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Camera elements that can link to screens


Sybily

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Perhaps people could create security cameras throughout their base (or large space station) and can monitor them from a control room. This might add an interesting twist to PvP.

 

Another use case would be for large ships that would otherwise be difficult to land or maneuver through structures or or cities (though a 3rd person view might mitigate this point). Or perhaps to allow a ship captain to better orchestrate the crew on-board.

 

I'm envisioning a control room like in sci-fi movies that have dozens of monitors, each of which correspond to different cameras. 

 

I'm not sure what technical hurdles would be to achieve this, but the cameras could be a low frame rate and low resolution. For cameras near the player, i would imagine that the image can be rendered on client side (I don't think trusting the client for this would be an issue since its the client viewing the images in the first place). Cameras at a distance from the player would have to render the images server side when the player approaches the monitor I would think. I can't say what the performance considerations would be for that but perhaps long distance cameras would have a hefty cost to operate, so as to artificially reduce the amount players make, thus less work for the server.

Of coarse I could be speaking out of my a** in regards to the implementation details but those are just my thoughts. So I'll leave it up to the Dev Team :)

 

 

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I really like the idea of setting up a camera system and linking cameras to a monitor somewhere. This is (sort of) a feature in space engineers and it has helped the game in so many ways. Just be sure to allow the camera to rotate when viewing!  Though to save on game processing resources, I think it would best for these camera feeds to not be constantly live broadcasting on a screen itself. Instead a person would need to press a button to view the camera feed. 

Additionally the camera could also be mounted on crafts for better visibility when in use. In space engineers it is common to use cameras on fighters because it helps the pilot to see so much more during combat. 

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You can also imagine spy satellite ( with a lua program inside ) to take picture at a point defined when warfare will be implemented.

 

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But it seems that lua program doesn t work in a device when it is far away from the owner-player.

Maybe in the futur of DUAL, this will be possible.

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On ‎12‎/‎12‎/‎2018 at 3:26 PM, Sybily said:

I'm envisioning a control room like in sci-fi movies that have dozens of monitors, each of which correspond to different cameras. 

 

I'm not sure what technical hurdles would be to achieve this, but the cameras could be a low frame rate and low resolution. For cameras near the player, i would imagine that the image can be rendered on client side (I don't think trusting the client for this would be an issue since its the client viewing the images in the first place). Cameras at a distance from the player would have to render the images server side when the player approaches the monitor I would think. I can't say what the performance considerations would be for that but perhaps long distance cameras would have a hefty cost to operate, so as to artificially reduce the amount players make, thus less work for the server.

Of coarse I could be speaking out of my a** in regards to the implementation details but those are just my thoughts. So I'll leave it up to the Dev Team :)

 

 

I like the idea of using cameras to then port to a "Control Room" of monitors. Likewise damaging cameras could knock out the aiming systems or info on where to shoot. You'd still need crew running around mending things, but the combination of information in one room or a few rooms would help the command structure and sense of sociability during combat.

 

Likewise no idea what options are available to create such a system using LUA to "live feed"? Or perhaps just "feed a relevant picture" for quality of accuracy to be inputted into firing systems to improve their stat success...

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/12/2018 at 7:26 AM, Sybily said:

Perhaps people could create security cameras throughout their base (or large space station) and can monitor them from a control room. This might add an interesting twist to PvP.

 

Another use case would be for large ships that would otherwise be difficult to land or maneuver through structures or or cities (though a 3rd person view might mitigate this point). Or perhaps to allow a ship captain to better orchestrate the crew on-board.

 

I'm envisioning a control room like in sci-fi movies that have dozens of monitors, each of which correspond to different cameras. 

 

I'm not sure what technical hurdles would be to achieve this, but the cameras could be a low frame rate and low resolution. For cameras near the player, i would imagine that the image can be rendered on client side (I don't think trusting the client for this would be an issue since its the client viewing the images in the first place). Cameras at a distance from the player would have to render the images server side when the player approaches the monitor I would think. I can't say what the performance considerations would be for that but perhaps long distance cameras would have a hefty cost to operate, so as to artificially reduce the amount players make, thus less work for the server.

Of coarse I could be speaking out of my a** in regards to the implementation details but those are just my thoughts. So I'll leave it up to the Dev Team :)

 

 

I think this is a great idea Sybily. Proper placement of cameras in a control room could be a game changer when trying to defend your base or for the commander of a larger construct. I would really like to see this feature implemented.

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I think this is a great idea, but there are some serious technical hurdles to consider:

  • If the camera being viewed is near the player, then their GPU load will be (roughly) doubled since the scene needs to be rendered from a second perspective.
  • If the camera being viewed is NOT near the player, then their CPU and GPU load (as well as their network utilization) will all be (roughly) doubled due to the camera having to compute the scene (voxels, elements, players, etc) and render from that perspective.

In some games, this isn't a big deal because you can just offload it to another thread since you are not using much of the CPU or GPU.  However in more complex games where you are already using a substantial portion of the client's resources, you can't due that and it causes everything for the player to slow down.

 

Some examples:

  • In the FPS "Insurgency: Sandstorm" when using a scope with zoom, the game renders the scene twice- once for the scope at its specific zoom level, and once for everything outside the scope with no zoom.  This isn't a big deal because the scenes aren't very complex, and it can be turned on/off with the graphics settings.  Not having this feature doesn't put anyone at a disadvantage.
  • In Space Engineers, there is a source mod that allows exactly what is proposed in this thread- viewing cameras on a screen.  Having more than a couple of cameras can bring a client's PC to its knees due to the complexity of the scenes in the game, and can even grind servers to a halt.  Unfortunately in games like SE and DU, not being able to see the screens due to having a weaker computer could be a significant disadvantage, so having it as a setting isn't fair.

I suppose you could offload this extra rendering to the server, but then you need to stream the camera's view to everyone that can see it's screen, thus consuming tons of bandwidth on top of the extra server resources.  Basically, I love the idea, but I'm not sure how technically feasible it is considering the extreme complexity of scenes in Dual Universe.

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10 hours ago, SGCam said:

I suppose you could offload this extra rendering to the server, but then you need to stream the camera's view to everyone that can see it's screen, thus consuming tons of bandwidth on top of the extra server resources.  Basically, I love the idea, but I'm not sure how technically feasible it is considering the extreme complexity of scenes in Dual Universe. 

Could the camera's view be converted into a format, that uses very little bandwidth, when being streamed?

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