TFportal managed to obtain an interview with Robin Walker a few days ago, and there’s quite a few interesting bits in it. Now the questions were asked before the spy update, but the answers were only received much later, rendering a couple of questions outdated.
The main bit which caught my eye was a section about a new demo format valve is working on.
Robin Walker: It’s getting close to being releasable in a beta form. The idea is that after you die or finish a round, and it was a round you were particularly happy with (maybe you scored an awesome kill, or saved the entire team with an ubercharge), you can ask the server to send you a demo of it. The server then sends you a demo that it recorded, which has the complete game state instead of just what your client saw, and it’s in a format that’s robust and won’t break as easily when we update the game. In addition, the format has a some side benefits, like supporting full backwards & forwards time scrubbing.
Awesome. Hopefully it will include something that makes smoothing less of a pain in the ass.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
“Awesome. Hopefully it will include something that makes smoothing less of a pain in the ass.”
Well, that’s one thing im hoping for.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Wouldn’t that cause immense masses of unused data? Each server would have to pre-record every single match and store the file in case someone would like to see the demo of it.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
@Fimbul: Actually there is a way you can do this achieve this right now. SourceTV demos aren’t large, typically a 25 minute match lands at under 15 megs. Add a couple of tricks such as automatically downloading the demos to another server and writing a couple of scripts to prune them periodically and you’ve got yourself the feature Valve’s talking about.
Of course the current demo system doesn’t support time scrubbing at all, and it’s just plain buggy in general.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:35 am
Yeah I do this with my server now, I’m curious if any other servers do this.
http://gamedownloads.nom-nom-nom.us/tf2demos/
July 13th, 2009 at 8:00 am
@Ratty: I have set up something like that actually, but I can’t publicly post the link. Once it’s fully automated, it’s a very nice thing to have.
The spray downloads on your site are interesting, though I probably couldn’t do something like that using a script on Gameservers. Everything would work except the vtf conversion, since I can’t really run linux scripts on rented game servers.