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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 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
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.
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".
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 :)
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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.
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.
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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!
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Half Life - Spectator Game of the Year Edition
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Game programmers are pretty slow, taking them what 20 some years to reinvent the television?
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