Delayed replay / stream?

[Kipper]

So this is probably more of a technical question than anything - but I was just in another thread and the idea hit me.

Would it be possible in theory to have a server that replays everything that happened, as it happened, on a delay? (Where you login as an invisible, invincible 'ghost' entity that can't interact but just observes from any angle or viewpoint).

And if that would be possible; would it be possible to go a step further and incorporate pause/rewind/forward/slow-motion into it so that people could make videos of awesome battles they were involved in?

[Attackmack]

Wouldnt that require insane ammounts of datastorage and bandwidth?
With the FTP model im havin hard time seeing how theyll even be able to uphold maitanence on the regular servers so even though i guess what your suggeating IS in theory possible, I can say with much assurence that it will not happen.

[zomg]

Yes, that was already done in Half-Life using HLTV. However, as you may be aware, the size of maps and the number of things happening in HL is way smaller than in PS2. Way, way, waaaaaay smaller.

Thus, it may prove to be a bit of a technical problem to solve it for PS2. I would think it's doable, but not something very easy.

[julfo]

What if it only stored the last 24 hours? I have no clue how much bandwidth or storage even one minute would require though, considering the scale.

[Wumpus]

It actually wouldn't require much bandwidth or storage space - the servers actually already record the basic information avatar/vehicle/projectile location and movement plotting. This is done to allow the dev team to see exactly what happened and when in history in order to examine a possible playing exploiting, or just to roll back to a previous point in time in case of server crash.

The difficult part is creating the software front-end which would compute this data and the desired camera angles then trans-coding this information into a watchable video. It would be much easier (require less resources overall) to skip the video part and just require the user to have the client installed from which to view this replay.

[Zeruel]

its also a bandwith issue. imagine 2000 players watching playbacks. its horrible as this would increase bandwidth use up into the skys limit and may even have negative impact on current live players.

[Wumpus]

Only if you assume the data transfer for this service is using the existing infrastructure. There's no reason they couldn't mirror the data with a few minute delay to another server cluster using it's own network throughput.

Like I said the devs have this capability for their own testing and research use - they would just be opening up the capability to the public. Not that this would ever actually happen..but it's possible.

[Zeruel]

Originally Posted by Wumpus

Only if you assume the data transfer for this service is using the existing infrastructure. There's no reason they couldn't mirror the data with a few minute delay to another server cluster using it's own network throughput.

Well, bandwith is a costly factor. also you would need hardware for this. And the existing data has to be mirrored, which means it will take up internal network and storage capacity. It just doubles the internal network load and even has bad influence on the existing live system as the data has to be read and sent...

[Masterr]

why do that? the resources to make that happen and the payoff if it CAN happen are not worth it, IMO.

[Wumpus]

Originally Posted by Zeruel

Well, bandwith is a costly factor. also you would need hardware for this. And the existing data has to be mirrored, which means it will take up internal network and storage capacity. It just doubles the internal network load and even has bad influence on the existing live system as the data has to be read and sent...

No doubt the costs involved for the hardware needed would prevent this from ever happening - but your understanding of how networks operate is lacking. They already have the historic telemetry data stored on a server separate from the servers used to actually handle the game in live time. While making this data available to the public would require additional bandwidth there's no reason they'd have to use the same network infrastructure as the live game.

It's actually not as much data as you think - there's no reason to include data outside of the viewing range of the replay camera. Yeah if they had to include everything taking place on the server that would probably be a lot..but there would be no reason to do that.

[Zeruel]

Originally Posted by Wumpus

No doubt the costs involved for the hardware needed would prevent this from ever happening - but your understanding of how networks operate is lacking. They already have the historic telemetry data stored on a server separate from the servers used to actually handle the game in live time. While making this data available to the public would require additional bandwidth there's no reason they'd have to use the same network infrastructure as the live game.

It's actually not as much data as you think - there's no reason to include data outside of the viewing range of the replay camera. Yeah if they had to include everything taking place on the server that would probably be a lot..but there would be no reason to do that.

Actually, its using up INTERNAL server capacity. even so there is a different connection used to transfer data to the public. I doubt they would use some weird robotic stuff to switch disks. And in case of "its not as much data as i think"... well, you would be surprised how much data will be generated by a single bullet shot. (vector data, starting position, endpoint data, endpoint vector, bullet type...). If thats around lets say, 10 Bytes it would end up getting into megabytes if you have lots of players firing (2000 Players for 1 second firing all together could add up to 20kbytes just for firing info if every weapon fires at 1 bullet per second, no timestamps added yet (timestamp maybe another 2 to 8 bytes)). But in this case, the "viewer" doesnt see it, you are right, you would need to filter through this data in order to see shots fired from behind, sounds you would hear (even if no visual bullet is available) etc. This should already be handled by the netcode of the live system, but the mirror process has to copy ALL the data from the live system, of the complete continent.

[zomg]

Video streaming sites like YouTube generate way more traffic than this ever would. I don't think there would be technical issues from just the traffic involved.