First look at Picture in Picture/minimap

Have some fairly awesome UI plans which we've been waiting for Uber's promised "new and improved" UI before we start serious work on. It's getting towards time to start on this, I think.

We will still be pretty limited in our use of those picture in picture windows. You may have the best graphics card available, but you're going to be bottlenecked by the network when you start doing too much with the chronocam and PiP. I'm a little worried that they might end up disabling chronocam in those windows.

Now you can keep an eye on the "bot king" brad, meta lol. Happy hunting.

This, added to the Ping feature... man there are so many awesome possibilities with PiP. A commander vision that simply tracks him at all times would also be very handy.

Bring up the console (`), then type "viz gbuffer" (without quotes).
"viz default" turns it off.

I'm pretty sure the PA network architecture just involves sending your computer everything you observed happening (in the form of "curves"), so PiP and multiple chronocams would all be drawing on the same pool of information as the main window. Unless you know something I missed.

At least in the future Uber will try to only send the exact same data that you are seeing. So adding more stuff you see adds more network load.

Would it be possible to have the mini map move with units? So rather than just being a security camera, you have a bot army making raids but you have to focus your attention elsewhere for some reason and could check in as they moved around.

They said you have the same control as you do in the main window. Select a unit in the mini-map and press 't' and it should track.

It's PIP not minimap! So yes....

Ah, I didn't know about the t button. XD

Garat said in his stream that we should be able to control the PiP camera through mods just like the main camera, so I expect to see (or make) an alert mouseover mod.

What I want to do is get data from multiple times in the game at once using the chronocam. I'm assuming this would double the bandwidth requirement.

would the developement on this also mean dual screen is on the rise?

If your "second window" replay something in past that you already seen it's won't require more bandwidth because PA cache in RAM all data received from server. Obviously if it's "play" something you didn't seen it's will require more bandwidth, but It's possible to add some optimization that allow update those windows less often, e.g with 5FPS instead of 10FPS so such windows won't be as smooth, but will use twice less bandwidth.

Incredible! Actually, that makes sense. It explains why the chronocam bugs used to happen the way they did before this build.

It's also main reason why memory usage goes higher in games with tons of units.

For testing you might start game with idleing AI, then build one firefly and 300 stingers and command them to attack patrolling firefly. You'll notice that bandwidth usage go pretty high, but if you stop attacking and "back in time" with ChronoCam it's will barely use bandwidth.

I'm going to make a mod that puts the PiP at 2 seconds before an event when you mouseover a notification. It will go back to the previous view when you mouse out.

Like the idea, though didn't seen any confirmations it's will be possible yet.

I asked on garat's stream, He said you can control the PiP through javascript just like the main camera.

That just reminded me I never finished the mod that added alerts to the chrono cam bar. Looks like I could tie it into PIP as well.