History

Who's that guy with pink hair?

It all started probably a little more than a year ago (end of 2002) when I saw a program on French TV about some "pro-gamers" in Korea. Me being a repentant video game addict (long time ago), I was quite amazed to see how it had developed in Korea with pro-gaming and everything. I got even more amazed to see that one of them was actually a fellow frenchman nicknamed ElkY playing a game called Starcraft Broodwar.

The game looked cool and I felt a sudden urge to play it too. I remembered some friend had given me the Starcraft CD a long time ago but I never bothered to try it (can you believe it). So I installed the game the next day and started the campaign in all races. A few days later I was on Battle.net getting my first losses, but hey, it was fun.

I love charts

About the same time I started BW, I also bought AOM. I never played much of it really (because BW was so much better), but I found the charts at the end a very cool thing to have. Blame it on my engineering background or something, but I like to analyse things afterwards with numbers, histograms, curves, etc. Going back to BW and finding out about replays, I thought it would be neat to have a tool that would analyse those replays and draw the charts. BWChart was born, but only in my head.

Teamliquid.net

I started looking for information on BW replays and more generally, on the pro-gaming scene in Korea. I think I just typed a few words on Google and arrived straight away on www.teamliquid.net. Couldn't have found a better place could I? Started to browse the forums on a regular basis, while continuing my slow progress on the Battle.net scale of newbieness. And suddenly, around the end of April, I found a post about a program called "Superview".

It could actually uncompress a BW replay file and display some basic information like player names, races, etc and also a list of all actions performed by the players during the game. That's also when people started talking about measuring APM using Superview (who invented APM?).
Obviously, someone knew how to read those replays. So I started asking on the forum for information on the replay file format. I didn't get much positive feedback, but a lot of sarcasm instead. So I decided to go for another approach, that is use Superview to read the replay and then simply grab the data directly from its window. Not very clean, but very efficient. The resulting program (bwchart v1.00) was posted on TL.NET on May 1st 2003 (see the post)

One little post on TL.NET and a few days later, bwchart.exe was all over the place. Out of pure curiosity, I typed "bwchart" in Google and to my great surprise, more than a dozen pages got listed. Some were from Korea, some from Russia, another one from Spain, etc (some links). The BWChart epidemy had just begun.

Indiana 'Hurtntime' Jones finds rocketeer

Shortly after that, some american guy with a beard named 'HurtnTime' contacted me on TL.NET to propose his help on BWChart. He brought in the idea of the replay browser, but more important than that, he found the guy who had written the original replay parser, the almighty 'rocketeer' from WGTour. Not only the guy had found a way to uncompress the replays, but he also accepted to provide the source code for it. How often do you meet people like that?

So finally, one little week only after the first BWChart was released, version 1.00R could parse replays without the help of Superview and you probably know the rest of the story. If you don't, go to www.google.com and search for 'bwchart' ;-)

BWChart is also mentionned in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in the Starcraft page.