Battle after action report API

[hollond_novac]

I am suggesting a new form of api similar to a play by play after action report for PVP combat.

This API will give out timing, targeting data, relative positions of players and objects on grid, deaths, kills, and other relevant data required to paint a nice picture of the battle that occurred.

Firstly, this API will allow the community to develop new tools and applications that players and spectators will use to enjoy looking at battles after they have occurred in either an interactive video or gif or spreadsheet. FCs can look over ship movements and actions to see what improvements can be made. DPS players will be able to see how they handled the battle on a grand scale. Logibros will finally get the recognition they deserve.

Secondly, outside news sites like Kotaku and Rock, Paper, Shotgun love to report on major battles that occur from time to time on Eve. I can see this new system perfectly complementing those articles and getting the general public excited for EVE Online with nicely defined and good looking versions of those battles without tidi, potato-mode graphics, and thousands of unidentifiable purple/grey/blue/red squares.

Arma 3 has an excellent mod called OCAP the gives you a picture of the first step of what we can accomplish with this kind of data. I will post a link to a video of it working here

Thank you all for taking a look at this,
Hollond Novac

[Wander_Prian]

Recording all that information would lead to the server having a really bad day. I highly doubt it’s gonna happen. Too much performance-loss for everyone.

[hollond_novac]

The server is already recording all that information in order for all user actions to be sent to all clients involved. At worst case scenario the server would take a hit of having one more client watching the battle. That’s hardly a serious performance hit.

[Old_Pervert]

There’s a big difference between “in and out to everyone” and “in and out to everyone and also into a database”.

It’s all stateless data presently. “Ship 1 is at coordinates x,y,z”, “ship 1 is locking ship 2”. It sends out the first to everyone, and the second only to ship 2.

As someone who maintains an AVL database server, I can tell you that location tracking is an extraordinary amount storage if you want any resolution. If the resolution isn’t high enough, you don’t have any reason to track it anyways because it’s useless.

Add in all those other details (most of which are significantly smaller data-wise) and it’s just too much data for anyone to maintain. The load on that server would be astronomical (pun slightly intended).