Chrono Cam in e-sports

I was thinking about quite how the Chrono Cam might change the way PA gets casted and this is what I've come up with so far:

• Rewind to cover something you missed.
• Rewind to show something again in slow motion.
• Rewind to analyse in further detail.
• Rewind to take control and demonstrate something.
• Create a viewport in an alternate part of the timeline. (Not sure how/why this would be used though?)

I don't feel like I would actually use it too much in casts but I guess I need to cast a couple dozen games to really get to grips with how it can be integrated into casting. I find it interesting that it could perhaps make PA casting quite different to traditional RTS.

Can you think of other ways it could be useful in PA e-sports casting?

This is more on the cam than the chrono but I know the cinematic guys always wanted a couple of features.

On E-Sports, rewind combined with player-camera mode could add perspective on specific plays.

Having 2 people do a live cast would be very efficient with replays and stuff since switching scenes into the replay would be possible and very convenient.
If its a recorded cast then cutting out or fading into the replay instead of 2 clicks in the middle of the game would make it look very good.

Just think of all the stuff they do in live sport events. The chronocam makes that possible with very little effort.

Can you give some examples? I don't think a lot of stuff would suit a cast.

Any kind of instant replay?

I don't watch sports but instant-replays like a perfectly executed manoeuvre with slowdown and commentary, play-by-play, recaps for new viewers, instant slomo death replays (Commander deaths for an example), stuff like that.

you'll be able to this sort of thing

One style it would make possible is to proceed from one startegically important moment to the next. Now the casters must fill in the down times speaking about something general or talk about the plays when they are no longer on the screen. With chronocam you can keep talking and vieweing about the cool thing until another cool thing happens. If the casters upkeep this sort of buffer they might also fast forward when things are only heating up and then go to regular speed and slow motion when the tipping point gets reached.

I do know that when I play Achron and I need to find the time I need to micro in I just cursorily binary search where things of strategic importance happen. For example I often just find the time the enemy makes fire contact with me and spend very little time watching the enemy walk from the horizon. If I get one snapshot of them walking towards my units I can questimate on when the point of interest of colliding with my units is.

This way you can load more strategic significance to the same amount of time but it might need special attention from the caster. Playing Achron naturally requires and teaches to effectively fetch and comprehend information from a timeline. If the usual game experience is about viewing the present in a linear fashion then the mindset required to access it in another way may make a unconfortable step to get through. It might very well be that it's too confusing for viewers or that it requires extra professionalism from the caster and way bigger cognitive load on what to focus (as you don't have to decide where to look but when too). There is also the issue that viewers get presented with a different narrative that the players go through in their minds. Planetary Anhhilation isn't going to be a timetravel game so requiring time travel thinking might be a big unnessecary head-scratching cost.

Plotting out narratives that work with non-linear time progression can also be challenging. Sometimes when I am attacked in Achron I go to the future to asses how much I get murdered before I even start to defend myself just to know if a chronoenergy spendage spree is warranted or whether I can be economical about it. I could imagine that a caster could show a before and a surprising after and then show how we got from A to B. Or we can get to a critical breakthrough and then show afterwards how it was prepared well in advance (such as going orbital factory before air etc). Now if a caster wants to highlight a interesting setup they may only allude to it's signifance by theory but with chronocam they have the option to show, not tell what is happening.

So don't expect it to automatically do anythign to casting. It needs a lot of showmanship work to make it have any impact.

I think what will make PA casting truly different is the fact that the battlefield is so enormous. You will very likely have 2+ hotspots that you want to watch at the same time - even in 1v1 matches - and the chrono cam enables this.

This is good and all but first you have to make sure that the game is actually fun to watch which is not the same as fun to play. If the game is not fun to watch, no one will want to watch it.

I tried watching some commentated SupCom FA games, I'm not going to sugar coat it, it's not nearly as fun to watch as say Starcraft 2, most of the time the camera is in zoomed out view and you're watching the battle of the icons... Not to mention the units have no fiddle animations, so when they're not moving they're standing completely still, makes the game feel dull and dead - I understand that they are robots, but still my point stands -.

You make a really good point, mostly people want to see close ups of action and explosions. But it makes it really hard to adequately keep track of the rest of the game when you are close up like that.

Honestly, I think these are the only two reasons you would really use it. Think of it as an "instant replay" with one advantage, you can show something from a different viewpoint or something you missed.

I think where it could come in very handy, is if you actually have the entire game going on through replay, slightly behind the actual game, it theoretically would allow you to ensure the camera that the spectators and viewers are watching was always on the action, although requires an additional camera operator.

I think I agree with you here.

Nice idea, it's possible I could run my 2nd monitor 10-30 secs in front of the 1st monitor to see stuff I'm about to commentate on. Perhaps an option to mirror the screens view/control but put one on a delayed timeline.

All you have to do is adapt and have one eye on another monitor the entire time. Takes skill and time to make it seem natural and that makes a good caster better than average :mrgreen:

In SupCom I'd argue that there is usually a discrepancy between where the player attention is and where the fighting is going on. Well players can be fighting several skirmishes on several different locations controlling both air, land and sea units. Usually you don't get to see the end of a fight because the fight has already been decided while the players and commentators attention has shifted to something else.
Multiple views and Chrono Cam might be able make viewers enjoy PA more, if those tools are applied skillfully.
However I'd dislike if PA sacrifices scale and multi-pronged conflicts in order to be more accessible for the viewers. Making the game both be fun to play and accessible to the viewers sounds tough without being more like Starcraft and smaller scale in general.

Now when I say viewers I mean mostly people watching a live-stream of a realtime game.
I think making an edited video, a commented edited video or even a commented replay where the player is going back and forth showing different points in the game will be greatly helped by a the Chrono Cam.

Showing both/all players' starting game at the same time would be cool. Right now casters keep switching between the two, but now we can show each.

For critical events, showing track-cam and target at the same time (like a nuke travelling to a base showing both the nuke flying in a small window and its target in the main one)

Most of the stuff I can come up with isn't so much practical as just looking really awesome. Being able to operate a casting-station with a few people with the option to swap active window(s) to show on screen (ie; caster A prepares a new window to show while caster B sets a window as active to talk about) would be able to generate effects that put even sporting events to shame.

To be honest I can see a good reason to cast slightly after the action so that casters have a little time to put together cool effects to show to people while they cast.

In Forged Alliance casts currently, even the best casters occasionally have to say "Oh sorry, I missed that little battle but it looks like that guy won and that was important"

The chrono-cam system should fix that problem, casters just can't look at everywhere on the map at once!

A lot of the stuff here is commonly used in other games or mentioned in the OP. I was kinda looking for NEW things related to utilising the Chrono Cam, not existing stuff like replaying something or having two screens showing 2 bits of action simultaneously.

The other thing is a lot of stuff that might seem like a good idea doesn't fit well in a cast. How often do you see a starcraft 2 cast where they rewind and show you something again? I've never seen that done except maybe in a tutorial. It doesn't fit well with the flow of a game to be rewinding and showing things you've just seen again. The only thing I can think of is continuing with game casting and opening a Chrono Cam viewport to replay something while the continuing game is being casted in a main window.

I was thinking, what does the Chrono Cam actually offer that isn't present in other games? Apart from having more than 2 viewports or having viewports from a different timeline I'm not sure if there is much else?

In terms of "relevant to casting", I think that's pretty much it. Time control and different viewports. Of course, those things make a huge difference as is. And enable a lot of things that aren't possible in other games.

As to "how often do you see a cast in starcraft 2 where they rewind", the answer is "never in a live cast" because it can't be done. You can only see it in after-the-fact casts where someone is playing with the replay.