Recording Battles

[Tapman]

I'm sure that many of you out there have thought about or attempted to make a Planetside video using Fraps or some sort of screen-capture software. There are some good videos out there but it is insanely hard to truly capture the scale of our battles, especially when the cameraman is at risk for being blown up at any time.

Given that SoE is working to make the minimum system requirements very generous, I would venture to say that there is a possibility of creating a system similar to the "Saved Films" feature of Halo 3 where people could record their battles to allow for replay from any angle (limited by the hexagonal sectors that the battle is taking place in) and upload them to share with the community. Throw an in-game timestamp on it so that if multiple epic battles are going on simultaneously and affecting each other then the originals could be combined into a larger replay to show the real scale. As I stated in the original thread where I mentioned this idea, this should always take a backseat to content development and balancing. To prevent griefers from crashing the server, keep the recording client-side and have a separate server for the combination/rendering of the replays so that gameplay is unaffected.

Give subscribers the chance to vote on the battle of the day, the winners become finalists for battle of the week, and so on for the month and year, and annually you could have votes on the best battle of all time. Outfits could use this for training purposes and for analyzing what went right and wrong after battles, helping individuals become better and developing specific situational tactics. It would also give people a record of battles for anecdotal purposes, instead of text-based flame wars on the forums you would see those people posting the videos of them owning their rivals, a much more concise way to conclusively settle these disputes.

Besides the benefits for current subscribers, the marketing implications of having these battles recorded for anyone to see is pretty tremendous. Giving anyone the opportunity to see how awesome this game is is sure to have every FPS gamer who sees it drooling shortly before they join the ranks. Thoughts?

[Hamma]

Cool idea

[Traak]

Someone with a FRAPS in HD who could witness things would be good too, as a crouching cloaker.

I wonder if "war correspondent" positions will be available in the game. These guys could give the daily battle reports to the ANN and we could all see what was going on in the struggle.

Sony needs to think immersion. And crossover to every day life, for many. Just because it's virtual doesn't mean it's not real, know what I'm saying?

The more absorbing it is, and the more it can be accessed and provide fun, challenge, and HUMAN INTERACTION, the more it will appeal to a large segment of society that doesn't have, at that given moment, a huge social crowd of people to hang with in the NVW (non-virtual world.)

Yes, life is better surrounded by loving friends and family who support you in all your amazingly financially and socially profitable endeavors. However, for those times when this is not really on tap, how about create an environment where we can feel at home and welcome, known, useful, appreciated (and sometimes ragged on) by our fellows online?

They are real people. We are in a real struggle. It just doesn't have life-and-death consequences. But how different is that from "putting your best foot forward" in social situations in the NVW, not letting anyone know you are hundreds of thousands in debt, wearing makeup or padded bras to augment or cover things, or the million other things we do to hide the truth that is not so appealing?

There are times in most people's lives when they feel lonely, excluded, poor, and useless. As it said in fight club:

This kid, Ricky -- supply clerk --
couldn't remember whether you ordered
pens with blue ink or black ink ...

(The two fighters circle, then begin throwing PUNCHES...)

JACK (V.O.)
But Ricky was a god for ten minutes
last week when he trounced an actuary
twice his size.

Yes, we should all be towering virtuous winners, replete with house, car, wife, and kids, all paid for, with supermodel looks and Kennedy charm. However, for those times when that is not happening, there is Planetside. Somewhere we can feel involved, depended on, needed, hated, loved, appreciated, ragged on, but whatever the case, ACKNOWLEDGED.

And, by crossing over reality with Planetside, and having updates, news feeds, and other things that bring the two worlds, virtual and non-virtual together, we can enjoy success, fame, and maybe some notoriety in a relatively harmless way that still provides that need for ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.

As the saying goes: If there is anything that is worse than being ignored, it's not being noticed in the first place.

So, yes, Combat Camera and recording battles, etc, is an excellent idea. Not all of us have warm, loving home life surrounded by supportive people. For those of us, at those times, there is the warm comfort of the familiar places and faces of Planetside.

[headcrab13]

Originally Posted by Tapman

I would venture to say that there is a possibility of creating a system similar to the "Saved Films" feature of Halo 3 where people could record their battles to allow for replay from any angle (limited by the hexagonal sectors that the battle is taking place in) and upload them to share with the community.

As far as I know, this feature would only tax the client's machine and not really slow the server at all, so I would love to see an optional feature like this. I agree that this is almost the only way to capture the true nature of PlanetSide warfare and would be excellent for making promotional videos and recruiting your friends.

-HC13

[Miir]

/sign

[basti]

Ah yes, something like that would really be good. Recording live is hard and causes alot of frustration. If we could record a demo and then replay it with more POV freedom player made videos would be much much better.

[Traak]

Good to counter cheating, too, when the devs can do a "walk around" of the guy who claims his ROF hack is just 0MGzz M4D SK1LLZZ.

If ONLY the devs had it, it would be great.

[Lartnev]

I'm all for demo recording

[Traak]

Demo recording allows us to e-mail people a scene to benchmark their latest-and-greatest computer specifically for Planetside, or their trusty old machine, and see how many FPS, or FPM or FPH they get.

[Bags]

Do want. Do want indeed.

[Raymac]

Voted 5 stars based on the title alone.

[Death2All]

Sounds like an awesome idea, but it may be difficult to implement given the scope of PS. If we don't see it at launch I'd definitely like to see it added later in the game.

[Sirisian]

I did some quick calculations and I figured out they could easily just store the full game state changes on the server and allow players to just replay across a timeline from when the game first comes out all the way to the present. I think I'd prefer that idea. Then if you want to show your friend a cool thing you did you could just open the game and go to the timeline in a floating camera and go backwards and forwards in time even over years. From my quick fairly accurate database calculations it would be around 250 TB of data after 8 years. Not much actually.

[Desoxy]

Originally Posted by Sirisian

I did some quick calculations and I figured out they could easily just store the full game state changes on the server and allow players to just replay across a timeline from when the game first comes out all the way to the present. I think I'd prefer that idea. Then if you want to show your friend a cool thing you did you could just open the game and go to the timeline in a floating camera and go backwards and forwards in time even over years. From my quick fairly accurate database calculations it would be around 250 TB of data after 8 years. Not much actually.

How did you come up with that number / care to elaborate what your assumptions were?

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by Desoxy

How did you come up with that number / care to elaborate what your assumptions were?

It was just a quick worst-case calculation of say 50 bytes per player at a 20 tick update rate not including snapshots for interpolation. The other assumption is to store all changes players make to their characters over time.

50 bytes * 1000 players * 20 state changes per second * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days * 8 years = 230 TB.

A state change would be things like key input and actions. The size I gave was to compensate for a data storage overhead. It could realistically be stored in a binary format for a fraction of that.

The basic idea would be to store just the state changes for each server update and use that to replay the game deterministically using periodic snapshots of the game to jump to specific intervals and simulate to a specific time.

Right after I posted this I did notice a major flaw. If the map was updated this could complicate the simulation unless they stores the old map data. (Imagine they changed a mountain or something for balancing reasons after the game was released you'd see players acting weird around it when the simulation was ran with the input data because the collisions would all be different). meh.