Forum

k

Quoted from kaidus

k

Quoted from AcidReniX

[…]
As for the blue wallhack plugin, I think at VanillaTV we are quite mixed about it. It is a nice visual to have, but I find that it actually takes more enjoyment away from the cast once I’ve got past the novelty factor of the plugin. When spectating 1st person, I want to see the game through the player’s eyes, and not see not have much additional information. Sure, you get their health from the hud, but it’s actually nice to suddenly see a player pop out and see how the player you are spectating reacts. Seeing the player in advance through the wall ruins the surprise for me, and doesn’t make me feel very immersed in their view. Not everyone shares the same opinion, in fact I’ve heard more people like it than dislike it.

There are a few other ideas in development, however they aren’t very intrusive, and while they will enhance the quality of the casts, you probably won’t know anything has changed :)

Actually that’s my exact opinion about the plugin as well, and I voiced it on the tf.tv stream as well. I think it’s great and it should be used but Im talking about casters in this case so they know what’s going on, as a spectator I find that having the position of all players available at all the times takes a lot of the excitement of the game, because you never get the excitement from any surprise picks or awesome backcaps because you always know where everyone will be.

Having the information available for who’s watching on stale situations or before pushes could be great tho, to see how both teams are positioning for the push or attacking/defense, longer than that it really wears off and actually decreases my enjoyment of the game. That’s why I watched the last few game on vanilla instead of tf.tv. Altough tf.tv “sacked” from vanilla some of my favorite casters I still prefer vanilla for the production quality, that’s a big plus and it should continue that way. But you can still merge the best of both and I’m sure in the next few months the tf2 casting scene will see a huge improvement with Arie’s and Blue’s plugins, among other things.

Even if it’s not available at all times for the spectator I think this kind of information provided by these “toys” should be great for the casters at all times, so they have all the information they need and even more on their hands

is is necessary to have the chat in the same column as the match events? If you have a different area where chat is collected, it’ll be less clutter for the casters.

I saw this feature on a couple of the casts last week and I have to say it’s amazing, really great job Arie. Interesting and useful information, very well presented and blends seamlessly into the HUD.

As Kaneco said, I would recommend that it only be displayed at the end of rounds and during stalemate situations. If you were able to display “in the last round” stats after a round and “in the last 20 seconds” stats during a round that would be cool, although I have no idea how difficult that would be. A “total heals” stat would also be nice, but I think an “ubers dropped” one would be a little redundant considering it only happens a few times a match so the casters and spectators are going to know about it anyway. These stats are best used to shed light on information that is interesting and useful but not immediately obvious, like total damage dealt.

Regarding notifications of important events, I suggest some sort of audio cue which could be played to the casters and cameraman only. I’m not sure how exactly they set up to broadcast, whether it’s Skype or Mumble or whatever, but if you joined both you could use one for the actual cast commentary and the other for being informed of these trigger events. This would let the casters and cameraman all know and be on the same page without having the cue broadcast across the stream. If it’s an audio cue you also avoid the problem of having something flash up on the cameraman’s screen (and hence on the stream view). Downsides being that suddenly hearing an audio cue in your ear could be distracting for the casters and derail their train of thought.

Another fairly major (IMO) downside is that it would ruin the excitement and tension you can hear in the casters’ voices when they’re watching a spy going in for the backstab or a soldier bombing the medic. If they already know from a cue (or lack thereof) what’s going to happen it will be difficult to feign that excitement. Perhaps have the cue play to the cameraman only so he can always catch the action, but not to the casters?

EDIT: Wow. Sorry for the wall of text.

TL;DR it’s awesome, keep up the good work and possibly make a couple of tweaks to improve it even further.

Quoted from Arie

That would be easy enough, but it’s hard to pick the right duration. 20 seconds might be too short in some situations.

True, but that will be the case for any time you pick. There will always be some situations where it’s too short and some where it’s too long. Better to just pick a time and go with it I think. Maybe 30 seconds then? Half a minute seems like a sort-of-round number.

Quoted from Arie

Total healing would be nice, but I’m afraid it would just turn into a measure of medic lifespan ;)

Yeah I suppose so. Might be nice for medics to have something on there to brag about but perhaps not the most useful of information :P

Quoted from Arie

I like that idea. Maybe in a different form, simply having the cameraman get stats at a lower delay perhaps? But we might be overloading our poor streamers. Animal is already so busy with picking the right angles, updating scoreboards and showing damage/kill overlay. Hmmm ;)

By lower delay do you mean that instead of cameramen getting “10 seconds till backstab” they will get “20 seconds to backstab”? I think that would overload them, they would have more stuff to remember and multitask. 10 seconds seems like plenty of time to think “ok backstab, I want to see that from first person, who is spy, ok get on his POV”.

Regarding multitasking (and I know I’m straying somewhat offtopic here), would it be possible to share the workload between two people? One who controls the scoreboard, overlays and on-stream graphics, and another who does the actual cameraman work and picks the angles? This would allow the cameraman to focus more on his specific job and pick the best angles, while the other “graphics guy” handles the other easily-forgotten stuff since he has less pressure to watch the action itself.

Again I’m completely ignorant of how the behind-the-scenes stuff of these casts actually works, this may not be possible at all.

Quoted from almightybob

Regarding multitasking (and I know I’m straying somewhat offtopic here), would it be possible to share the workload between two people? One who controls the scoreboard, overlays and on-stream graphics, and another who does the actual cameraman work and picks the angles? This would allow the cameraman to focus more on his specific job and pick the best angles, while the other “graphics guy” handles the other easily-forgotten stuff since he has less pressure to watch the action itself.

Only locally and with two pc’s, so its pretty much impossible with setup we do now.

I’m very negative about medic healing stats because the way tf2 works is that in logs it shows completely wrong stats to real game… If we dont include buffs the final result is down to how much medic likes buffing ppl, not how much he heals in total. And even with buffs included the stats dont fit with stats on medics hud, they usually are about 20% off. That can be somewhere around 5k healing points not logged and because of how it works it wont be constant and equal for both medics. So saying someone is better or worse because bad logs say so isnt something id want to see…

As for streamers log function – it will happen. It doesn’t really make it complicated for streamer at all, since you would generally only want to watch it when nothing is going on.