banimod / etpro / ettv forums

Not sure if you want/care/etc about feature requests/idea's on ETTV, as chances are you'll be most keen to initially just get things up and running right, but thought I'd throw two idea's in anyways.

BTW, I'm making the assumption that ETTV should allow the game to be viewable to more than just players/clanners - but rather, it should actually attempt to show ET off as a good spectator sport in general ( which I think it can be ).

As mentioned in this thread:
http://games.bigpond.com/pc/messageboar ... startid=20
...if people can choose who to spec/freefloat, they have complete freedom, which at first seems to be a Good Thing. However, the lack of cameramen does indirectly weaken any spectator chat ability, because specs through ETTV are likely to all be watching ( and hence talking about ) different things happening in different parts of the arena.

Announcer

An automated announcer would be good. To take an example, Unreal Tournament 2004 has an announcer that announces multi-frags ( 'Double Kill', 'Multi-Kill', etc ); Quake 3 also had one IIRC ( with the 'DENIED', 'HUMILIATION', etc ).

A good announcer makes segments of extraordinary play obvious ( something that you want to do ), without such announcements, it can be difficult for non-players to comprehend when somebody's laying down Teh pwn@g3. An announcer bellowing out how hard they just owned the other team makes it completely obvious.

Furthermore, by announcing a multikill etc, you make people aware of action. Because of the timed spawns in ET, you tend to get 'waves' of action ( similar to most big spectator sports like Soccer, Rugby, etc ), which an announcer would accentuate.

You can also draw peoples' attention to the playmaker, making their view more interesting, that is, assuming you use....

Replays

Because the system isn't played live, you can ( hehe, ok, I assume you can :p ) parse for significant events ( quad panzer, triple SMG kill, knife kill, last-second defuse ), then replay these. Replays could either play over top of periods in which nothing much is happening ( between waves - again, the non-live nature of the stream could allow you to find these ), or they could just interrupt, and the stream resume after - the match is delayed anyways, so it doesn't matter much.

Replays would just be... err... secksy . After all, when some n1nj4-h@X pulls off a double-kill knifing, and you miss it cos your dumb ass was watching the SK, waiting for his camped-up splashdown, you wanna see it - and currently the only way to do this is to download the demo and watch it ( and because you can't rewind the demo, it can be a pain to find and watch the exact segment of play ).

....the downside to interrupting with replays and delaying the stream as opposed to playing them over top of lull periods is of course that it makes sync'ing with the shoutcast next to impossible ( unless the shoutcast were part of ETTV, but I'm guessing re-creating all that would be a waste of precious time ).


Course, ETTV will rock with or without .

someone else getting carried away

fwiw killing spree's etc can be done if the server is running that admin script thingy, I'd assume it would still work if it was running on the ETTV server (or could be made to). That said, it would be waaay better built in, and better yet available via toggle on the client. some of us would be pleased to see it on a non-linux server also... Dunno if double/multikill could be put into the script either, since I'd assume it doesnt have much idea about real time.

http://bani.anime.net/banimod/forums/vi ... =adv+admin


if it could tie in a replay (maybe in a multi-view box?) triggered by "multikill" etc, that would pwn

paranoid about wether the bandwidth for etpro client will nuke my isdn already though

<tangential_ramble>

Looks like finding the highlights in sport to replay them isn't exactly an ignored issue ( first 2 links recently posted on slashdot ):
http://research.microsoft.com/displayAr ... spx?id=195
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996097
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~peng/publications/hmm.pdf

Of course, the job is much easier and more powerful in a game, where you can semantically analyse everything, rather than having to parse external outputs like the sounds a spec hears, or camera angles within a certain recording.

One of the biggest issues would be what to do with the highlights once you find them, because in a game you can choose what camera angles and shots to use to show the sequence off. And especially with the added follow/free cams etc, there's plenty of choice on what to do ( show a panzer shot: from the players POV, from the targets POV, from 3rd person, from above, following the panzer rocket, or a combination - not to mention the ability to speed up or slow down the playback and cut between shots on whim o_O ).

/me goes back to pondering

I like the idea of replays, perhaps if there could be an ETTV admin configurable option to display "Killing Streaks" (eg, display 4 kills in a row)etc etc an icon could appear on the clients view which they could click on to replay the relevant Important event. Mght be more trouble than it's worth, but hey, it sounds good

Ok here I go:

From what is being said and from what I understood, seems that the ETTV server will kind of BUFFER some action, analyze it's "skillness" and then transmits as a QUAD PANZER, KNIFE KILL, TRIPLE SMG, etc. grabing the attention of all users (locking their cams, such as mortar cams/panzer cams/etc. already does - also, will these be avaiable?). This would be like playbacking a demo with a 5-10 seconds delay, Of course there is already the STREAMING DELAY, which is intentional as far as I know, so this 5-10 mean nothing next to that (1 minute or 2?)

Just trying to get that straight, if along with the delay you can (already) track down what's happening and provide something extra to the spectator. For example, broadcasting something like "QUAD PANZER coming up in XX seconds" just like the /UNPAUSE does, on the center of the screen. Of course it won't be that much exciting in some cases, so we need a CVAR for that. Not even saying THIS should go in, just messing around with the idea/trying to explain better what I'm thinking of, etc.

Anyway, that's not the main part of this post. Let's get there now: REPLAYS. (loved the idea)



With multiview on, you get these cool little numbers on the screen reflecting each player, team, classes, etc. where you can open up little cute windows lowering your fps but still tracking the action on the whole game... hehe

Multiview is nice, even though I'm not a fan of it, and I believe it's already there, right? Anyway, in multiview mode we see there is a MOUSE CURSOR on the screen. Can we get a small button-counter for the replays, popping up a small hud LISTING the replays? It could get flashy once there are new replays avaiable.

The hud would display a list more or less like:

- PLAYER_A doing a PANZER QUAD KILL
- PLAYER_B doing a KNIFE KILL
- PLAYER_C killing 4 TEAMMATES with a SUPPORT FIRE (some ppl like seeing that, specially if you're cheering for the opposing team)
- etc.

Could also exist a small checkbox to display only NEW/UNSEEN replays or ALL. Since it has already been streamed, it's buffered on the client and requires no additional bandwidth (considering the client can autorecord on demand after a specific server message).

Another suggestion is using the multiview skills and showing the replay on that. We could then have:

- Auto replays on small auto-popping windows
- Auto replays on full screen with the real action on small auto-popping windows
- On demand replays on fullscreen/windowed mode

We could even get these popped up windows for objective carriers, so even watching a team trying to hold a respawn so that the objective carrier gets to the radio/truck/wherever it should go, you can see a nice panzer camping for it and getting it back. Not very frequent, but again, messing around with the idea.


Now THAT seems much more interesting than watching Ronaldo and the Brazilian Soccer Team. Right, duke'ku?

Peace <3

Multiview to 250 clients would require a lot of bandwidth...

IdNotFound wrote:Now THAT seems much more interesting than watching Ronaldo and the Brazilian Soccer Team. Right, duke'ku?

YOU AM PLAY FUTEBOL???

Some interesting idea's, IdNotFound

Sauron|EFG wrote:Multiview to 250 clients would require a lot of bandwidth...

Yeah.... BUT, as Rain posted here:
http://bani.anime.net/banimod/forums/vi ... php?t=4180
...they've improved on the multiview bandwidth requirements .

/me goes back to pondering some more

KingJackaL wrote:Yeah.... BUT, as Rain posted here:
http://bani.anime.net/banimod/forums/vi ... php?t=4180
...they've improved on the multiview bandwidth requirements .

/me goes back to pondering some more

Well, the 250 spectators will take as much as they ever did—as much as a spectator on the real server. This will still be a Big Hunk of Bandwidth, but that's part of the purpose of ETTV—moving the load from the main server to someplace else. Once we're able to chain multiple ETTV servers, this should help even more.

The improvements we can make are for the ETTV feed from the master server. Right now, it's running about 43k/s for that on when streaming a server filled with 24 players, and there are still several improvements to be made. (ETTV slave connections aren't rate limited, and I imagine multiview could easily top that if it weren't rate limited either.)

i really really really like this idea, although i dont know if its possible. one of the things that make watching sports on TV interesting is seeing the replays of the huge hit on the goal line, or spanking the crap out of the baseball only to be caught by the outfielder reaching over the wall, or the last second jump shot from half court that wins the game (for the euros, a last second goal/great save by the goalie/penalty kick)

i'm not a programmer, so i cant think of a logical way to do this without A: using a fuckton of bandwith B: having 12 "cameramen" each watching an assigned player C: having some sort of "demo playback" function for certain events.

if i'm wrong and there's a very easy way to do it, lemme know. other than that, all i can say is good idea kingjackal, wishful thinking.

KingJackaL, there is no problem with cameramen in ettv. Players can follow spectators if they want. They just aren't forced to only watching the spectator, like wolftv/gtv.

bani: i think you missed the point entirely.

what he's asking about is replays of major events that happen during the event of a match (i.e. big panzer kill, multi-kills, knife kills, last second dyno defusals) and i stated that i dont know if it's possible because there isnt a "cameraman" (or multiple camerapeople) to catch those "big plays" during the match to replay them.

the only thing i can think of would be this:

Player-X mows thru 3 people with his thompson to clear out the North gun on Oasis. This "Kill Streak" sets off a trigger for a "multi-kill" which would then pop up a "Multiview Window" on everyone's screen from Player-X'sPOV. ETTV viewers could then see the replay of the multi-kill.

I imagine having said event trigger a "multi-kill" wouldn't be difficult, but having it actually replay something thats not going on at the same time everything else is would be difficult.

NewdeaL wrote:I imagine having said event trigger a "multi-kill" wouldn't be difficult, but having it actually replay something thats not going on at the same time everything else is would be difficult.

If the client could auto-record it in a demo file upon a server message, I guess this could be as simple as a demo playback. Since the map is already loaded on the client, there should be no loading delay.

I am probably wrong, but from an outside perspective, it's as simple as that.

NewdeaL wrote:Player-X mows thru 3 people with his thompson to clear out the North gun on Oasis. This "Kill Streak" sets off a trigger for a "multi-kill" which would then pop up a "Multiview Window" on everyone's screen from Player-X'sPOV. ETTV viewers could then see the replay of the multi-kill.

this would be incredibly difficult, and due to the way q3 works it would require roughly double the bandwidth for viewers. (eg 8k/sec -> 16k/sec) for the duration of the replay-in-window.

I think bani also mentioned that multiview was most likely not going to be implemented in ETTV.

Replays would be interesting. Call of Duty has replays with their killcam. The killcam stores 7 seconds of playback in memory, and when you die, it will play those 7 seconds back. The only problem is that you then miss 7 seconds of action because the game keeps going while you are watching the replay and it re-syncs you after it is over. It might be possible to implement, but I don't know the specifics of the ET engine.