We play Soul Calibur 2 every day at work and I've finally gotten fed up with trying to guess at all the statistical data about best character, best matchups, wins/losses, etc. And of course, there's no SC2 API that I can hookup to So I've been working on an app that uses a video capture card to grab the SC2 video and screen scrape data (current characters playing, who wins each round, who wins the battle, health recorded throughout the fight, etc). So hopefully we'll end up with a huge database of Soul Calibur statistics -- so when your fight starts, the computer can tell you who is favored to win, how long the fight might last, it will be able to show you your best character, overall best character, best matchups for you, etc. I can't wait -- There's no such thing as too much data analysis

Anyway, this leads me to one issue we have. There are as many as 5 or 6 people who rotate the controllers in a circuit. The rotation rules are very strict, so conceivably I could just have the computer tell us who is up for 95% of the time. But my concern is when there are exhibition matches after the tournament when people are leaving and the rotation breaks down. What I really want is to somehow be able to figure out who is actually playing at the moment.

This is my problem, though -- I can't come up with any reliable way to actually figure it out. Anyone have any clever ideas? I've considered making a small IR transmitter for each person that they can just press a player 1 or player 2 button when they come up, but that kind of sucks. The other option is maybe voice recognition -- pretty limited grammar of words, but it's a pretty noisy environment (what with soul calibur going in the background).

The other thing I can't wait to make is the Choke Alarm so when someone falls behind after winning the entire fight they can be sure to be demoralized by the computer notifying everyone in the room of it

ms