Viewing Rooms for GST
 

I think it would be a great addition to the gst if the viewing room for players who have passed the first round gets updated(I think they're called levels lol?). The public viewing room currently have 6 spar boxes but there are only 4 spar boxes viewable for players who are participating in the GST. This makes it impossible for the people participating to watch any of the PC spar matches, which I'm sure most of the community would also like to watch. I'm not sure if this is the right section to post it, but I think this would be of help in the future gsts!

Yes I noticed this too! I like watching it in the GST room because there is less people there so it's less laggy in the room and it's easier to find fellow GSTers but I had to leave that room last GST because they didn't have the viewing room where my guild was Sparring so I couldn't even watch it in there.

Wat

There really just ought to be a UDP stream for events spectators. Scripters aren't going to be able to do that since I'm pretty sure TCP/UDP control has always been handled by the client, and someone told me they nixed UDP.

Not even sure what that means @ deadowl. If anyone knows anything about scripting, please explain it in a simpler form lol. I've just always thought that they could just duplicate the public room..

omg yes finally someone who has the same opinion as me

But I think they only added 4 to reduce the lag of the entire server.

I don't really care about mixed gst because it's always the same few teams(Alumni, War etc.) that place so it's not really worth watching imo. I think they should put the iDevice and Mixed gsts in different viewing rooms so we can choose which one we want to watch. Either all iDevice matches or all mixed matches. Idk if that makes sense lol im still kind of tired.

So on the internet, the two most common transport protocols are UDP and TCP. A transport protocol is the technology that's responsible for transmitting data between two computers. TCP ensures that all data gets through. UDP doesn't.

Here's a really dumbed down version. TCP is ideally 3 steps which is what happens if you leave out all the 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, and 2.2:

1. Hey other machine on the internet, can you give me this data?
1.1. Hey other machine on the internet, did you get that? I'm asking for this data. (Repeat as needed)
1.2. I saw you tried sending me a message, but I couldn't understand it, could you try again? (Repeat as needed)
2. Here's the data.
2.1. Hey, did you get the data? I'm not hearing that you got the data. (Repeat as needed)
2.2. Hey other machine on the internet, I didn't hear that! the signal's bad can you try again? (repeat as needed)
3. Okay I got it.


UDP is more like:

1. Server can you give me the data?
2. Sure, here ya go, if any of the data gets screwed up on the way, I provided a means for you to figure that out.


So basically what goes on with TCP connections (which everyone is using), is that there is chatter back and forth between your player, the server and other players. The more players there are, the more data being sent, the more lag.

Now with events, you could maintain TCP connections for the host and the participants, and set up a client feature for spectating events that just blasts data over UDP to everyone that wants to watch, everything's just being broadcast by the server and if you get a fuzzy signal you have to live with that. That would prevent lag from the number of spectators causing issues, while at the same time making it available for viewer consumption. It's not all that different from someone running a Twitch stream alongside an MMO (minus the IRC).

A crude MS Paint chart:

Attachment 18048

Edit: should note that I don't know whether players game clients talk directly to one another (I speculate that they do), but it definitely increases the volume of data being transferred, in which case the lines on the left side of the graph would represent data transfer sources and destinations without intermediaries.

The least trivial way to implement this would just be to have events streamed to a service like Twitch by a host (assuming they can stream a full screen version) or a bot. Doing it at the server level would be a more difficult task and would require a programmer with a background in computer networks programming.

ya, I never understood why there are 2 vastly different viewing rooms

I agree

In a perfect graal world we would be able to sit at one GS square and scroll between the 6 GS squares. Would take away the need to run around looking for matches.