Peter Vesti Frendrup - 3D Telemetry

3D TELEMETRY

In 2006 I was working as an intern on a Danish MMORPG called Seed. During the open alpha we had more than 10000 players and this was the first time I worked with large amounts of data reflecting the behaviors of our players.

Since then I have been very interested in how data can be utilized to make better games.

In 2009 I pitched a telemetry system and when I joined Ubisoft in 2012 I utilized their DNA viewer as part of our daily work.

However my biggest involvement in telemetry started in 2015 when I was working on Battlefield 1 at DICE as Lead Level Designer.

I once again pitched a telemetry system, but this time with focus on the visualization of the data. I wanted a visualization tool where we could explore data in 3D and over time.

I didn't manage to get someone else to do this for us, so in the end I made it myself. Below I will describe my journey developing and using the tool.

BATTLEFIELD 1

The first thing I wanted to implement was the core functionality:

Visualize player positions in a 3D representation of a level.
Toggle between seeing one specific player and all players simultaneously.
Ability to "scroll" through time to see the movement.

Core Functionality (2016)

One of the most valuable features I implemented was an overview where survey data was presented alongside quick overviews of playtime and player deaths. I colored the survey scores so green would be our target, yellow slightly off and red very bad.

This gave us the ability to get a quick overview of an entire UXR playtest. Sometimes we would find (as shown in this example) people where the playtime and number of deaths could mistakenly have been interpreted as someone who did not have fun. However since survey scores were presented right next to the telemetry data - we could quickly see this was not the case.

Overview & Survey Scores (2016)

BATTLEFIELD 1 LIVE

Towards the end of development of Battlefield 1 I had started working on supporting telemetry for our multiplayer levels as well.

It was used only ad-hoc for the launch levels but when I got the opportunity to work on the first DLC I put effort into making sure we would have good support from the tool and that we would also actually use it.

From a tool point of view one of the big changes I did between SP and MP was to focus on entire matches, rather than specific players. It makes sense in SP to compare players, but for MP it makes more sense to compare matches.

BATTLEFRONT II