Hey, everyone, I've been brainstorming this for a while now, and I think I've finally got all the specifics down enough that I'd like to put out a call for coders to both provide feedback and maybe to help make this idea a reality.
For a long time, other members of the competitive TF2 community and I have been dissatisfied with the limitations of the spectator HUD, even in tournament mode, and Valve support has been very sparse as far as feedback towards the idea of improving the capabilities of the spectator system, so a few other people and myself have drawn up some things that we feel would vastly improve the spectator experience for TF2. I don't exactly know how some of this stuff would be implemented, or how difficult it would be, so that's why I've turned to you all.
This plugin would theoretically be closely integrated with the HUD, and turn the static elements of the advanced spectator hud/tournament HUD into dynamic objects that allow for a much enhanced viewing experience.
The first thing I hope this will be able to do is to make it so that clicking on the box of a player in the tournament HUD would automatically spectate them, in first-person mode. This would make it easy for streamers doing live casts to quickly switch from a free-roam omniscient viewpoint to the viewpoint of a roaming soldier bombing in, or to a demoman who has just popped someone up and is attempting an airpipe, or a spy going in for a huge backstab. This would address the issue of having to bind keys to spectate individual players, or cycling through all the players to get to one, and again, make the casting/viewing experience a whole lot easier and more enjoyable.
The second thing I wish for this plugin to be able to do (and feel free to indicate if this would require an entirely separate plugin), is to visually display stats for each player, that would be updated in real time. The way I envision this working is also through the dynamic objects of the HUD, as previously mentioned. Instead of clicking on the box, if you simply hover over a player, a small box would pop up that displays 2-3 key stats, such as total ka:d, total damage, and etc (total heals, total ubers, and dropped ubers for medics). Here's where it gets a little complicated. The stats would be obtained from a parser that would output data from the log (which is updated in real-time) of a match currently being played, making sure to add the appropriate output delay given that STV relays most commonly are behind by 2 minutes. The plugin would take the output data, updated in real-time alongside the logs, and, as stated above, visualize it in a small pop-up that appears next to a player's name when you hover over their box.
Those are the two major goals/additions that I see this project accomplishing, and I thank you now for having read through it and in advance for any feedback that people can offer.
Any interested parties can contact me via pm on this site, email (
[email protected]), or on steam (I'm the only svfrey), to provide extra feedback, or to discuss compensation if you are interested in offering your coding services to this (potential) project.
Thanks again, and cheers!
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