Multi-Casting Games

From the message board:

just a thought for a future enhancement:

If this game really catches on, there may be competitive tournaments – eg. two teams in a module go head to head, the winners move up the ladder.

And if anything like that catches on, there’s going to be demand to enable spectators. There’s already support for a few spectators, as limited DMs. How about adding support for a whole crowd of spectators, via multi-cast?

A few spectators would act as camera persons, with a special “camera” client mode or add-on that forwards it’s results to a multicast server. Spectators would watch with a “TV” mode, where they can’t control the view, but perhaps can choose between several views.

We’ve tossed the idea of spectator modes around a bit and the concept of a multicast server ties into that very nicely (ValvE is currently doing some interesting work and research into that right now). Will it make it into NWN? That’s hard to say – we’d like to but we have to make sure that the other client types (DM, Player) are solid first.

Good question,
Rob Bartel
Co-Lead Designer