It would have to be pretty gamespecific (at least the piece that actually pulls the stats). Some games (like possibly America's Army) may store the stats on a master server, in which case you may be able to simply send the right request to it and get what you need back (which may or may not be easy at all). Other games may store it in some form on the actual PC.

Tracking stats for a game that doesn't already track stats, though? Getting more than total runtime will be next to impossible, especially without breaking the license. The CD protection schemes often make hooking into the executable very very difficult.

Otherwise, you can use packet sniffers... which I've never done, and you'd have to manually figure out what each packet means (and they may be encrypted... but probably aren't). There are people who enjoy doing that, but I can't imagine it. If this is project you are considering doing by yourself, I'd boot up an example game, grab a packet sniffer, and see what you find.

The nice thing about a packet sniffer is that you can sniff the whole network from anywhere on it (usually). This means you don't need the tracking software on every computer (hardly a concern anyway, though)

I would think that this is game specific. Some games i know of allow for data retreival through scripts (i'm thinking lua). The question is more of how to retrieve the data from a specific game.

Originally posted by DarkPenguin
I would think that this is game specific. Some games i know of allow for data retreival through scripts (i'm thinking lua). The question is more of how to retrieve the data from a specific game.

This is what Barbie/RatRace do, although we don't store stats on a server. Every game-specific variable is in Lua, so it's a simple matter to dump them to a log file or the console window (ie, stdout). Same with engine variables, like FPS or AI state.

-Rez