Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

A Battle Recorder May Be Much Closer to Reality

Way back in December I tried to make the case that perhaps CCP's time would be better spent on releasing a Jessica tool (which would allow people to create their own battles, which would lead to more dynamic player-created videos) rather than trying to cobble together a battle recorder.

The argument was based off the fact that many in CCP were steadfast in their statements that a battle recorder was far to difficult and time-consuming a project to tackle. If CCP thought the project was too resource-intensive, then I figured Jessica might be a good middle ground.

Of course, as it turned out, Jessica is very much an internal tool of CCP. Not polished. Nowhere near ready for consumer use. Not too mention that development of Jessica has lagged behind EVE development, not too mention that CCP were not even using it much anymore.

Fast forward eight months, and what do we see as a result of CCP's tournament this year? A Battlespace Simulator. Basically, it is a battle recorder for alliance tournament matches. You can replay any Alliance Tournament XI match in your browser. Zoom in and out however you want. Drill-down and view a specific ship from whatever angle you want. It allows you to watch a match from whatever angles you want.

What was once claimed to be completely off-the-table in terms of development resources ... well, CCP now has a solid proof-of-concept.

Granted, moving from a server-side recorder to a client recorder, they're two (sort of) different beasts. I doubt anybody wants the CCP servers to be responsible for battle recording on any scale. Database considerations. Load considerations. (The alliance tournament fights are small enough that it's not a problem for the servers to record a match without affecting any other processing that has to occur.)

Seems obvious (to me) that you'd want to off-load that functionality to the client, let the player decide when and if they want to record, and then decide whether they want to put up with any additional client lag due to increased processing (we can assume that a client trying to record 6VDT would have been taxing.)

A client recorder would also require a playback tool (something more robust than a browser and WebGL can offer). Of course, given that all the ship models are available, players could create their own viewers on whatever platforms they want, with whatever nifty features they want.

The proof-of-concept is there for a battle recorder now. This may very well be something that CCP is working on for the Winter 2013 or the Summer 2014 expansions. (Or they might not be, nobody knows except CCP and the CSM.) Whatever data that the servers are recording, I'd assume the clients have the same data (cartesian coordinates, vectors, ewar effects, etc.) thus can spit the same out to a local file.

Here's a sample of a single frame (one second server tick, presumably) of data for a single ship from one of the tournament matches:

{
  "physicsData": {
    "y": -793.8044662475586,
    "x": -2607.681427001953,
    "vx": -2.0828461590355337e-12,
    "vy": -6.034987203256968e-22,
    "vz": -1.7836478910283474e-12,
    "z": -534.4640808105469
  },
  "shield": 1,
  "itemRef": {
    "href": "http://public-crest.eveonline.com/items/1011428849377/"
  },
  "armor": 1,
  "effects": [
    {
      "duration": 10000,
      "guid": "effects.ElectronicAttributeModifyActivate",
      "modules": [
        {
          "moduleID_str": "1011429310006",
          "moduleID": 1011429310006
        }
      ],
      "startTime_str": "130194305295175152",
      "startTime": 130194305295175150
    },
    {
      "duration": 10000,
      "guid": "effects.ModifyShieldResonance",
      "modules": [
        {
          "moduleID_str": "1011429327163",
          "moduleID": 1011429327163
        }
      ],
      "startTime_str": "130194303634393632",
      "startTime": 130194303634393630
    },
    {
      "duration": 10000,
      "guid": "effects.ModifyShieldResonance",
      "modules": [
        {
          "moduleID_str": "1008282285951",
          "moduleID": 1008282285951
        }
      ],
      "startTime_str": "130194303626699456",
      "startTime": 130194303626699460
    }
  ],
  "structure": 1
}

No matter what happens, a battle recorder in our future or not, the new CREST functionality for the alliance tournament is pretty darned cool. I like to think it's a proof-of-concept for CCP to give us the ability to do some cool things for ourselves on the client in the future.
Source: A Battle Recorder May Be Much Closer to Reality