Mortah - AQTV?
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2006 4:21 pm
Since your other thread got bogged down with random crap and I know you're a programmer and therefore lazy, here's the information you may need if you want to work on this:
http://q2pro.sourceforge.net/ (SkulleR's work, last updated in November?)
http://www.savageforums.com/printthread.php?t=5224 (Q2TV actually existed at one point, if I remember I will try to see if I have a copy somewhere, other people can help out by trying to track it down--I only ever remember seeing it at the old Savage website)
http://planetquake.gamespy.com/View.php ... il&id=1682
http://planetquake.gamespy.com/View.php ... il&id=1683
(Gamers TV, GTV, Q3TV, may provide some insight and MAYBE code, not sure where to even download this... made by arQon of http://www.promode.org/ perhaps? We did use this for the RQ3 tournaments that were also shoutcasted, I believe, and it's been used at QuakeCon when I was involved in that back in the day)
http://www.r1ch.net/ (someone mentioned this guy? In May of 2005 he mused the inclusion of Q2TV-like features into his work, maybe try working with him to include a generalized Q2TV into his work rather than trying to make a specific AQTV--once the groundwork is done you can always modify it to suit your needs)
http://relay.planetquake.gamespy.com/ (this may also provide some ideas)
Your ideas on how to do this:
<i>Have an Q2TV program connect to the server as a spectator. Have that program then act as a server for other clients to connect to. Ideally the Q2TV program would be ran on a machine other than the server so it would only eat up the bandwidth used by a single client.
Then further spectators would connect to the machine hosting the Q2TV program.
As it stands there it is still limited to only a few spectators, depending on how much bandwidth the host has.
Would that be OK?
The alternative is that clients connecting to the Q2TV machine could in turn act as hosts for further clients and these would be allocated when initially connecting to the Q2TV machine.</i>
This is essentially how GTV does it in Q3. And it's pretty much the best method. In fact, GTV has one main connection and then, say, all of its 32 player server slots are filled in by OTHER 32-player GTV servers which are fed by that one initial connection. And I think you can keep cascading if more capacity is needed though 32 x 32 is 1024 possible players spectating so in this theoretical setup, that'd probably be enough.
Don't do any crap like trying to broadcast audio through the server. Let the game events trigger local sounds for the players, let them tune in to Teamspeak or Ventrillo or Roger Wilco themselves. And let them use the game engine's built-in talking function (messagemode/messagemode2/whatever) to talk to people on the local Q2TV server, if they want to type while doing stuff.
The main GTV server/entity that spectates, I believe can be directly controlled by a player/spectator. So you could actually have a 'cameraman' in-game following the action. I'm not 100% sure but I thought there was a way to get split-screen and multiple feeds for GTV, like 4 different people following the action and you can see all 4 at once. But it's been years since I've messed with this kind of stuff, so I don't know.
Either way, you'd want to have someone be able to "control" the Q2TV spectating entity so that spectators won't be seeing a brick wall the entire match. Even if all the controller does is make sure it's on auto-follow whenever everyone dies and the follow loses focus, there should be some consideration for that.
And ZooL and arild might be able to shed some light on the Q2TV they used a few years ago. I figure someone who knows them can point them to this post.
Haudruf's post is at the top of this page: http://forums.aq2world.com/viewtopic.ph ... c&start=45 and provides some additional ideas and information.
Good luck.
http://q2pro.sourceforge.net/ (SkulleR's work, last updated in November?)
http://www.savageforums.com/printthread.php?t=5224 (Q2TV actually existed at one point, if I remember I will try to see if I have a copy somewhere, other people can help out by trying to track it down--I only ever remember seeing it at the old Savage website)
http://planetquake.gamespy.com/View.php ... il&id=1682
http://planetquake.gamespy.com/View.php ... il&id=1683
(Gamers TV, GTV, Q3TV, may provide some insight and MAYBE code, not sure where to even download this... made by arQon of http://www.promode.org/ perhaps? We did use this for the RQ3 tournaments that were also shoutcasted, I believe, and it's been used at QuakeCon when I was involved in that back in the day)
http://www.r1ch.net/ (someone mentioned this guy? In May of 2005 he mused the inclusion of Q2TV-like features into his work, maybe try working with him to include a generalized Q2TV into his work rather than trying to make a specific AQTV--once the groundwork is done you can always modify it to suit your needs)
http://relay.planetquake.gamespy.com/ (this may also provide some ideas)
Your ideas on how to do this:
<i>Have an Q2TV program connect to the server as a spectator. Have that program then act as a server for other clients to connect to. Ideally the Q2TV program would be ran on a machine other than the server so it would only eat up the bandwidth used by a single client.
Then further spectators would connect to the machine hosting the Q2TV program.
As it stands there it is still limited to only a few spectators, depending on how much bandwidth the host has.
Would that be OK?
The alternative is that clients connecting to the Q2TV machine could in turn act as hosts for further clients and these would be allocated when initially connecting to the Q2TV machine.</i>
This is essentially how GTV does it in Q3. And it's pretty much the best method. In fact, GTV has one main connection and then, say, all of its 32 player server slots are filled in by OTHER 32-player GTV servers which are fed by that one initial connection. And I think you can keep cascading if more capacity is needed though 32 x 32 is 1024 possible players spectating so in this theoretical setup, that'd probably be enough.
Don't do any crap like trying to broadcast audio through the server. Let the game events trigger local sounds for the players, let them tune in to Teamspeak or Ventrillo or Roger Wilco themselves. And let them use the game engine's built-in talking function (messagemode/messagemode2/whatever) to talk to people on the local Q2TV server, if they want to type while doing stuff.
The main GTV server/entity that spectates, I believe can be directly controlled by a player/spectator. So you could actually have a 'cameraman' in-game following the action. I'm not 100% sure but I thought there was a way to get split-screen and multiple feeds for GTV, like 4 different people following the action and you can see all 4 at once. But it's been years since I've messed with this kind of stuff, so I don't know.
Either way, you'd want to have someone be able to "control" the Q2TV spectating entity so that spectators won't be seeing a brick wall the entire match. Even if all the controller does is make sure it's on auto-follow whenever everyone dies and the follow loses focus, there should be some consideration for that.
And ZooL and arild might be able to shed some light on the Q2TV they used a few years ago. I figure someone who knows them can point them to this post.
Haudruf's post is at the top of this page: http://forums.aq2world.com/viewtopic.ph ... c&start=45 and provides some additional ideas and information.
Good luck.
