I got a question from @Matt_Boehm_329 about what heatmaps would look like if you just use my zones instead of the very granular heatmaps that are created using the raw data. Here is 254’s qual 1 heatmap using raw data:
This is very granular, and definitely the best for human viewing.
Next, I looked at each timestep, and for whatever zone they were in, I assigned their position to be the center of that zone. Here is that heatmap:
This is not particularly useful. All of the dots are the same size. You can tell a little bit based on the color, but it’s a very poor visual representation of the data.
The next thing I did was to spread around these data points a little within the zone instead of just centering them all exactly at the central point. Here is a picture showing a small amount of bleed:
This is much easier to interpret. I made the bleed proportional to the zone dimensions, so you can get a sense of the zone size based on the spread. You can see small, high density zones in areas like the middle left red cargo ship zone. You can also see large, low density zones, such as the depot.
Note that we are seeing bleed into the cargo ship and rocket. This is because of how I set up my zone definitions for those areas. As you can see in the below picture, my zone definitions clearly enter into the rocket and cargo ship.
Had I known we would be using zones for something like these heatmaps, I would have made the zones stop at the edges the field structures, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.
Here’s that same bleeding effect, but even more spread out from the central point of each zone:
I like this one better I think, there’s more area covered by dots so it looks a little more natural, just personal preference though.
Finally, here’s one where I just randomly pick a location within the current zone’s rectangular area to make a mark (note that this will cause the non-rectangular zones by the rocket to be a bit misrepresented, the above 2 images had this same issue to a lesser extent):
This really just looks like a blurrier version of the raw data, which is exactly what we would expect! You can still see that 254 spent a lot of time at the loading station and adjacent zone, on the near two rocket scoring locations, the middle left side cargo ship location, and the left middle L1 platform. They spent most of the rest of their time just driving between those locations.
I’m not really planning to officially add this functionality into my data parser. The raw data definitely makes the clearest, most useful heatmaps. But these are still interesting to help us mentally visualize what the “zones” actually mean.
