One of the wishlist items at the CSM Winter Summit has been to give the playerbase a battle recorder. CCP (specifically CCP Veritas?) have been quite resistant to this.
I think the main argument from the playerbase in favour of the battle recorder is that video makers will be able to make better videos. With a functional program that can read battle recorded information, video makers will be able to focus on specific ships, pan about using an independent camera, etc.
Granted, a tool like that would certainly make for better videos of actual EVE battles, but would it make for a more exciting video? In some cases, sure, in most cases, probably not. Large EVE battles mostly look like bugs whizzing around a zapper. You have ships orbiting anchor ships, ships orbiting targets. EVE battles do not resemble Star Trek, Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica space fights. EVE battles look like flies buzzing about a corpse. With a battle recorder, video artists simply have the option of recording the pseudo-chaos from different angles, but it’s still pseudo-chaos they’re recording. They’ll have no real options to massage the data. The battle recorder isn’t going to make sense of a large scale fight, it’s not going to bring order to the chaos. The skilled filmmaker is going to be able to bring some sense of coherency to an EVE battle, but only to a point. EVE battles as we’ve all experienced them are not space dogfights.
There’s also the time commitment that would be needed to create a fully-functioning battle recording system. For the number of people that are going to use it, is it worth CCP’s time and effort? Not at all. There are better things CCP could do with their time. And what are player expectations of a battle recorder? I imagine that most proponents of the battle recorder are of the mind that trailer-quality battle videos will be the result. I beg to differ on that front. The battle recorder simply records orbiting mayhem. The video artist will still have to resort to staged battles to get their specific shots and action. It will be just as time consuming for video artists to construct trailer-quality battles with a battle recorder as it is for them to do so now.
We already have video artists creating great videos out of actual battles. A battle recording isn’t going to make their videos leaps and bounds better. Only marginally so. About all a battle recorder is going to do is to save them time. I’m not sure throwing a bunch of resources to save filmmakers a bit of time is time well-spent for CCP.
What video artists really need is the Jessica engine.
Jessica is CCP’s in-house tool for creating game trailers. Ian Chisholm was graciously allowed the use of Jessica when he created Clear Skies 3. Jessica allows the video artist/filmmaker to set-up and film the exact shots they require using all of the EVE Online assets available (ships, weapons, missiles, drones, etc.)
If video artists want to create the sorts of engaging stories they’ve been aching to tell, then the Jessica engine gives them the freedom to do just that. Now they can stage entire battles more easily, without the headache of trial and error and repetition galore within the game itself.
As it stands, if the goal is to just maintain records of battles, they can already be FRAPSed. That’s the simplest form of battle recording. It exists. And is widely used.
If the goal is to give video artists better tools, then Jessica would be the far more engaging and useful option for those people. Far more malleable than a battle recorder. A battle recorder is a rock. You can view that rock from any angle, but there’s little you can do to change the rock. Jessica is clay. It can view from any angle, but it can also be shaped and formed into something more useful to the filmmaker.
If CCP wants to give their players tools to create really engaging and exciting content, then it would be in their interests to polish Jessica for external use and then release it to the playerbase.
Player-created content. Hours of it per month. Created at no cost to CCP. An amazing level of marketing potential sits there, underutilized, in CCP headquarters. If they could get Jessica out into the wild, they’d see huge benefits from it. People love creating. Give them tools to create.
You can read more of Poetic Stanziel’s opinions at his Poetic Discourse blog.
…wiki linking dogfights?
In case some idiot thought I meant actual dogs fighting dogs.
whew, glad to see PS back to his usual level of nonsense after a couple posts that made good sense… I feel better already. If you think eve video artists won't find ways to do amazing stuff with a battle recorder, you're just much less creative than they are. Plus it'd be 10x as valuable to FCs as current videos are.
That said, CCP should indeed not spend their time on a battle recorder. sounds like lots of work on stuff that is not in fact spaceships.
PS does veer back into sense again (stoppit!) when he brings Jessica engine. Why not? As long as it's not a huge effort to push out and all requests for support are met with "piss off", it shouldn't soak up much dev time that's not already being spent for trailers.
I'm only making the case that the Jessica engine is a better use of CCP's time, if they want to give video tools to the playerbase.
All About Jessica interview:
massively.joystiq.com/2011/01/18/eve-spotl…
One big thing it should do is reduce CPU strain on some of us with less that stellar CPUs and let us record harnessing the power in our gpus.
One of the problems with FRAPS is that you only catch one small section of the action. One of the coolest innovations to arrive in the past decade or so (actually when Need For Speed II: Hot Pursuit came out) was the ability to record without actually having to save everything frame by frame. As NFSII showed, all the game actually needed was the raw data that made up the positioning of the vehicles on the track over time. This meant that you could save an entire 20-30 minute race on 2 or 3 blocks of memory on a PS1.
Fast Forward in time, and look at EVE. The destiny system already knows the location of every object in space, and when those objects are doing something. Your client knows when other ships fire their weapons, when their hardeners are on, off, and their cycle information, because the server tells it as much in order to provide the graphics engine with enough information to render the shimmering shields/hull effects and for the turret/missile animations to fire.
It would not be difficult to build a battle recorder that captured all of this data for a grid, and allowed the player to reconstruct it later. Would it be an effective use of CCP's time? Maybe, maybe not. I think that it would be worth it, both as a tool to create art (videos) and as a learning tool, to examine fights and see what happened, from more than just the angle of one random pilot within the fleet. As well, CCP can put this into use for tournaments, showing some replay style video from different angles, different ships at the same time. At the same time I don't think that they should do much more than assign a couple of dudes to tinker with it, certainly not at the expense of something like revamping moon mineral mechanics or ship balancing.
I have thought eve should make a spectate function like many FPS (CS does it) do. This would be awesome for tournaments, it would take a lot of work I would imagine.
This idea is just retarded. You can't have "spectate" in the sandbox. Think of the intel advantage from a "spectator" just following the enemy fleet and relaying the intel back to their guys.
If you want this simply for the tourneys eve has then go watch them on Own3d. Having more entities on grid of a tourney fight would lag it down.
damn good idea imo. the artistic among us would drown in their own drool if an opportunity like this presented itself.
How about Jessica with an ability to import battle recorded data? Eh?
A Poetic post that gets a +1 from me. Jessica please!
I completely disaggree. You are saying that fights don't look like actual dogfights. That is just not true. When local is high that means there are multiple fleets on the field with different characteristics. All fleets have there own targets and all fleets are trying to pull the range against the enemy which is optimal for them. Meanwhile spotgiving tacklers and antitacklers are having there own minibattles too and bombers are keep bombing the field. Also drones are flying back and forth.
The dominion trailer is pretty close to what is actually happening on the battlefield but in videos we only see the little icons and the UI covering half of the screen. Battle records doesn't mean that the creators can't give notes and commentate what is going on. Also in the biggest fights people have to turn off effects even with the best computers. With a battle recorder it would be possible to render even the largest fights in the best quality.
Of course it would be time consuming but who cares if people will be willing to do it instead of ship spinning on the station.
This would be good for us because we could have a tool which help to record important fights in a lot better quality and it is good for CCP because when a potentially new player is looking for gameplay footage after seeing CCP's awesome trailers, their first and last thoughts about the game won't be "What the f*ck is this sh*t!". I know it sounds a little bit harsh but I'm sure that was the first thought for many us when we saw the game for the first time. Or at least it was for me. I came back only after a long time when I was getting tired of all the rest of the MMOs out there.
I'm pretty sure CCP don't want to be the graveyard of bitter MMO players. A battle camera would be a step forward from a marketing point of view.
Of course I'm not saying that Jessica engine isn't a good idea but you are trying to support a good idea by discrediting an another good idea.
Not sure what you guys are talking about. The only PvP happening in EvE at the moment is high sec ganking which we are in charge of anyway. The only big alliance left capable of having a dog fight is Goonswarm and no other alliances in EvE would have the balls to fight us. There wont be any dog fights so you dont need your girly program.
Don't feed the troll, guys. Just ignore him and he'll give up eventually.
Good advice nube keep telling yourself that.
Trolls never go away, they just come back as something else (Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, Bin Laden, Obama, and Goonion).
I'd probably have more fun with the Jessica engine than I ever had playing the game itself… I wonder how many more great shows like Clear Skies would be out if we had this tool publicly available
any decent multiplayer game has demo-system (most first person shooters, starcraft etc.), EVE would be GREAT with demos because you could watch fights back in your EVE client in high quality and look at the things you like. You could use this to make great movies btw. (CTRL-F9)
This will never happen. Basically because it'll null and void their biggest liability waiver ever, "our logs shows nothing"…
Imagine a huge fleet fight, 1000 v 1000…. First half desyncs after jumping in, second half slaughters them easily while they're desperately waiting to load grid. You have 2000 game replays visually promoting "CCP SUCKS!"…
This will not happen. Ever. With CCP. Forget about it. The only software in that house getting proper maintenance, is the credit card billing software…
So fraps certainly doesn't show those things already?
AFAIK CCP has lined out that they aren't going to mass reimburse anything in 0.0 blob fights, no matter how clearly server fucked the fight up. It's something that might happen and usually both sides gets some of it and if you were so stupid that you jumped 1000 man gang on top of another 1000 man gang and your fleet isn't loading grid, you fucking should lost that fleet because of your enormous stupidity.
Fraps will only show POV from a very few people, so CCP doesn't give a rats ass about it. Perception is all that matters, if 3-4 dudes shows a mass fuckup its fair enough, if 2000 people can reconstruct the fuckup and fraps it later on, its a massive PR liability right there. And there will always be somebody with gridvantage, so either way one part has to land on grid to the other part. There is no way around it, that be a gate or cyno jumpin…
Well best solution would be to just make our clients to have ability to record and Jessica ability to playback it, not separate battlerecorder-device
and this will improve game play how???
cool stuff, but please reallize few things:
to battle-record skirmish/dogfight you need to collect data only from few "points of view", or better to say all their actions and reactions, example:
- for dogfight 1vs1 without any other involved parties this is 2 sets of data +drones
- to battle-record you would need to collect data from every involved object that can do actions and react, on grid.
All that data needs to be send to all recording parties, and this esults in an exponential increase of bandwidth use in function of all involved, or CCP will store that data and make them avaible for download? Who is going to pay for that?