Best Of

IeptBarakat wrote: »

Ah the ol' punish the other team for your team quitting idea. I'd rather have the game end sooner than prolong an imbalanced match and cause additional timing inconsistencies per game.

Some players, which seems to be newer players, prefer longer drawn out games. Some players, which seems to be older players, prefer shorter more concise games. I agree with IeptBarakat in that I would rather have shorter more concise games.

Ah the ol' punish the other team for your team quitting idea. I'd rather have the game end sooner than prolong an imbalanced match and cause additional timing inconsistencies per game.

This flavor of the idea hasn't been discussed yet, but we've had past discussions about adjusting resource flow and it was generally agreed that it was a bad idea, mostly due to the inconsistency it introduces. It's just such a fundamental concept of an RTS that it's hard to fiddle with it.

skav2 wrote: »

@NousWanderer with the in-game demo system, could you describe a bit more on how you would think it should work and how the new players can learn from it? Would it work where it puts you into the perceptive of an advanced player so the new player gets a first hand account of those players actions ? Or would it be more along the lines of a top down look at tactics/positioning/John Madden highlighting? Or both.

NS2 lacks a proper demo/recording system. You're likely familiar with the concept. With a demo, gameplay is recorded as-is using the game engine. Graphical settings can be adjusted with changes reflected realtime via demo playback. The perspective can either be a first-person limited demo or something like a GOTV demo (e.g., via HLTV in CS:GO) which allows you to navigate the footage as a spectator, or from multiple perspectives. Either method produces a lightweight file. This technology has many uses. It makes it easy for players to record their own gameplay, the gameplay of important matches, create frag compilations or fan trailers more easily, create match databases for future review, etc. The storage and performance impact requirements are minimal.

It also allows more advanced editing and manipulation of the game footage since you're working with the engine. For example, consider this timestamp from an ancient Team Fortress Classic compilation video created by a Japanese clan in the early 00s: -- you'll note the wireframing and other comparable effects throughout the video. That's possible due to the footage being derived from a demo. Point being: demo files are flexible.

Given the intense, unique nature of NS2's gameplay, this would have been great to have from the beginning to show off the game to wider audiences. Alas. It's likely that players would have come up with some amazing compilations, whereas we only have a few of note.

I suspect but cannot confirm that something along the lines of demo recording would also be necessary for us to have a proper killcam: potentially one of the best learning tools for players to see how / why they died, and avoid making the same mistake in the future.

I based the tutorial idea around demo recordings because they're easy to record, lightweight, and multipurpose. I view it as a development time investment with a high upfront cost, but low maintenance and content generation requirements thereafter. I'm envisioning something like this:

-You load the tutorial system
-You're given a spectator pov of a map (tram, for example)
-There's an additional menu with with a series of tutorials ordered in a logical sequence
-If you click a tutorial, it loads the demo without reloading the map (this may not be easy to do but it would be ideal)
-The tutorial would have a timebar and playback controls for rewinding / jumping ahead / pausing
-The tutorial would have subtitles/text at a minimum, but also be able to playback an optional timesynced audio file for narration
-Ideally, tutorial creators would also be able to specify certain effects like room highlighting or movement arrow overlays in order to illustrate important concepts

I was envisioning something exclusively from the spectator/commander POV for illustrating things like "a top down look at tactics/positioning/John Madden highlighting" - especially re: lanes/zones - but a series of combat tutorials would also be suitable, especially from the first-person or free view perspectives. Things that could be outsourced to the community if this system existed include:

-The actual list of tutorials and their logical ordering
-The text / script for each tutorial
-The actual content of each tutorial via demo recording (as long as it isn't necessary to reload the map when selecting a new tutorial, then it should be possible for a single tutorial to contain multiple recorded blocks of footage, as opposed to everything having to be recorded in one "take" - this would allow tutorial editors to splice things together, for example: "now let's see what might have happened if X did Z instead of Y...")
-The narration and recording of the tutorial

There have been so many attempts at creating video / tutorial content for NS2 which suggests that the will is there. For example: ISEGaming's videos, the ENSL tutorials, the various live tutorials strewn throughout Twitch, etc. These all wind up being less than super effective. That's because:

-The game changes over time, making old videos less useful
-The videos themselves are cumbersome to record and often involve a single take with a lot of unnecessary footage
-The videos are often difficult to find
etc.

The system I'm proposing is envisioned as having multiple uses, or at least involving technology that could be used across multiple features. If NS2 gets a significant (> 1000) influx of players via F2P or a major "NS2.5" marketing push then I think we'd see the real benefit of demo recording. Better social media presence, better tutorials, possibly a killcam, etc. Also, because the tutorial system I've described would be modular, it'd be easy enough to update over time. If a tutorial is outdated, it'd be easy enough to replace. Or, if we identified a topic that really needed some illustration, the developers would just have to do a review of the content we produce, as opposed to having to handle it themselves.