Killer view

[LoNi_]

Hey everybody,

This is a suggestion for the game and not for the ladder, and I have no idea if is this impossible, however I will ask for...

I have been playing too much Call of Duty lately, and in this game, after you die, if you wait you can see the last 5 seconds of your killers view.

Thats would be awesome in Descent.

Is that possible?

LoNi_

[Drakona]

That would be prohibitively difficult.

Descent has a single global idea of what the mine looks like -- what doors are open, what powerups are where, shots in the air, timeouts on things, and so forth. It uses that single scratch pad any time it wants to display something, whether it's your viewpoint, a missile cam, rear view, marker cam, and so forth. It also updates that state whenever it receives information over the net. So while it's easy to add more cameras to the mine, it's very hard to display something that *isn't* happening right then. That would require splitting the scratch pad into two; one to keep receiving updates on the current netgame, and one to go back five seconds and display what happened. And that scratch pad isn't a single structure; it's actually a lot of them, accessed and updated in hackish ways throughout the codebase.

I won't say it's impossible; nothing in software is ever impossible. But the amount of reengineering it would take to support something like this would be an order of magnitude more than anything I've attempted or intend to attempt. The risk of introducing bugs would also be a couple orders of magnitude more than anything I've done.

That *does* sound pretty cool, and there may be a clever way to accomplish it more easily, but I can't think of what it would be right off.

[bahamut]

I think we should just be patient and wait until somebody completes Observer mode
Or learn to code

[Jediluke]

Drak, can you just make a mod of COD that makes it look and act like Descent

[Drakona]

Security professionals were puzzled today by the appearance of a new virus spreading like wildfire across the net. Targetting machines with popular games such as DOTA and COD, the virus installs a mod to the games, adding a mode that consists of a quirky, 6dof flight simulator.

"It's actually a surprisingly good little game," said one industry source. "So we're not sure who would want to do this or why."

The mods offer identical performance and are cross-compatible in multiplayer, despite targeting games with wildly different engines. In fact, in many cases, the virus must first add a modding system to a game that does not natively have one, before delivering its payload. "It's basically the hardest possible way of doing things," commented our source, "so we can only assume the programmer was bored and wanted to show off."

- The Onion

[Ryguy]

Like

[Sirius]

The easiest way I can think of to do this is to secretly record a demo behind the scenes from the other player's point of view, and for the kill-view cam, break out the last 5 seconds into a separate file, suppress the sound from the game, spawn another instance of Descent just to play the demo, redirect the graphics to an off-screen frame buffer, blit that into the original instance (might be able to skip the last two steps and just overlay it if the windowing system supports it but that'd be iffy), and shut it all down once you're done.
To save time, it would prevent you from using the demo recording functionality for the normal purposes while this is active.

[Drakona]

Right, all that and we have to disable demo recording. And it's harder than it sounds (recording a demo continuously isn't easy, and fast-forwarding it to a given point isn't trivial -- witness that the existing program screws it up.) And it doesn't work well if there are three players in the game. And that's the easy way.

I am reminded of .

[Djcjr]

Talking about things I'd like to see implemented, regardless if they're possible or not (didn't feel like starting a new thread. I'm hijacking this one!):

1. A progress bar for demos.

2. The ability to join games in progress as a spectator.


If I win the lottery (gotta play it first), I'd put you on the payroll, Drak.

[bahamut]

KB ramping and 3rd person view