Revinor Dagoth
   |
Posted - 2006.06.17 21:45:00 -
[1]
I have just read about the alliance tournament and it sounds like a great fun to watch in real time. Unfortunately, given enough interest, it can be next to impossible to broadcast video stream for it in good quality.
I know that it is probably too late to do it for this competition, but maybe for the next one it could be implemented: possibility to put people in such system in 'read-only' mode, using virtual ships, only for this given event. More or less, this would be equal to broadcasting the object data for given part of the system, like it is transferred to normal ships being on site.
Allowing people to come to system in question with normal ships causes lag not only because data about combat has to be transferred to them, but because data about spectators would have to be transferred to participating ships and other spectators (thus causing quadratic increase in load with number of spectators). By not allowing people to interact with anything and not showing them to each other, load would just increase linearly - plus I suppose that some kind of distributor servers could be created (as every spectator would receive exactly the same data).
In-game this could be explained by people having the remote camera drones - they could even cost some isk per match (not too much, so even the fresh players could get few of them). This would be enabled only for specific system, only for duration of competition (to avoid all the misuse which would happen if you would give invisible spy drones to players in normal game).
Somehow related to that, would be a possibility of recording the demo of flight. All what is transmitted to player ship could be stored to file and then replayed - with possibility of either replaying all camera movements or overriding the camera and watching from your favorite perspective. Think about FRAPS, just played with full fps and resolution of the client, with files taking max few hundred kilobytes per minute. And if such data could be streamed in realtime, we have another solution for match transmission (just have GM or trusted player broadcasting their POV while being in cloaked ship somewhere next to the battleground).
Demo functionality would be a lot more useful (as it could be used outside the tournament for many, many purposes) - but if this is not possible for any reason (like problems with being able to guarantee file replayability between different EVE client versions), then at read-only camera-drone streaming for events would be still a great thing to have.
Failing that, what about some kind of peer-to-peer video broadcast ? This could scale to large number of clients with no real costs on the server side... I have never used that, but there is something called PPStream, which looks like a right tool for the job (except the default language).
|