First Person Spectate in Natural Selection 2
System
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
First Person Spectate in Natural Selection 2
Millions of people that watch large sporting events such as the Olympics, the World Cup or the Super Bowl. Only a small proportion of them are able to play the sport they are watching with any degree of competence. People enjoy spectating other people while they display skill, courage and showmanship. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly prevalent in computer gaming.
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Can't wait to see how this affects the viewing numbers on shoutcasts like Hugh's or Blind's streams going forward.
Everything? Really?
Well at least we can finally see the twitch skillz of players on those streams.
Nevertheless, great work and I hope I'm wrong!
Next step - HLTV! Or, SparkTV. :>
Thank you, done!
What's a super spectator you ask? Well, it's a spectator client, and a spectator server. What it does is connect to the game server as a spectator, and maintain a complete game state, for the entire map. Then, regular spectators (i.e. actual players) connect to the super spectator, to watch that game from any perspective (first, third, any player, etc.).
The idea is to take away (or significantly reduce) the responsibilities of spectator tracking and networking, and delegate them to this spectator server (which is a smart NS2 proxy/broadcaster, in a sense). The main benefit, besides helping with server performance, is that you can scale this very well... you have one super spectator on the main game server, then this super spectator can hopefully handle at least 200 spectators (since it doesn't do game logic/calculations, it only broadcasts game state as it comes). If you need more than one super spectator server can handle, you just connect more super spectators to the first super spectator, and viola... scale!
Would be so cool if it was like Dota 2 where you could control the camera as a spectator, chat with other spectators, etc., without disrupting the game itself.
did this got updated too?
can we have compressed demos,
which start ingame and can be skipped trough
in both directions?
With the changes described I would guess a proper demo system won't be too far behind.
Because we love you and we know you can do it, that's why!
One of my favorite features from Guild Wars was the ability to watch current tournament matches in game.
Combined with something like CS GO with team matchmaking, you could get a whole lot more people interested in the competitive aspect. That might be more oriented to a game with a much larger player count, and or free to play.
Still, fps view gives so much more feeling to a spectator when used smartly. The commentators have to be smart when to use it though.
You just described HLTV. Had many games in Team Fortress Classic where it was used for the spectators to watch our games. (maxed out a 100 spectator HLTV one time in a match.)
HLTV would connect to the server and use up a player slot, then the spectators would connect to the HLTV and they could go around just like they were a real spectator on the server.)
Watching NS2 on its own is a little boring, but watching it with Hugh and Wasabi going mental, (*)unicorns and interviews with devs etc is priceless.
As for streaming, I think any decent and insightful commentary starts from watching replays. You might be able to barely fit NS2 action in a one viewpoint spectator view, but at the very least it requires way more game awarness, analysis and experience than what the casters have now. It's just next to impossible to consistently find the important action with 10 players and 2 commanders interacting unless you're able to go through games step by step and see what you should be focusing on given times. You don't have to look any further than your average day9 daily to understand how important the SC2 replays are for understanding the game.
If NS2 wants to have an actual long term healthy competitive community, you're going to need the HLTV demos. If they're fine without comp community, then the HLTV becomes a lesser priority. However, even then it would work wonders on understanding how the gameplay works and how the balance and development process should go in the future. There's quite a lot of advantages in being able to say "Here, at 3:15, player X's viewpoint. This is the important bit why the game works the way it does".
I think this sounds awesome! Does it work by spectating the commander as well?
For sure, I hope the minimap doesn't appear for people spectating. Some indication that they have it open would be ideal.
You can spectate the commander at the moment by holding the mouse on the comms name plate. A complete first person view with UI and all could be interesting, I would never want to look at it though.
Badly needed.
Good stuff.
Whit a Delay, this would be simelar to the League of legends spectator system, would it not?
Or is this currently available in gorgeous already?
I love watching casts of top level ns2 matches, and anything that improves these already very good casts is an awesome and very welcome addition.
Roo
i dont know if you know ut-tv. its like hltv with a stream combined.
the reason for that?
first: quality
second: freeeedom of camera movement, you can watch what ever you want in what ever style you want, you are not bound to the camera movement of the casters. most of them are always missing the action by talking about anything...
third: bandwidth! a hltv stream needs around 2.5kb/s ... then you can add voice and video from the caster IF YOU LIKE! ... ns2 uses extreme low bandwith (one problem related to the ultra low servertickrate and cmdrate... and therefore: hitdetection.)
fourth: analysis. if you ever had a real problematic game, especially as a competitive game and you want to find out WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?!?! a hltv demo is like GOLD! you can watch every ones action again and again and again and by doing that you can find out WHAT went wrong. because u get 12 in eye demos with overview in one file and you can easily zap forth and back.
But one question. Moving input code from spark to lua sounds like a performance hit / input delay. You sure know this too and have checked if it has any impact. But a few sentences how much impact it has on performance would be nice.