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Spectator Gaming, Multicast Style
Woil writes: "This interview at stomped.com is a discussion with project manager Erik Johnson about Valve's new multicast spectator technology. It'll be used first in Counter-Strike, then used in other games. The goal being to allow thousands of people to view top level matches from a separate proxy server." I'd like an aisle seat in the mezzanine, please.
gTv: which is used in quake3 matches these days to do the same thing, runs on a 10 min delay. ( I believe the delay is adjustable, but 10 min is pretty standard since matches usually run 20 min)
The main reason for this was "spectator" cheating. All top clans these days use voice communications (RogerWilco, Battlecom, etc) so it's a MUST to run with a delay.
From the sound of the article Valve is just taking the gTv concept a bit further providing Multicasting, instead of the connection based method that gTv uses.
I have a CS clan going (IKYN) and we have clan matches all the time. To have a seperate spectator server would mean we could record it, and review our moves to see where we went wrong! That would be cool...to have a "coaches clicker" for the entire clan match, where the players move forwards and backwards as you need to, so you can refine your game.
JoeLinux
I was wondering about that too. I like the "tape delay" idea, I figure if I'm so predicable that after an hour of watching me it will give someone an advantage that I deserve to die.
For me it would be all too easy to set up something like you describe - I have a DSL line and a cable modem. If I have two machines that aren't even on the same network, how is it going to stop that?
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crazy dynamite monkey
I've been in Tribes 2 games with about 75-100 players, but I've seen some servers listed with a capacity of 255.
To see the current high, go to http://gamespy.com/stats/ and look at the Current Most Popular Game Server near the bottom of the page. This number fluxuates quite a bit throughout the day, so it will be much higher during prime-time.
Sorry, TsN moved. They're now at http://tsn.gameloft.com - its just that the Tribalwar guys haven't updated their menu yet. :)
The clever boys over at the Tribes Shoutcast Network (I think it was actually TheRedDread of Team 5150, but that may have been a different spectator viewing app) have been running an amazing little app called TribesTV, which let you connect to a video stream from the point of view of an ingame observer, realtime.
The major Tribes 1 matches were incredibly popular, and I can't wait for something similar for Tribes 2. The most impressive part (to me, anyways) was that this was all done without any help from the games developers.
Note: it would appear that the URLs don't work right now - Tribalwar has just moved servers and it looks like they missed some DNS entries.
It is catching on, big time in the Interactive Digital Tv field. However these tend to be private networks, one problem with the internet at large is that multicast support in routers and switches is patchy to say the best. check out a cool application of this technology at www.kit.tv
You must not have lived in my apartment with my roommates back when I was in college, did you?
And you forgot about the smell of bongwater.
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Not entirely true. The large ISPs (i.e. Sprint, Qwest, and the like) do have multicast in the network. And most of them talk to each other (although UUNET is a bit odd...they don't peer multicast with anyone it seems). The big problem is the smaller ISPs that deal with residential users. If the cable modem and DSL providers would jump on this technology, the Internet would be a far more interesting place. (I suppose the Dial ISPs as well, but a lot of the cool things that multicast can do, like efficient video streaming, wouldn't be so hot as the lower bandwidths.) Imagine being able to get a 700k stream (which is pretty good video quality in my experience) of the baseball game you missed because you were at work. Or an episode of "Survivor" that you missed because you were stuck in traffic. Or an episode of your favorite anime that's showing in Japan, but hasn't quite made it to anywhere else in the world yet.
Multicast is pretty cool stuff (I use it every day at work) but it's not really going to make an impact until the home user can reap its benefits.
"It'll be used first in Counter-Strike, then used in other games. The goal being to allow thousands of people to view top level matches from a separate proxy server." "
Very, very sad.
This kind of stuff has been around for quite some time now. The QuakeWorld proxy Qizmo has been able to do this for a while, and at the Australian Big Day In, we had a spectator proxy set up so that people could spectate on all of the finals matches.
It worked extremely well, one guy from overseas sent us a screenshot which had two quake3 windows open, with the opponets POV's in each, and our event coverage shoutcast mp3 stream in winamp. I don't think any Australian LAN has had similiar coverage since....
It's hardly "Valve's New Technology", try "Valve's Implementation of Old Technology".
This technology has been around a LONG time.. But, has never gotten over the hump for implementation/acceptance. The problems have included protocol issues, cooperation among ISP's to accept each other's multicast routing/pruning, and lack of compelling applications.
Hopefully, a cool application like this can help push acceptance along. With this technology, low cost streaming of audio content is very easy, and video is realistic with a bit more effort.
On the down side... As others have stated, I would expect very few people to be able to actually use this when it becomes available. But, if you have problems, complain loudly to your ISP, let them know the demand is out there.
This is one step closer to what I've dreamed of ever since I first experienced the thrill of deathmatch.
A few points of interest:
- As I understand it, this is essentially one player watching the game, and the "multicast" is people connecting to that player and seeing the same thing. Makes sense. Now.. what exactly does this player see? Is it limited to receiving events only within a certain distance, as with normal players? Does it receive all info about everything that's happening at once?
- Following from that, how hard would it be to pull off varying camera angles? It seems as though everyone would be limited to the same view.
- Seems they can address cheating with their buffer. Buffering up 1-3 minutes of gameplay before casting it out would hopefully prevent most forms of eye-in-the-sky cheating. The instant replay idea is neat too.
Deathmatch could work very well as a spectator sport. This comes close. It lacks commentary, and it lacks varying camera angles. Ideally one could choose to wander around on their own and follow individual players, or rely on a group of cameramen with commentators in control of what view gets shown when. Wide-angle shots zooming into tight behind-the-shoulder shots, etc., would keep pace and make things interesting.
Good step in the right direction
Now I've written a multicast video transmitter, and tested it with viewers between Boston and Japan. First off, it broadcasts on some addy that's 22?.x.x.x/5-digit-portnumber. These addy's don't correspond to any machines, it's just a way of telling the routers what to do. So my transmitter tells the local routers that it's going to subscribe to the mcast addy and can then send/recv. Then, when people want to view this video, they tune their receiver app to that channel; they're telling their local router that they'd like to receive this traffic, and then the router pipes it to them. Contrary to peterb, this scales very well for one-to-many better than unicast; my transmitter only puts out one stream, and NEVER needs to accept a connection from anyone else. So that whole thing of a proxy server off the game server that people connect to? Bogus. That's not how multicast works. Now, I believe it if that's their transmitter box..
But the real downside is this: how many people have access to multicast? very few. Hardly any ISP which anyone is connected through subscribes to it, much less has the equipment to route multicast traffic to individual users. DSL, for example: multiple end-users are connected to a single box in their local CO, and that box doesn't know what to do with multicast. Even if multicast were given to it, it means that all end-users would receive it, not just the subscribers. Now, I get multicast traffic at work, but my workplace has a beeg pipe and peers with abeleine in order to pioneer those group-to-group multicast apps. The other thing is that it co$t$ to get mcast from backbones, so most ISP's aren't gonna spring for it, especially because then they still need to upgrade and configure their routers right.
But if nothing else, it *is* the right idea for 'net broadcasting. But it'll be some time before it's more widespread, and even more before home-users get it.
-cryptomancer
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Er nope... There's a proxy server that connects to the game server and sucks out info (much, i guess, like a normal client would).
This proxy server is then responsible for distributing the spectator feed across the world
Why would anyone want to go to a baseball game. I mean, why drive for miles and sit in a outdoor stadium for three (+) hours watching some guys throw and hit a ball around a field, then run around and around a dirt path? And pay for it! Why don't they just pick up a bat and a ball and play it themselves!
For me, I pay for to watch sporting events because I am a total geek and cannot play sports to save my soul, but I do enjoy watching them. While not all slashdot readers may be sports fans and not all slashdot readers may be first-person shooter (FPS) fans, there are people who are willing to pay real money to watch other people; whether it be baseball or basketball . . . or counter-strike (fortunately counter-strike is free).
Spectating in UT seems to be handled pretty efficiently. You're just getting the display data. Nothing is really traveling back, so you can swoop your camera around, follow players, etc. (It's fun to put a camera on the lead player when you have a large projection screen at a LAN party).
I don't know if there would actually be the draw to have 1000's of people watch a Quake/UT game though. I mean, tournaments are fun, but are there even that many fans who'd want to watch?
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Then, all this info (not much though) is sent to you (from the proxy server) and your own game renders frames for you, according to what is relevant to your current view. (where you are looking as a spectator)
Say you're looking straight into a wall. That means your game knows no players are in the view, and the basic map is shown to you.
It all makes sense, and sounds really useful :)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
I've yet to see anyone address the issue of cheating. If you're broadcasting the game information live to a bunch of spectators, it's not that hard for someone to set up a separate machine and have a perpetual overhead view of what's going on. This could be somewhat mitigated by comparing player IPs against spectators IPs (which would stop people who're masquerading both machines behind something like a single DSL IP address), but even then someone could use a proxy or other means to get around it. All-in-all, if I were a player, I'd prefer a "tape-delayed" broadcast of the game after it was over. Even just delaying the broadcast by 5 minutes would help (although someone could still use it to gain an unfair advantage, by having a friend track the opponents' favored locations and such). Overall, though, as long as you don't spoil the results of the match before it's been broadcast, no one's going to really be able to tell the difference between live and delayed. Delaying it also has the advantage of making it easier to do those instant replays that were mentioned during the interview.
I think this would be an interesting idea for a screensaver. Better than those twirling lines.
As someone who enjoys FPS-type games and who is dismayed at the bad rap they get from "concerned" parents types, I think it would be great if FPS tournaments could receive the same kind of promotional attention that other sports get. This could help get gamers some well-deserved legitimacy in the eyes of the mainstream public.
As an example, skateboarding has done well for itself as a pastime by marketing itself as an "X-treme" sport. Skateboarders had suffered under an undeserved reputation as being vandals, delinquents, etc. Amateur skaters had nowhere to go to practice their skills and ended up in places where they weren't wanted, like parking lots, where they were persecuted and harassed. But once skateboarding started to get itself organized and began to televise professional events, things slowly started to change. Now, many cities have skate parks where kids can go practice, and they aren't automatically looked at as criminals.
I see this possibility emerging for FPS enthusiasts as well. But I don't think that FPS lends itself well to a live multicast. Without having some kind of announcer/moderator giving a play-by-play to explain what's going on, who's in the lead, and what's happening, a multicast is bound to be hard to follow.
One of the biggest problems facing the creation of a cohesive documentation of a multiplayer tourney is the need for ubiquitous "cameras".
Ideally, what I think should happen should be this: The multiplayer game takes place, and each players' moves are logged and saved, along with their health status and weapons inventories, etc.
This log can then be used to re-create the events in the actual game, with the added benefit that any part of the map can be rendered from any angle at any time.
Once the game is over, have a video animation guy go through the replay over and over, generating video clips from various angles and carefully editing them into a cohesive video narrative.
Then, have some announcers do a voice-over to put it all together.
Save the result as an MPEG and put it on a server, or better yet, put it on television and promote the new sport of multiplayer deathmatching to the general public. Have interviews with start players and turn them into money-grubbing celebrities.
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here's a video (windows media .ASF format) of the spectator system in action.
very cool.
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in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
All of this you won't have to worry about the smelly fat guy sitting in the seat right next to you or your feet sticking to the floor.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
One of my friends is a Counter Strike fan, plays in clans, plays clan/league/practice matches. These guys are good, and watching a clan match is really alot of fun. They actually have IRC bots, which can broadcast an entire game in text (ie. "-LaMer killed John. -LaMer threw granade" etc.) Supposedly several 1000 ppl 'view' the most interesting matches on IRC this way already.
You can actually download high profile matches, and run them under CS, just to view what went on. Demo Player and matches here.
But this is just the beginninge.... think: watching the Quake finals at home with your friends... or Game Bars broadcasting the European CS finals! With pro sports commentators! And beer!
-Kraft
-Kraft
-Kraft
Live and let live
Half Life - Spectator Game of the Year Edition
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What fun is a game if you can't watch it?
I wonder if they'll attempt to market this, and have something like an IMAX theatre for watching video games...
What someone needs to do is create something like a Starbucks based cafe globally with PC's set up in all of them for daily tournaments of your fav games, Quake, Halflife, etc., that shit'd own!
Think about it, it'd be a nice decked out shoppe with techno playing in the background, redundant OC3 connectivity, strippers serving you coffee... Can't beat that now can you?
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I'm no prophet but if we take a look at two of the recent Slashdot gaming stories we see that technology is increasing the scale of digital games. We have an example of some good research to create a large VR environment as well as a new method of allowing a multitude of spectators to watch a 'live' game. It may be that in the future many of us will connect to the nightly Quake tournaments much the same way we watch a football game today. (Which reminds me quite a bit of The Running Man
All of this may be good, or it may be bad. I think the Internet's advantage over television is primarly that it actually involves the end user rather than just piping information his way. There is a bit of thinking involved, or there can be. It would be sad to see it become more passive. More like television.
Thank you for reading this comment.
Game programmers are pretty slow, taking them what 20 some years to reinvent the television?
God spoke to me
What constitutes a "top-level match"? I sure hope they aren't going to use the technology such that thousands of people can watch a bunch of thirteen-year-old llamas accuse eachother of cheating 80% of the time. Valve oughta at least wait on the technology demo until the CounterStrike community matures a bit, although at the current rate, that'll never happen.