I play a lot of Team Fortress 2 with my gaming community F7Lans, and one of my favorite classes being Engineer. Valve has been continually adding new and community maps to the stock lineup as it has done it's Class Updates since early 2008, and as an Engineer it is sometimes hard to stay on top of where the best and most effective locations to be and defend from.

Taking a page from Valve themselves with their deathmaps, I decided to create a Heatmap system that would visually map out where the most often built, most deadly, and most "successful" Sentry locations were at. This is done in 2 parts; a lightweight SourceMod plugin running on the F7Lans TF2 servers that logs the X/Y location in a map when a Sentry is built and gets a kill, and a server-side script that is ran daily that generates a map of the data that was gathered. What this does is allow me to quickly identify successful locations in new maps and be a more effective player for my team. Writing Heatmaps has been an idea I've had for a while and there were a few small hurdles that had to be cleared, mostly due to PHP's semi-limited image manipulation. However after a few short days, both the plugin and the server-side script have been operating perfectly smooth.

Update!
My heatmap code has also been used by the HLstatsX Community Edition team. HLX:CE is a freeware version of the popular HLX stat tracking software. As of their 1.6.0 release on August 12, 2009 my heatmap code is now fully integrated into their system. Thanks to psychonic for letting me be a part of their team.

You can view my TF2 Sentry Heatmaps here.