Caster facecams for people with personalities and reactions like lange

We've toyed with using this for online casts, just haven't got round to setting it up properly yet

casters who actually understand whats going on in the game

i dont care what's onscreen (usually casts need more fireplaces tho) i just want to hear good analysis

I actually really like being able to see an aggregate of the team's total health. It makes understanding the tide of a mid fight/ non v non engagement, where there haven't been many picks yet, much easier.

i bolded what should be kept/added
nobody cares about the other things, like who is casting isn't important, but it could be shown between rounds or at the half
this is just my opinion

of course i get -fragged for telling my opinion

I think our current online TFTV setup is pretty optimal in terms of info without visual clutter. I'd personally like to have player names with the player models but I don't know how it could be done without adding too much clutter. I'd expect casters to use it though.

we used this at i52, I personally thought it was too cluttered, but if there's enough requests for it it can be added back in.

I was going to knock out a bunch of map configs for this a while ago, if it's something that people want to see in casts I'll get it done soon.

• Map Score
  Map score in a non-intrusive overlay is good.
  
• Previous Map Score(s)
  Previous map score should be a pop-up overlay every few minutes and/or after a team scores a round win.
  
• Kritz / Medigun being used
  Very good implementation as is; could only be improved if there were some sort of notice upon the medigun type being changed. Perhaps a flashing animation as the text background of the medigun for a few seconds?
  
• Numerical Uber Advantage
  Unnecessary, but it is not-intrusive as is. Indifferent about it.
  
• Overall Team Health
  Waste of space
  
• Individual Player Health (above heads), Individual Player Names (below)
  Unnecessary
  
• Casters Names Overlay, Casting Org Logo Overlay, Team Name Overlay
  I think these would be perfectly implemented in a small transition just on round starts during rollout. Mids take at least 10 seconds to get to other than koth, so just a sliding transition over the screen like the pre-game stuff would be great, maybe a little smaller.
  
• Fixture Overlay
  ?
  
• Player Outlines
  Perfect. I'd like to see the lightness/darkness of red and blu differ more depending on the health of the target; I'm pretty sure TSC has made this possible, but I've not seen any cast utilize it.
  
• Projectile Outlines
  Unnecessary. It could be useful to spot a trap, but watching a trap be det isn't the most exciting anyway.
  
• Fixed Bird's Eye Views (specific pre-determined views)
  Seeing this for a few seconds on early mid and early push fights wouldn't be too bad (no later), then back to player POVs.
  
• Fixed Player Aliases
  Needs to be used more by every caster/organization. Players are always aliased and it looks very unprofessional. Can't tell if anyone is a ringer or not. If a player is a ringer, the tag of their own team should be displayed as well (primarily talking Euro 6s)
  
• Custom Models/Textures for Teams/Sponsors
  Not sure how this would be implemented, but so long as it's not intrusive, I'm fine with it. A sponsor overlay full-time is fine if they're heading an event if it's blended well in terms of transparency and the hud.
  
• Minimap/2DRadar
  Unnecessary. Once checking logs, seeing a heatmap where most battles are occurring/player deaths are could be neat, but not during a game.

Basically huds need to be as minimal as possible, giving you the most information while being simple to read, not a big glob where you're not sure where to look. Not every bit of information needs to be available at the same time, but it is nice to be able to see WHO is casting aside from asking chat.

One thing I've always wondered, perhaps it might be possible in statusspec, is if classes could be organized? 2x Scouts, 2x Soldiers, Demo, Medic from top to bottom to keep uniformity.

Gradients and roundness are a very year 2000 design - square designs and flat textures are the standard, as you can see through major logos like Windows and Google. Huds following more modern design are more appealing to me, but I don't see it too often.

The Kritz/Medigun thing is quite nice in my opinion. It does add clutter though, so maybe finding a way to make it smaller?

i would like to watch whoever is getting ubered in first person pretty much 100% of the time

Wouldn't prevent people asking about it which is the main point of having the previous map scores

This would be a good idea, not sure if it's possible to animate the HUD panels like that though, will mention it.

Player names: agree (see my post above)
Player health: big disagree, it's the best way to see how a 1v1 is progressing, or whether someone behind could make a difference etc

Definitely something we can look into, maybe coupled with caster cameras during rollouts or something?

After compression etc the effect would be pretty miniscule.

As a streamer I wouldn't use these permanently (although they were during GXL), but the main time I would use them is in the case where I know the trap will be effective, I can flash the outlines up for a quick second to locate the trap, then go into freecam over the trap which I think is the best way to spectate one since from the demo's POV it's usually in some corner of the screen and from the dying player's POV you just see them explode seemingly randomly.

This is a (more recent) feature we have as far as I know, hasn't been used yet though I don't think.

I set up player alias binds for all prem teams this season, although they might need updating at the moment, haven't been following much due to IRL stuff. Myself Sim and Suyo all use them though as far as I know.

Corsair/PBL/extv logos were used throughout the maps during GXL. This was a basic texture replacement on the computer running TF2 for the stream, didn't affect the players at all. Player models are harder to implement but it's been discussed/investigated already and seems possible.

Has been added to statusspec, used all through GXL, although it can affect the binds we use to spectate with the current tftv hud which needs to be updated to allow it.

Making it any smaller would make it challenging to fit with the HUD

Would you rather watch the pocket being ubered if I could show you the roamer hitting a double airshot or a scout coming in on the cleanup for a 3k or something along those lines? Similarly, say the casters are talking about the demo on mid but I can see the roamer is going to go huge, would you rather miss the roamer going huge to have the player the casters are talking about on camera?

Genuine question, it's something that's conflicted me for a little while. Currently I go for show all the cool shit and it seems to go down well in general, but there's still a part of me that thinks people might prefer seeing the general flow of an uber or watching the player the casters are talking about. However, when I see that happen and the sniper hits a headshot I've seen complaints about the camera guy. Can't win I guess?

Any opinions welcome.

I don't care so much about the play by play as much as I like to hear the analysis so when a play by play c aster interrupts the analysis it really bugs me, also casters who don't habitually say "ummmm".

really dont like the uber counter mod. everyone who plays should be able to do 1st grade math on their own. you get a better feel for how the uber is built when you can see the actual percentage.

edit: my b, im dumb. guess im just used to the percentage next to the name

One thing that's more from a casting perspective, is there a way to make big events stand out in some way for the casters? I don't know exactly when the the live feed of events that was used at i52 is available for casters, but when it is, some sort of bold text for ubers, drops, med kills, all the big sorts of things that you guys use for making those instant highlights or whatever. One of the most frustrating things for me as a viewer is those situations where the casters talking about a fight as if one team still has ubered while it is plain to see that the uber had been forced earlier on. I understand just how hard it is as a caster, but it would be nice to make these things more obvious to avoid these situations of the casters missing some big play and commentating off of incorrect information.

I don't think previous map scores need to be shown. I always felt it weird that they were shown in ETF2L casts, the specific scores aren't relevant to the current match, just the overall map score is necessary.

If there were a way to put some kind of indication of which base was which (eLevate logo on their last?) that would be neat. Perhaps also on second points and captured mids. Similar to how DOTA 2 has flags that show team logos.

What do you mean?

http://puu.sh/ca6oS/c853e3dbf4.png

You can see the actual percentage on the left.
Glancing at the advantage number is much easier than looking at both uber %s and taking one away from the other.
It also shows which medigun is being used.

could u reliably show me the roamer hitting a double airshot?

watching the person whos invincible for 8 seconds will consistently tell u a lot more about how the push/exchange will go than randomly tabbing through other players hoping to find something cool

did plat hit all his rockets and have a good uber? good im glad u kept the camera on him
did plat miss all his rockets and then get dropped by indust? good im glad u kept the camera on him

Some casters do use the 20sec cheat feed that streamers use and it turns out fairly well. Some casters on the other hand would find they were casting in advance. There is also a live feed available that isn't 20 seconds behind, but I think we need to raise some caster awareness of it. However, there is a lot of information there so it can be hard to extract the useful information out of it.

The previous map scores are there so that people who join the stream in the second map don't ask what the first map score was. Of course you get the odd person who can't read what's in front of them, but it stops the majority of questions like that.
Since (in Europe) we switched to the NA casting overlay which currently only supports a single map, the amount of questions we have from people wanting to know the first map score is staggering.
I'd also disagree about the first map score being irrelevant. If the first map was a 5-0 roll to one team, you could look at how the other team might be demoralised, or if the other team is now winning 4-0 then it's worth noting the comeback compared to the first map.

This is possible through a texture replacement. If you look closely at the GXL stream, the cap point logos were replaced by the Corsair Gaming logo. If we get logos for all the teams we can certainly do this.

European streamers can make use of a cheat feed.

In theory yes, given that we know what's going to happen 20 seconds in advance it's not too hard to show, but we can still miss things by not paying close enough attention to the cheat feed, or the cheat feed might be misleading for example it might say a soldier hits a 100 dmg airshot, but really it was just a direct as someone fell off gully mid but there's no way to know that in advance.

In the (rare) games these days where we don't have the cheat feed due to whatever reason, following the uber is generally the way to go of course.

For the love of god please use a birds eye view of mid fights, you don't really get a sense of what's happening on mids when you just see one persons POV.

Would it be possible for the casters to have keybinds set up to swap to a specific player? Something on the numpad maybe, so when something surprising happens the casters can swap to the right POV faster instead of having to click through multiple people.

I'm pretty sure they do this already.
It's built into the game afaik.

Not built into the game, but provided by the spec plugins.

The streamer side of things on tf.tv is good, i52 VODs were really impressive watching back. The cheat sheet, the plugins everything is cool and I'm sure that there will be even more cool stuff for the next big event. TF.tv's issue is quality control. Back in the early days of tf.tv there were quality casters that actually knew what the fuck was happening and didn't just read the killfeed and that's why their viewership was way higher than vtv's. Now I'm surprised when I see a prem/invite player casting a tf.tv and just assume otherwise. I think plenty of prem/invite players (inactive or otherwise) would be willing to cast and provide some real analysis, but are too lazy to go out and organise it themselves.

On topic though, a nice preset camera angle for mid fights on every map that focuses on the high ground would be awesome. Switching player POV every 5 seconds is annoying and doesn't really convey whats happening on mid.

I think it mainly depends on what kind of audience you're trying to appeal to.

Folks who can generally look at a situation and tell what's going on probably only need rounds for and against and some way to tell who has advantage. The rest can be handled by the casters who are probably looking at things up in the sky.

If you're aiming for people who have no idea what's going on, you'll need your casters to go about things in fairly simple terms, and I'd be more in favor of a more explicit hud that explains who the casters are, what the map is blah blah.

I myself favor a pretty spartan hud, but that's pretty much just my personal preference.

Quick question, what interp/interpratio is used for tf.tv streams?