HLstats FAQ

Installation

1. Does HLstats work under Windows?
2. I've got HLstats running fine but the database is empty. What is wrong?

1. I get errors like "You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'TEMPORARY TABLE" when trying to view a player's Event History. What gives?
2. I've just set up HLstats and when I try to run hlstats-awards.pl it returns NULL for all the awards. What am I doing wrong?
3. I get errors about "mysql_connect" when trying to load the PHP pages.

1. Where can I get more map screenshots?
2. How can I delete a player from the database? Or, please create a script for deleting players from the database.
3. How can I import old log files into the database?
4. How can I customise the appearance of HLstats?

1. Does HLstats work under Windows?
   Yes! Installation instructions for Windows are included with the latest versions of HLstats. Ask on the Forums at http://forums.hlstats.org if you have any trouble.

2. I've got HLstats running fine but the database is empty. What is wrong?
   This could be a number of things. A couple to check:
   • Have you correctly configured the Games and Servers you want to collect statistics from, in the administration interface?
   • Have you configured the game servers to log data to the IP and Port that hlstats.pl is listening to, by using the HLDS "logaddress" command?

   (Refer to the HLstats installation instructions for more detail.)

   If you're still having trouble you should enable hlstats.pl's debugging output by setting the DebugLevel in hlstats.conf, or by adding the -d switch to your hlstats.pl command line:

   shell> ./hlstats.pl -d

   
   This will help you to see if any data is being received, and if so, why it may be being ignored.

1. I get errors like "You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'TEMPORARY TABLE" when trying to view a player's Event History. What gives?
   This means you are running MySQL 3.22 or older. HLstats requires MySQL 3.23 or newer.

2. I've just set up HLstats and when I try to run hlstats-awards.pl it returns NULL for all the awards. What am I doing wrong?
   hlstats-awards.pl looks at the previous day's statistics to generate the awards. If you do not have any statistics for yesterday, you won't get any awards. Try running it again in 24 hours time.

3. I get errors about "mysql_connect" when trying to load the PHP pages.
   Your installation of PHP does not have MySQL support enabled. If you're installing from RPM packages, make sure you install the php-mysql package. If you're compiling PHP from source, make sure you have MySQL installed and then configure PHP with the --with-mysql option. You can check what support for MySQL and other applications your installation of PHP has configured by creating a PHP page called phpinfo.php on your server with only the line <?php phpinfo(); ?> in it, then view that page through your web server.

1. Where can I get more map screenshots?
   HLstats includes a subset of map images from the HLmaps Project. Check out their hlmaps_images package for screenshots of a wide range of additional maps.

2. How can I delete a player from the database? Or, please create a script for deleting players from the database.
   This is not possible. Please understand that every player can interact with every other player. When "Joe" kills "Bob", this is recorded in the database as such. If you then tried to delete "Bob" from the database, you would also penalise "Joe" by taking away that kill.

3. How can I import old log files into the database?
   HLstats-1.00 supports reading log data from standard input. So under Linux/Unix you can do:

   shell> cat *.log | /usr/local/hlstats/hlstats.pl --stdin --server-ip 12.34.56.78 --server-port 27015 --timestamp

   
   Where 12.34.56.78 and 27015 are the IP address and port of the server which generated the log files (because when reading from standard input, HLstats of course cannot determine the server address from the UDP packet headers as it normally would). The --timestamp tells HLstats to record events using the date and time on the log data, instead of the current date and time.

4. How can I customise the appearance of HLstats?
   Basic font and colour changes can be made from the web-based administration interface. For more complicated changes you will need to edit the PHP files in the hlstatsinc directory. A lot of customisation can be made just by editing header.inc. This file is prepended to the top of every page of output.