Theater Mode?

(SockDog) #21

Aren’t there inherent “problems” with the Quake4 engine that limit it’s actual usefulness as a movie making engine? I’m sure that has some bearing on the lack of tools, if you can’t put in skip and rewind functions or view action from multiple viewpoints due to the engine then I’d guess you can’t expect a massive rewrite just for one feature.

Of course I’ll be Captain Hindsight here and say that perhaps it should have been on the whiteboard when they were rewriting the Quake4 engine and decided to make a game as visually stunning as Brink. That’s just me being a dick though.

SD. Please consider this [ninja]and additional game modes[/ninja] for your next game! :slight_smile:

(murka) #22

The current system + controls(ex simpler way to make cameras, rewind or some jump to previous keyframe, etc.) = win.

(tokamak) #23

Skip and rewrite aren’t possible, but I thought it was possible to set bookmarks in the replay to which you could jump back.

(murka) #24

Yes it is possible, but it was quite buggy and caused crashes.
I can see how they just lacked time with etqw on these features and have the right ideas. Surely they’ll get those features done for brink.

(Bodo_Fraggins) #25

+1 to implementing some form of theater mode, with SMART and customised player appearance, it would be orsm to be able to create vids showing cool frags/moves/etc from different perspectives … demo rec in etqw was great but it was fiddly to to do certain things … demo rec/playback 2.0 with moar features would rock.



(Hansel) #26

When I first saw the Black Ops multiplayer trailer I thought that feature like that would be a nice addition to Brink.

Third-party movie making mod tools are never accessible enough for majority of players. With Black Ops everyone and their mothers are uploading videos to Youtube. Like already mentioned above, there is no better promotion for a game than that.

I have no doubt that the Call of Duty series will steal the SMART system for it’s next iteration, so why not go ahead and add this feature to Brink? It is soon going to be a standard feature for online shooters anyway.

(Cankor) #27

I know in ETQW when you record a demo it doesn’t capture the same “level of detail” (in terms of the data stream from the server) for players far away from you. The idea here is since those players aren’t important to your situation (becasue they are to far away to interact with) both the server load and bandwidth requirements can be reduced by sending less info. You can see this by specing another players point of view who isn’t close to you and watching their viewpoint change in an extremely jerky fashion.

My understanding when dealing with this kind of thing is the amount of data being sent from the server is the square of the number of players times the amount of data in each packet. So with 24 players there’s more than twice as much info (576i where i is the info in the packet) being sent from the server as there is with 16 players (256i). So going from 16 players to 32 players it’s 4 times more info being sent from the server, not twice as much as you might at first think.

So several thoughts come to mind here:

  1. Possibly the way the data is sent is part of the engine, and in this case recording the action from players view points far away from you wouldn’t work because not all that data is sent to every player.
  2. Possibly it’s not part of the engine or it’s been re-worked. Because there’s fewer players and fewer stuff flying around (no loose Magogs) the bandwidth thing may no longer be an issue and it is possible to send it all to everyone.

Also could be related to the 8v8 player cap, even though we are told it’s because that’s the optimum size (which I do tend to beleive because it makes sense), but even if not certainly there’s a benifit there in terms of bandwidth.

Anyway, if the data is sent the same way it is in ETQW you’d need a server demo to make an accurate movie from other players points of view. This could still be workable, maybe some way to request a download of the server demo at the end of each game (of course that could screw up the load on the server too, but probably not everyone would request it for the same game). But if the data in your demo is limited, would be cool to be able to requesta server demo whenever you wanted one, even if the movie making stuff isn’t included this would be useful for identifying cheaters.

(tokamak) #28

Sever-side recordings do record everything going on in the game. Which reminds me, I still need to get back on working on a project a few folks helped me with. I put it to rest as I didn’t have the right tools and knowledge.

(Mustang) #29

How about getting servers to always record, then if a client has recording enabled it will be auto downloaded the server side recording at the end of the map during the post game review/cutscene/next map loading phase
Could even do something like setting the default view to that of the client’s
Servers can then delete recorded games once the next map starts
Clients will have non bandwidth impaired gameplay as well as full demo recordings

Edit:
Whoops, just read Cankor’s post, which pretty much says the same thing

(LyndonL) #30

How much stress would that put on the upload bandwidth of the server and therefore negatively affect the game performance of people playing whilst someone is downloading?

Are demos recorded serverside in a Vector style format and how large would an entire match’s demo be to include every single player’s movements and environment interactions?

(Cankor) #31

[QUOTE=LyndonL;249077]How much stress would that put on the upload bandwidth of the server and therefore negatively affect the game performance of people playing whilst someone is downloading?

Are demos recorded serverside in a Vector style format and how large would an entire match’s demo be to include every single player’s movements and environment interactions?[/QUOTE]

As far as I know they record the same way as the client demo, they just have all the data for all the players. My idea would be you request the demo from the server as opposed to just doing it automatically, that way you aren’t downloading to a bunch of players who don’t care, so that should lower the bandwidth.

I checked my ETQW demo’s and the largest was 22 meg, but that was an anomoly the next smallest was 11.5 meg. Looks like they average around 5. So say they are around 10 meg (more information on each player, but fewer players and less information over-all cause there’s lots of stuff happening in ETQW with vehicles and arty and stuff liek that which won’t be in Brink).

Just have the player who requested the demo start the game after it downloads, so he’s using his own bandwidth up. Should be done in around a minute maybe?

(LyndonL) #32

That’s pretty economical. Smaller than I’d guess… but then again they say you only need 10kb/s upstream per player to run smoothly -> 10k = 600kb / min and a round can last up to 30 mins? = 18megs.
My logic is probably flawed though.

(Hansel) #33

I’m not an expert but the Black Ops and Modern Warfare games use IW engine which is just heavily modified Quake 3 engine? One would think that the same thing can be done with a heavily modified Quake 4 engine as well.

(Icemonkeyjr) #34

They certainly do need to take it into acount, theres really no reason to dissmiss it, i cant imagine it having any downsides at all

(SockDog) #35

From what I understand idTech 3 and 4 were quite different in how the network code worked and of course IW modified that Q3 engine a lot whereas this is SDs first major tinkering with idTech4 (I’m sure they contributed in ETQW too).

(DarkangelUK) #36

Even average games can be made to look awesome with decent demo tools, think what it could do for a great game!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZr62nnwoSs (thanks IntuQk)

(Cankor) #37

[QUOTE=LyndonL;249101]That’s pretty economical. Smaller than I’d guess… but then again they say you only need 10kb/s upstream per player to run smoothly -> 10k = 600kb / min and a round can last up to 30 mins? = 18megs.
My logic is probably flawed though.[/QUOTE]

I was surprised at the 22 meg one, seemed kind of big but what do I know (maybe it was a 1/2 game, have played on servers with 1/2 hour maps including the demo).

I’m not surprised at the file sizes being as small as thay are, the data stream has been as optimized to be as compact as possible out of necessity. There’s no graphics info being sent (as it’s all rendered on the client). Not having done anything like this I’m taking a wild guess, but I image what they do is something like figure out how many states a given piece of data can have. If you have a number of data types that only have two states, you can stick 8 of those into a single byte. If you have a data type that can have 16 different states, yuou can stick two of those into a single byte.

Would be pretty interesting to see the packet spec for the data stream, everything that’s in it, and how big it is (probably it varies depending on what you’re doing, no sense sending info that’s irrelevant).

(tokamak) #38

Could be a stopwatch.

(Icemonkeyjr) #39

[QUOTE=Hansel;249031]When I first saw the Black Ops multiplayer trailer I thought that feature like that would be a nice addition to Brink.

Third-party movie making mod tools are never accessible enough for majority of players. With Black Ops everyone and their mothers are uploading videos to Youtube. Like already mentioned above, there is no better promotion for a game than that.

I have no doubt that the Call of Duty series will steal the SMART system for it’s next iteration, so why not go ahead and add this feature to Brink? It is soon going to be a standard feature for online shooters anyway.[/QUOTE]

Exactly mate

(Cankor) #40

Stopwatch demos are a separate demo for each round.

I checked my etqwpro directory and got a wider range of demos (more in there than vanilla) and they tended to average a little larger. That plus the fact that those matches were probably mostly 6v6 makes me think the files sizes would be larger.

I also found a couple server side demos, the biggest was 22meg, chances are it was 6v6 and I think it was volcano so would tend to have less crap flying around. I think it was a full 20 minute round though, which is another thing to think about, rounds on Brink are supposed to be shorter?

So maybe with 8v8 they’d tend to be around 15-25 meg. Still guessing of course but it seems doable you could download one at the end of a match if you wanted it.