/exp or notifying that a TMl has been spotted on an enemy ACU (visually). And such notifications should not be in the game.

This Information is not synced to the UI layer in the same way the eco or your own unit data is, therefore it is not used. There literally mods which already light up nukes etc with different symbols, which makes this a very strange example to bring up. But again I think your whole concers would be moot if you actually tried it instead of talking about it.

This will not substantially help a 1.5k player. I know this because it doesnt substantially help me (except for the automatic BO popup). Now maybe we get to a point where we can elevate even more people to be better. You youself have a post on this forum about how dead the 2k scene is. Not saying this project will change that (yet), but there are reason why people are stuck and 300, 500, 1000 or 1500 rating, we should stop arguing about purely theoretical concerns and think about how we can elevate these players, find what is holding people back and give them the ressources to improve.

Deribus

@Sheppy I think it would be incredibly helpful to have that feature. As someone who plays a lot of 1v1, you win or lose 1v1 games because of something different you did from your opponent. Being able to compare 1v1 data would be immensely helpful for "well my opponent won because he did X instead of what I did"

Sheppy

@Deribus yes it will be implemented in the next Update alongside the reclaim/income split and some more specific categories of units:

+    return { 
+        "combat_units":  0,
+        "combat_unit_in_base": # idle combat units 30 of start location
+        "labs": # UnitName Mech Marine, Hunter, Flare or Selen
+        "tanks": # TECH1 & TANK
+        "arties": # TECH1 & INDIRECTFIRE
+        "buildpower": # via BuildRate
+        "buildpower_t1_engies": # via BuildRate
+        "t1": # TECH1 & mobileCombat
+        "t2": # TECH2
+        "t3": # TECH3
+        "t4": # EXPERIMENTAL
+        "t1_navy": # TECH1 & NAVAL
+        "t1_land": # TECH1 & LAND
+        "t1_air": # TECH1 & AIR
+        "radars_and_sonars": # RADAR & not SCOUT
+        "t2_navy":  # TECH2 & NAVAL
+        "t2_land":# TECH2 & LAND
+        "t2_air":# TECH2 & AIR
+        "t3_navy": # TECH3 & NAVAL
+        "t3_land":# TECH3 & LAND
+        "t3_air":# TECH3 & AIR
+        "inties": # AIR & TECH1 & ANTIAIR
+        "swifties": # unit name Swift Wind
+        "asf": # category ASF
+        "frigs": # FRIGATE
+        "subs": # catetory T1SUBMARINE or T3SUBMARINE
+        "nuke": # NUKE
+        "tmd": # Description": "Tactical Missile Defense"
+    }

I also wanted to review your games and think about if there are any data driven things aren't covered yet/open up the rule engine to custom rules.