Plan for Joel Baxter

The Daily: All quiet on the kvm front. A relaxing evening of spectating.

The Daily for Nov 14 2002:

The kvm switch issue has hopefully been resolved as of this afternoon (see yesterday's .plan and comments) and I have my office all happy now. Got Torque and Grav running on both Windows systems and a dedicated server on Linux. My desktop system, which has been unused for a while, is really a mess though. I have the various drivers updated now, but I'm feeling this terrible urge to wipe it clean and re-install stuff from scratch. Must resist; I've spent too much time on this as it is. Also, I probably need to keep that system on Win98 to give me a wider variety of OSs to test on, and if I'm going to take the time to rebuild a system from scratch it would be a shame to end up with Win98 after all that work. :-) So it stays untouched... for now. The random bluescreenings will just be part of its charm.

I took some time off this evening to watch some Quake 3 league play on GTV. Couldn't be easier: I fire up the All Seeing Eye server browser program, select the 1.32 GTV checkbox, and refresh those servers to see what's going on. If the speakeasy.net GTV server has clients on it, I know they're probably watching a game from a team deathmatch competition or perhaps some 1-on-1. If the Rise & Fall GTV server has clients on it, I know they're watching some Q3CTF. Double-click on the server name and ta-da, I'm in there spectating too.

For those of you not familiar with GTV (or similar programs for other games), the gist is that the GTV server program connects to a Q3 game server as a normal spectator client, and Q3 clients can connect to the GTV server. The GTV server broadcasts the view of the game to the connected clients. These spectator clients can see the game, and talk to each other, but they can't talk to players in the game or otherwise affect the game in any way. (Also, the GTV broadcast is on a delay so that spectators can't pass key realtime information to the players by some other means like the telephone.)

I know there are a lot of people, even people who religiously play and/or create games, who can't understand the appeal of watching someone play a video game. For most of the games going on out there, I'm not interested either. But in a multiplayer game that I understand well, and that has some skill depth, I can get quite a bit of entertainment value out of watching a game. Especially if I know the styles and histories of the players and teams, and if the game has some context, like league play. (If none of that applies, then of course it's just pretty pictures on the screen, and it doesn't make for interesting viewing.) Double bonus entertainment points if it's a Q3CTF game being played on a map I made, which has happened in recent leagues. :-)

GTV coverage for Q3 tournaments has become an expected thing, and recent big events have also sported simultaneous shoutcast streams with the "shoutcast DJs" doing color and play-by-play, as well as pre- and post-game shows with music, predictions, interviews, etc. (The same is true for Return to Castle Wolfenstein and, I believe, Counter-Strike. Tribes has long had the shoutcasting, but I don't think it has a spectator broadcast program.) When you've got a top-notch shoutcast DJ or two, a great game unfolding on your screen, and a crowd of GTV clients cheering and talking smack, to me that can be about as entertaining as watching a sport on TV. Hope that doesn't make me too geeky...

The spectator geeks are legion, BTW. Even a random Q3 league game of no particular importance can pull dozens of spectators, and a WCG or CPL "world championship"-type game will get hundreds or thousands. I'd bet that the spectator crowds for big Counter-Strike games are larger, given the relative size of its playerbase. So, this phenomenon is worth pondering for game developers who are working on multiplayer games, especially multiplayer action games. Kudos to id and Valve for actively assisting the development of spectator-broadcast software for their games. I don't know if it's something that small indie software developers should worry about too much; you do really need a large player base for this sort of thing to take off. But who knows?

If you haven't tried this spectating thang and you'd like to, generally you just need the latest version of the game client, and also the mod (if any) that is being played for the game you want to view. geeteevee.com has more info on Q3 GTV and RTCW WolfTV, along with a tiny extra download that is required for WolfTV. Not sure about the best place to go for the word on Counter-Strike spectating, but if you Google on HLTV I'm sure you'll find something. :-) The other issue is finding a GTV/WolfTV/HLTV server to connect to. For organized competitions, relevant info is usually listed in the channel topic of the IRC channel associated with the competition; for the really big tournaments, such info is also often provided at gaming news sites. Or, as mentioned above, for Q3 GTV you can just use All Seeing Eye to see if "anything's on".

Hit me up if you need any more info.