Replay analyzer
The replay analyzer is meant to show various information about a replay, and show some statistics about the game and players in it.
Currently it has the following areas:
Charts and player actions: displays the actions of the players, and draws various charts.
Game info: a simple text panel showing important information about the replay.
In-game chat: a formatted text panel showing the in-game chat with time stamps and with the player's in-game colors. You have option to show the conversation in paragraphs. It also includes a Translation bar, you can translate the in-game chat from and to hundreds of languages with a single click.
Map preview: it shows a zoom-able icon of the map the game was played on.
If you don't have the map, it offers a button to download the map. If you download it, it will be put in your StarCraft II cache folder (depends on what folder you set), so if you want to watch the replay in Sc2, the map will be available instantly.
Gateway can be chosen where to download maps from (e.g. America, Asia, Europe).
Public comments: this is an integrated public replay commenting system. You can read more about it here: Public replay commenting
Private data: on this tab you can view and edit private replay data stored on the Sc2gears Database server. This data is not shared with anyone.
When you want to open a replay file, you will see a replay preview (info+map preview image) on the file chooser dialog for the selected replay so you will know if that's the replay you want to open. This applies to all file chooser dialogs where you have to select replays.
Google Ads
Features of the Charts tab:
15 chart types as of now:
APM: Displays many types of APM charts of the players over time. APM means Actions Per Minute, it's a measurement of how active a player is, how many actions he/she issues averaging to 1 minute. Read more about the different APMs: APM Types.
Hotkeys: Displays the hotkeys usage of players over time. By hotkeys in this case we mean unit grouping: assinging a group of uints (or buildings) to a number, or to press that number to select the group.
Builds/Tech: Displays the build, train, research and upgrade actions of the players over time.
Builds/Tech Stat: This bar chart shows statistics of the units/buildings/researches/upgrades you made during the game, and abilities you used grouped by their categories.
Map view: The Map view chart displays the map image with objects on it including resources (minerals, geysers), other map objects (destructible rocks, towers etc.), buildings and the screen positions of the players (locations where players were looking at). Performs various analysis like Hot points, Hot areas and Camera areas.
Action distribution: This chart visualizes the action distribution of players up until the selected action, or if no action is selected (by default) for the whole game.
Main building control: This chart visualizes Larva injections into multiple hatcheries and Chrono Boost usage on different buildings. Read more about this chart: Main Building Control Chart
Unit Tiers: This bar chart shows the trains (and morphings) of the units of different tiers over time.
Resource Spending rate (RSR): This chart visualizes the resource spending rate of players over time. 2 separate graphs are drawn for each player: Mineral RSR and Gas RSR. The displayed RSR values are per minute values.
Resources spent: This chart shows the costs of the players actions, visualizes the amount of minerals and gas spent over the time. There is an option to calculate and visualize spent resources cumulative or non-cumulative.
Produced Army/Supply: This chart shows the produced army size (in supply) and the produced supply over the time. There is an option to calculate and visualize produced army/supply cumulative or non-cumulative.
APM redundancy distribution: This chart visualizes the distribution of the ineffective actions. Very useful for those who want to reduce their redundancy.
Action sequences: This chart visualizes visualizes how fast players execute different action sequences. Action sequences are subsequent select+command pairs without being interrupted by other commands or by a specific time break, and consists of at least 2 select+command pairs. For example: select+move+select+move+..., another: hotkey select+attack+hotkey select+attack+...
Productions: This chart displays what units, buildings, upgrades, researches are in progress, and a bar indicates their completion status.
Player Selections: This chart shows the current selections of players at any given time. Animate the replay to see how the players change their selections and what buildings and units they cycle through.
Profile integration: Profile integration: profile data (portrait, leagues etc.) is automatically retrieved and displayed. You can also create your own custom portraits: Custom portraits
On the APM chart you can set the granularity in pixels and the curve approximation (linear or cubic).
On the Hotkeys chart you can visualize the Assign and Select hotkeys (you can hide select hotkeys).
On the Builds/Tech chart you can visualize the Build, Train, Research, Upgrade actions, and usage of unit and building abilities . You can enable/disable any of it, and you can choose whether to display workers if Train actions are displayed. You can choose the icon sizes, or chose "Hidden" to show texts instead of icons.
On the Builds/Tech Stat chart you can specify what to display (units, buildings, researches, upgrades, ability groups), and you can change the bars' size. You can set to display the results after the operations are completed.
On the Map view chart you can choose the map view quality (low, medium, high), you can choose the map view background (map image, hot points, map image+hot points, hot areas, map image+hot areas, blank), you can choose the hot areas count, hide overlapped buildings (default behavior), you can choose to display building images or just filled rectangles and you can show/hide the map objects.
On the Productions chart you can select to either group the same productions (with a counter), or paint them differently.
On the Produced Army/Supply chart you have an option to include the initial units (like workers, main building), and you can set to display the results after the units/buildings are completed.
Animate feature: with this you can "play" the replay. Sc2gears will iterate over the actions of the replay with a changeable speed, and automatically updates the charts.
A colored action list with action icons is displayed below the charts, you can filter it by action types. Action colors can be inverted, icon size can be changed (or hid).
You can jump to a specified frame, you can search text in the action, you can filter them by the entered text, or you can enter a filter text to filter out actions that match the filter text. Words in a filter text are in logical AND connection by default, you may enter OR between them to specify a logical OR connection. Hotkeys: CTRL+J jump, CTRL+S search, CTRL+F filter, CTRL+T filter out.
You can fast switch between charts with CTRL+number. For example CTRL+1 for APM, CTRL+2 for Hotkeys etc.
You can fast zoom in with CTRL+I and zoom out with CTRL+U.
Right click on the chart opens the Replay operations menu.
Right click on the player names opens the Player context menu. You get direct access to Blizzard's Battle.net profile page of the player, and you can add the player to the favored player list.
Middle click (net scroll) on the charts enlarges the charts!
You can turn on a Grid on the charts to see when periodic tasks like "Spawn Larva", "Chrono Boost" or "Calldown MULE" can be optimally performed, and see how well you executed those tasks.
You can display multiple charts at once: there is an "Overlay charts" link above the charts where you can select any chart types to display on top of the "main" chart.
Applied to all chart types:
Charts have tool tips. By default the tool tip shows the frame and time information of the point under the mouse cursor, on the Map view chart it shows the details of the building/map object under the cursor or the coordinates of the location under the cursor. On the Unit Tiers chart it shows the details of units and tiers of the bar being under the cursor. On the Hotkeys chart, tool tip shows the current selection in case of hotkey assigns. In case of the Builds/Tech charts and the Map view chart it shows the name of the bars/icons/map objects.
You can group players by teams. If players are grouped, only 1 chart will be displayed for each team, and in case of the Map view chart team members will have the same color on the map.
Every chart can be zoomed. If a chart is zoomed, you can simply drag it to scroll (or traditionally use the scrollbar).
You can choose to display all players on 1 common chart, or to put each on a separate one.
You can choose to display time info in seconds or in frames.
You can choose to display charts using the players' in-game colors, or with the same color.
You can enable/disable any of the players.
The chart marker and the selected action is synchronized to each other.
There is an option below the action list: "Use listed actions as chart input data". If it is checked, the charts will be charts will be constructed only from the actions that are listed in the action list.
Limitation
Sc2gears operates on replays. It can only analyze and show statistics based on actions stored in the replay. This is somewhat limited as for example actions to train a unit or build a building is stored in the replay, but there is no information whether it will be executed eventually. That would require recreating the game engine.
Another note: StarCraft II does not record actions like "a unit was killed" or "a building was destroyed", there is no action for deselecting objects that get destroyed. Therefore the tool tips on the charts tab might contain incorrect information in some cases, but it's accurate enough to get a "feeling" how and what the player uses the hotkeys for.