Jita Park Speakers Corner

One of the wishlist items at the CSM Winter Summit has been to give the playerbase a battle recorder. CCP (specifically CCP Veritas?) have been quite resistant to this.

I think the main argument from the playerbase in favour of the battle recorder is that video makers will be able to make better videos. With a functional program that can read battle recorded information, video makers will be able to focus on specific ships, pan about using an independent camera, etc.

Granted, a tool like that would certainly make for better videos of actual EVE battles, but would it make for a more exciting video? In some cases, sure, in most cases, probably not. Large EVE battles mostly look like bugs whizzing around a zapper. You have ships orbiting anchor ships, ships orbiting targets. EVE battles do not resemble Star Trek, Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica space fights. EVE battles look like flies buzzing about a corpse. With a battle recorder, video artists simply have the option of recording the pseudo-chaos from different angles, but it's still pseudo-chaos they're recording. They'll have no real options to massage the data. The battle recorder isn't going to make sense of a large scale fight, it's not going to bring order to the chaos. The skilled filmmaker is going to be able to bring some sense of coherency to an EVE battle, but only to a point. EVE battles as we've all experienced them are not space dogfights.

There's also the time commitment that would be needed to create a fully-functioning battle recording system. For the number of people that are going to use it, is it worth CCP's time and effort? And what are player expectations of a battle recorder? I imagine that most proponents of the battle recorder are of the mind that trailer-quality battle videos will be the result. I beg to differ on that front. The battle recorder simply records orbiting mayhem. The video artist will still have to resort to staged battles to get their specific shots and action. It will be just as time consuming for video artists to construct trailer-quality battles with a battle recorder as it is for them to do so now.

What video artists really need is the Jessica engine.

Jessica is CCP's in-house tool for creating game trailers. Ian Chisholm was graciously allowed the use of Jessica when he created Clear Skies 3. Jessica allows the video artist/filmmaker to set-up and film the exact shots they require using all of the EVE Online assets available (ships, weapons, missiles, drones, etc.)

If video artists want to create the sorts of engaging stories they've been aching to tell, then the Jessica engine gives them the freedom to do just that. Now they can stage entire battles more easily, without the headache of trial and error and repetition galore within the game itself.

As it stands, if the goal is to just maintain records of battles, they can already be FRAPSed. That's the simplest form of battle recording.

If the goal is to give video artists better tools, then Jessica would be the far more engaging and useful option for those people. Far more malleable than a battle recorder. A battle recorder is a rock. You can view that rock from any angle, but there's little you can do to change the rock. Jessica is clay. It can view from any angle, but it can also be shaped and formed into something more useful to the filmmaker.

If CCP wants to give their players tools to create really engaging and exciting content, then it would be in their interests to polish Jessica for external use and then release it to the playerbase.

Player-created content. Hours of it per month. Created at no cost to CCP. An amazing level of marketing potential sits there, underutilized, in CCP headquarters. If they could get Jessica out into the wild, they'd see huge benefits from it. People love creating. Give them tools to create.

copied from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2012/12/battle-recorder-vs-jessica.html

Against, strangely for me.

From what I know; the inhouse tool you speak of takes a week's worth of training, just to get a ship to fly in a straight line and the only people who have been allowed to jump into training either were going to be employed by CCP, or were already working for CCP by proxy (E:ON magazine has a copy for cover shots).

In addition to that, it is a tool for testing, not for video creation, and it carries in the code CCP's render engine which must not be made public because that would mean anyone could put assets (models and textures) into it and probably compile it.

CCP were running a training session at a time when Ian was requesting assistance, so they did not lose out by having him attend at the same time they were going to do the training for other people.

In addition to that, he was not given a full-copy, but a 'lite' remote copy, as the actual version used for the trailers is tied into the main servers at CCP HQ, which is why the trailers have high-resolution cubemaps and textures on the ships, according to CCP's youtube page.

If you want CCP to release something for video creation, it would take considerable effort and time to do this - and you have to ask yourself: If they needed to do this internally, they would have do so and a 'player ready' copy would be more likely.

Time and money? Sorry, but I have to turn off the creative side of my brain and look at the bigger picture which would be content and balancing of EVE.

RE: Battle recorder.

I understand the reason you will not and can not have a battle recorder with EVE is due to the recording of other clients on the same grid is a security threat, and that if the game was written from the beginning with this in mind, then it would have been possible, but they didn't and it's not, so, you cannot have a security risk of recording the packets from multiple users on the same grid.

I sympathise you should be able to record to a secure sever at CCP's HQ and then download the file to be played back through the client, but this would involve stripping/partitioning out the game code/render code/secure code so you are left with something that can be 'played back'. The difficulty in doing this at the stage of development EVE Online is at currently is beyond possible.

Which is a big shame.

Summing up - I do not disagree with the intent of your post, just the implications which surround it.

For now, the only people which should have a copy of Jessica 'lite' are the people who work (in)directly for CCP - but the code Ian has is very old code now. And a battle recorder is out of the question.

What would be more likely is asking for better camera angles and tools for getting the right shots inside the game, or, creating something yourself which would record the DirectX calls which go through your video buffer. I saw some code somewhere which did this, and it enabled the ability to record the DirectX calls and then replay them from any angle and at any speed - very cool. Whatever you look into, make sure you check with CCP it isn't in violation of the EULA.

AK

This actually isn't the issue. Your client already gets all the information it needs to display all the other ships on the same grid, which is all you need for a battle recorder. The main issue is that there are 2 basic ways to implement a battle recorder:

1) Save the state of the world at the start of the recording, then save all the network packets the client receives. You can then replay them.
2) Invent a new mechanism that saves out the positions and states of all the ships and effects.

#1 is the easier approach, but CCP Veritas found that there were some issues with the way the client was built that make it hard. That means the only workable approach is #2, but that is a lot more work. The CSM has urged CCP to do the work, but it is up to them.

That shouldn't be an issue. Clients aren't even told about cloaked ships, so there is nothing to record...

IMO, checks for potential bumping are done server-side, then, if bumping happens, the server tells the client "a ship just got uncloaked".

Otherwise, you could check all the grid with a modified client for cloaked ships...