Note: This will most likely be useful to shoutcasters and in some cases moviemakers but it’s somethings I feel have been misssing.
Location or area “bookmarks”
Now one thing that I’ve found very annoying when I’ve been spectating games is if I spectate X who is at area Y but then something interesting happens in area Z. I really want to get there quick but in order to do so I’ve so far have more or less two options:
1. Use my mouse/keyboard to get out of the first person viewmode and into free fly mode and just go there.
2. If I know a teams setup I would also probably know that one of the players might always be in that area so I press “5” to switch to that player, if that doesn’t do it, step 1 needs to be done.
Both of these most likely results in you “getting there” too late. In some cases it’s impossible to get there in time but most of the time you just want to get there fast. If a bomb is planted you might want to know where that dude is going to hide so it’s all not just a big surprise when spectating the team coming to defuse it.
So here’s two possible solutions I’ve been thinking of:
1. In free fly mode you can, just as normal, fly around the map but let’s say you fly to the last delivery point in Whitechapel, hit something like CTRL+F2. Now anytime you wish to get there fast you simply press F2 and voila, you are now in that position, including the angle and everything that you had when you first created that “bookmark”.
2. Make it bindable (how the fuzz do you spell that btw?). Now I have absolutely no idea how binds work in UE3 but to get the idea across, something like this:
bind X "posx: 00000; posy: 00000: posangle: 00000;"
Obviously this is way less user friendly but I think that this could possibly provide a little bit more fine tuning.
Specificly for shoutcasters it could also mean that if you make one of these “bookmarks” you get somewhat of an image-in-image kind of thing where you can see if there’s any action going on around that place.
I have absolutely no idea if this is at all possible or even viable but I thought I’d throw it out there.
Replay
Basically, something awesome happened, you missed it, don’t worry, just rewind and watch it live. How would it work?
If I’m not mistaken each player has a number which can be used to quickly spectate that player, right? If you missed a 5 man take down by player X on his “bar” (with health, class image and all that) you might get an icon or flashing message saying simply “Rewind” and you automatically get taken back a few seconds before that happened. Afterwards you get returned to the actual game.
Maybe you have a dedicated rewind button on the ui or in the controls so that when you hold it down you rewind the entire match and are able to navigate as normal to find that “event”.
Combine it with the “bookmark” above perhaps? CTRL+F2, hold the rewind button, done.
Make it a console command only?
/rewind playerid: 1; 20s; mode: firstperson
Again I have absolutely no idea if this is at all possible or even viable but you know… Might spark something else at least.