Televised Leagues (or something)

[aquarius]

What I'm getting at is a website with live, or recorded games, such as appealing events, professional leagues, intense duels, ect.

 

I know the ?gamerecord module exists in ASSS, can this be fed to a website, live? While being viewed on a website, is it possible, in any way, to implement an actual gamerecord? At first though here - I doubt this, because I believe gamerecord simply records instances of the game and plays it back. Not in image form - at all. It's only the server recognising what everything was, and projecting it back again. I believe, I may be completely wrong.

 

The site must retain the ability to spectate each individual player, see their stats, and in utopia, communicate with them.

 

Think about this - if everyone on the net could come to our website and instantly communicate with the players?

 

Player1> Yoo I'm on the website! Is this game cool?

Aquarius> yea dude it's a great community, and a really competative game with squad, leages, duels, basing, turf, rabbit, soccer, hockey, warfare, dogfighting, zone making, *super spamming load of fun. Download.

Legas> !@#$%^&* YEA IT IS $$$

okyo> pwned

DrewID> yup, get it

 

Back on topic, as this site will gather new pilots, existing pilots will use it often to view the pre-recorded games. Heck I know I would use this on the daily. Every ASSS zone, the list grows slowly, but surely. ASSS is the future - so this project has some time to float around in the back of your mind.

 

As with most of my topics, I'm just creating the topic I had in mind (multi-topical, yes), expecting immediate feedback and creative involvement.

[Samapico]

That would definitly be awesome... I believe it would be possible to stream the video. But the chat would DEFINITLY need to be relayed separatly, else the quality will suck and noone will be able to read.

And I suppose a module could receive guest players' text and display it in the zone.

I think communicating with players would be actually easier than to be able to spectate everyone.

 

Dunno if someone will be up to it for Continuum, but these kind of ideas would be fun to have in Subspace 2 as well (see The Continuum Project). And will probably be easier to implement, since we are remaking a whole new client / server.

[aquarius]

Dunno if someone will be up to it for Continuum, but these kind of ideas would be fun to have in Subspace 2 as well (see The Continuum Project). And will probably be easier to implement, since we are remaking a whole new client / server.

 

Great point. Why bother doing this with continuum. Thanks Sama, I was looking for a critique from a coders perspective.

 

 

 

 

 

So move this to Continuum Project

[Samapico]

I didn't say it was impossible though, and I'm no expert on ASSS. Maybe it's easier than I think...

[Smong]

Why bother doing this with continuum.

Because cont works, everything else has a history of never getting finished.

 

One thing that could be done is make a flash applet that plays back games recorded in ASSS. I don't know flash so I can't do it, but it is possible. A Java applet would also work but I suspect not many people have it (look at the amount of flash adverts vs java adverts).

 

Once a player is made it might be possible for ASSS to stream a live game without having to re-write much of the flash applet. I think live streaming will require significant effort to implement and will probably never be done.

 

I think allowing anonymous people to spam into the game chat from a website is a bad idea. If they want to chat they can either get the game and spectate, or the website could provide a chat room where you can only chat between other viewers of the website, not what's happening in game (so it would be a normal chat room).

Edited January 7, 2008 by Smong

[Arry]

There are webcam programs out there that can stream your program windows too. I think there's one called webcammax. The best one is supposedly camtwist, but it's MAC only (and I don't think there is a MAC SS client, is there?)

[»Purge]

I suppose you can do something cheap like have Windows/Linux open a video recording program, start recording the video, then stop recording on queue and save the video as an FLV (or whatever format flash videos use) then upload it to the server and have it play on the site.

 

of course, this has nothing to do with ASSS and can even be done with a bot, and the webcast wouldn't be live, but it's an idea.

[aquarius]

rofl, but that would be too cheap. the gamerecord module is sweet, you can spec each player individually - a bot recording video couldn't do that at all, and the quality would be cheap.

 

to do this we would need actual code that works with ASSS, and acts like continuum, maybe the source code from bak's client has what we need, and could use?

[»Purge]

what does the gamerecord module actually do?

[aquarius]

i think i saves the game as server data, because when you ?play it back, everyone in the arena gets specced, 'fake players' enter the arena with everyones' names who were playing when the game was being recorded. You can then spectate each player (by hiting ctrl on their ^names), and watch he whole thing over again, spectating yourself is funny - it even logs what everyone says, and the fake players talk.. lol...

[»Purge]

oh so it emulates player's actions? I don't see how this can be connected to live video feeds, though.

[Arry]

Yeah, capturing video data into some sort of other format (like server data from a gamerecord module) is just a waste of time cause you then have to convert it BACK into video data. You simply need software that takes a window as video source and broadcasts it as a virtual webcam. That software *should* exist. It may even be a feature of popular webcam software. Check with people who stream online. They undoubtably want to stream their games from time to time. Find out what software they use.

[Smong]

@Purge & Arry

It's already been pointed out a video is no good because you are stuck with a fixed view. You need to use a special recording of the game (such as the one ASSS can produce) so when you play it back you can view any part of the map.

 

The way ASSS's "game record" connects into live feeds is while ASSS writes the data to local disk space it can also make it available as a stream on some port. As I mentioned earlier a flash/java applet could then connect to this port and display the game live. I also mentioned it would be much easier to forget the live thing for now and just allow watching old games. Once the applet ground work has been laid the streaming can be added.

 

There are a few flaws in ASSS's game record, I heard at least one is it doesn't record the ball (which is why HZ/PBZ don't use it). I'm not sure what happens to flags either since I haven't tested it thoroughly. Even if it did record the ball we still need to get the ball physics formulas, but that's an entirely different topic.

[aquarius]

thanks for your input smong

[Arry]

Even if it did record the ball we still need to get the ball physics formulas, but that's an entirely different topic.

 

Wouldn't you just be able to let the clients watching the old game do the physics on the ball? Isn't that how recorded weapons fire works too?

Edited January 28, 2008 by Arry

[kid]

what you guys are suggesting is a browser based client (which won't be able to play)

 

 

seems like a hokey idea to me, if you want to watch something in real time, just go watch it.

 

 

 

on the other hand, recording events with camtasia seems like a cool idea.

[Samapico]

Ball physics formula? That shouldnt be too hard to figure out. The only thing to figure out is the friction no? Possible to figure it out with a single throw with some maths.

[Smong]

I knew this would happen, that's why I said don't talk about the ball physics in this thread.