Posted - 2009.09.06 23:45:00 - [3]

 

Originally by: Melissa Lyrus

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Having thousands (or more) people effectively connect to the node with the tourny solar system in would lag it to hell and back. It's not going to happen. Not a matter of cost, but just impractical/impossible.

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while this is true, its far from being impossible. just a matter of solving it another way.

intended to view-only, this ingame sub-client should only be capable of / allowed to read data and not write any. so we are talking about a single direction data stream - from the source node to the client nodes.

as the viewer only receives raw data (no video), he may interact as far as the client usually allows - say zapping through ships, change viewing angle, locking targets, etc.

without going too much into detail, this can be easily achieved in two ways:
(probably more and/or different ways to solve this, these two just as examples)

1. additional servers with the solele purpose of receiving all necessary data and relaying it directly to the viewers.

2. a chain relay or peer-to-peer backend, which seeds the necessary data to each link/node. any pilot may then get the tourney data straight from the node he currently is located on, no need to ask the tourney system node. thinking of the future, this could/should be implemented in a way where each node serves two other nodes (1->2->4->8->16...). this should be a good balance in terms of traffic/load/delay.

sure there are downsides as well, like needing more servers (first example) or having a constant traffic/load even when no one on that receiving node is interested in the stream (second example).

still both far better than blobbing the tourney node with viewers directly ^^

all depends on the full specifications tho, if you eventually want players to also be able to seed to multiple viewers, the system should be way more dynamic and loadproof - compared to the tournament solution, where you can utilize a static chain link map from the serving node to the reading nodes.


...and finally: as you have the ingame view-only client and do receive a raw data stream, it only needs a record button and you can view the tournament any time again. this should also enable players to record their own gaming stuff, for whatever purpose. send the last op by email to the guys that missed lots of fun, rewind and repeat scenes for editing/video purposes, whatever... =]

Posted - 2009.09.07 01:12:00 - [5]

 

Originally by: wiLik

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I must admit I'm a little disappointed that there's no live streams for all the matches in this tourney.

Instead of providing live video streams in HD (which I'm sure is costly), would it not be possible to provide a viewing facility in game?

This would allow people to get a much fuller, exciting experience without the steaming/studio costs (maybe just some coding time).

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The essential issue here isnt the streaming.

They can stream the feed using their current setup; or feed to another host who the broadcasts it; or using a bittorrent setup to stream it using our uploads.

That's not the issue.

CCP wants to bite off too much. They want to setup the whole couch setup and all that garbage nobody wants to see. :)

Posted - 2009.09.07 05:01:00 - [7]

 

There is, of course, another reason why they won't do it. Giving people that much ability to watch a fight would let someone who isn't on the field be able to FC the fight. Even the "live" stream is a few seconds behind and thus of minimal use for that, in addition to the fact you can't look at what you want with it.

Posted - 2009.09.07 20:24:00 - [9]

 

Edited by: wiLik on 07/09/2009 20:27:01
@lord cyrez: That's the sort of thing I was thinging of. Obviously you wouldn't connect everyone to the same node.

I was thinking of that sort of multi-tiered relaying type cenario where you could have a few servers connected to the node running the tourney. These in turn could then delay the stream for x seconds/minutes and then relay to more servers which you would connect to in game. And as you say, as it's basically only a 'read' operation, it shouldn't hamper server load too much as there's nothing to actually process.

The possibilites for this sort of a feature in game could be used for any number of things... A few I can think of off the top of my head:

Tourney
Viewing fleet battles 'live'
Storyline features
Tutorials for newbs
'Recording' fleet battles - Take snapshot of the grid, then replay the transactions. Probably not practicle for particularly large battles due to node load, but if the transactions didn't take up too much space/resources to be copied, they could be played back later.

Obviously there would be costs involved for time/resources for implimenting something of this scale. But iirc CCP have said before that the costs of doing the whole alliance tourney thing with the studios, streaming, getting expert guests there, pulling poeple off of other stuff, etc, etc, are quite large. Then consider what the costs would be if they did this for every tourney!

Instead of putting all that money into something CCP frankly get nothing back from (apart from our love of course ), if it were put into a game feature such as this it would only need to be done once. i.e. Long term savings for CCP and more shineyness for us