Over the past two semesters, I have been working with a professor in the Computer Science department at my college on a system for making video games easier and more enjoyable to watch for spectators. Just recently I found out that the paper we wrote about it was actually accepted at a fairly large computer graphics and visualization conference, so I figured to celebrate I’d share some of it with all of you guys. A few of you might remember this project from me mentioning it here a few months ago when I had just started – well, this is the “finished” product.
The basic premise is that most video games, while containing lots of action and interesting behavior, are often actually too complex for a spectator to really take in all of the detail and identify the really good bits. Added to that is the fact that most spectator modes in games are really just variations of the normal player interface, and so often an observer doesn’t really get any more insight into what is going on than the competetors do.
So, what I did is wrote an add-on module for ET that would allow spectators to watch either live games or demo playbacks in a more “instructive” mode. Here are some examples:
This is an example of the “Summary Coverage Map”. Basically, red and blue areas are those controlled by each team (the brighter the color, the more immediate the presence of one of that team’s members), and yellow is where direct combat is taking place. Players are represented by icons showing their view direction and class so that they are easier to identify. Here, it’s pretty easy to see what is going on in general.
This is an example of the shot tracers. In this shot, the blue team (trying to advance with the tank down a road in a valley area) gets lazy and does not secure the high ground by the tower first. The result is a very nasty crossfire… whoops. Also, note the corpses from a previous fight near the red team’s base wall.
Here you can see the player paths, icons, and shot tracers all together – the halo’s around the player icons are scaled relative to their respective scores. These two shots show a blue player chasing a red defender across an open area, as the red player evades and runs for higher ground to gain an advantage.
In the next shot, we can now see that the tables have been turned. As the blue player runs out of ammo, he quickly strafes to the right and ducks behind an obstacle to gain some cover before rejoining the firefight.
Here’s another screenshot I found:
Here, you can see a big conflict at the exit to the tunnels that the blue time is advancing through. The red team is providing support fire on the area from the nearby guard tower (the Orange color indicates fire targeted outside the shooters immediate area, i.e. supporting or suppressive fire) with re-enforcements heading down the road from the base.
Meanwhile, the blue team is trying best not to get caught in a crossfire, and to take advantage of the fact that Red’s northern flank is undefended. This can be seen in the Covert Ops who is trying to sneak around behind the hills and trees at the top, in order to neutralize the machinegunner in the tower and allow his team to advance.
Those are just a few examples of what the system can do. It really looks much better in action, and I highly reccomend downloading and watching the video if you like the screenshots.
The (very cool) video is available here (26 MB)
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/pubs/lithium/lithium.avi
The paper that talks about all this stuff and has the nifty images (with captions) is available here – Print quality resolution, so it’s a bit big (16 MB)
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/pubs/lithium/lithium.pdf
unfortunately i’ve got only a boring application paper to present there 
but the good thing is that i can drive over to mesquite after the conference and knock at "The Carmack"s door 