Battle Recorder
Hugh
CameramanSan Francisco, CA Join Date: 2010-04-18 Member: 71444NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts
CameramanSan Francisco, CA Join Date: 2010-04-18 Member: 71444NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts
<div class="IPBDescription">Enabling commentary and gamecasts</div>Hello everyone!
Unless you have been living under a rock lately, you'll know that Starcraft 2 has been very successful. One of the excellent features of SC2 is the replay viewer, which has allowed SC2 enthusiasts to cast good SC2 games. I'm of the opinion that this feature has played a big part in the popularity of SC2, as non beta participants followed games on Youtube.
I think such a feature would allow the NS2 Alpha/Beta communiy to raise the profile of NS2 and contribute to the success of the final product. Has anyone heard anything about the Dev team considering a battle-recorder feature? What are your opinions on the technical feasability and usefulness of such a feature? I'm sure there are other examples of such features being implemented, such as Source Recorder.
Unless you have been living under a rock lately, you'll know that Starcraft 2 has been very successful. One of the excellent features of SC2 is the replay viewer, which has allowed SC2 enthusiasts to cast good SC2 games. I'm of the opinion that this feature has played a big part in the popularity of SC2, as non beta participants followed games on Youtube.
I think such a feature would allow the NS2 Alpha/Beta communiy to raise the profile of NS2 and contribute to the success of the final product. Has anyone heard anything about the Dev team considering a battle-recorder feature? What are your opinions on the technical feasability and usefulness of such a feature? I'm sure there are other examples of such features being implemented, such as Source Recorder.
Comments
I agree greatly, I've lost countless hours of my life watching Starcraft 2 replays/casts on YouTube thanks to users like HuskeyStarcraft and HDStarcraft.
I also like your idea about recordings, replays and .dem (demo) files.
As well as being good for broadcasting on YouTube, they're also good for people who make other types of video. (Be it "frag" videos or clan versus games.)
Another good thing about .sc2replay and Source .dem files is their filesize. I have a 5 player .sc2replay which lasts just over an hour and it's only 70kb.
I also have several L4D2 .dem files and they're usually 4/5 meg per map.
Making sharing these files easy and encouraged. (Obviously there's no guarantee that the NS2 files will be small but a recording is still handy either way.)
I'd love to see NS2 implement playback and recordings, hopefully it's on their To-Do list when the game is (close to) finished.
And please package an intelligent spectator system and UI.
I'll somewhat agree but I don't think a large part of SC2's success can be placed on YouTube commentaries. Here's a few far more important things that contributed to it's popularity; It's the sequel to the most popular RTS ever, it's predecessor has a fanatical competitive community and is a national sport in S. Korea, Blizzard spent years developing SC2 and made a very solid game, many casual gamers looked forward to continuing the SC storyline. Granted, YouTube commentaries helped a ton but Blizzard nailed the fundamentals first.
I wouldn't be surprised if UWE pushed a robust spectator feature back until after release. Also, creating a really good spectator system may require quite a bit more thought than a system like SC2's.
One of the best things about spectating an RTS is how simple it is to view and understand. In all popular spectator events there is a ball or puck which is basically something to focus on and keep the attention of the view. This lends itself well to an RTS because the "ball" is any battle or harassment and in downtown you can look at the players' bases and talk about general strategy.
In an FPS this doesn't translate over so well. You have 12 to 16 players you're bouncing between, which is itself confusing, and you have a high potential of missing action or a critical game-changing moment. For NS2 there's the added complexity of determining if players want to see the RTS side or the FPS side. Do they want to see both at the same time and if so how do you pull that off without making everything seem too busy, hard to follow, or intimidating?
If UWE was to look at Blizzard the most important feature of SC2 I'd want them to copy is the idea of making a solid game. Everything else can come in time or through community mods but if the game's quality isn't up to par with expectations it doesn't matter how many YouTube commentaries NS2 has.
Watch replay in RTS view, note important moments/excellent action sequences ---> Record game in RTS mode, observing all key moments (Like an SC2 cast) ---> Record game in FPS mode, observing all good action moments from varied perspectives ----> Combine both in dual views/focusing on key FPS/RTS moments ----> Add commentary/Replays ----> Render ----> Upload!
Assuming 20-30 min game times, looking at 1-1.5 hours of recording. Not bad at all.
Rather than making NS2 bad for casting, I think the combined FPS/RTS is going to open up amazing possibilities for cinematic casts.
And while youtube may only have played a small part in SC2 success, if NS2 is 1/10 as popular as SC2, I think we will all regard it as an outstanding success.
Not only that, but catching hackers would be stupidly easy, like it is in SC2. Think the only way someone beat you was hacking? Watch the replay and see for yourself. If they were hacking, get their Steam ID from the replay UI, post the replay on NS2's official forums and get their NS2 copy banned for a month. Hell, report their Steam ID to ###### steam and get them a permanent ban (right?).
That alone would give NS2 a huge amount of validity which NS1 doesn't. In NS2, you'd know losing meant lack of skill and there was no chance of hacking (or if there was hacking, you would damn well make them pay).
This definitely isn't something for beta or for full release version 1. Blizzard didn't give replays to SC1 until a few patches later and they were horribly buggy until a few patches after that. Now that Blizzard is a gigantic monolith with WoW and Activision backing them, and are making a sequel which had replay functionality, we expect replays during the alpha, beta, and through the launch. UWE isn't Blizzard-Activision and NS1 didn't have replays. So I can definitely understand not having this at release or even not having it until a few months after.
But I would love this sooooo much. Definitely think about this, Devs.
PS: I was going to post this, but searched and found an old suggestion so I'm bumping.
Ofcourse, recording is a welfare feature.. Putting it now would be ridiculous.
I think it turns into a valuable feature once the gameplay balance starts being a priority. It's far easier to analyse things while you've got a good view of all the factors in the game instead of just having one first person view of small part of what's happening.
Obviously right now there are far, far more urgent things than balancing or recording.
:P
Anyways, demo type recorders are always awesome. Demosmoother or the even more awesome unreleased beta version SourceFilmMaker even, that thing from Trackmania, Company of Heroes has one as well and much much more