Update 1 - 24 Nov to 8 Dec

[slmnio]

Commits in this time range: 04bece1...491da07

This is the first update to document more of the behind-the-scenes of the project. These will accompany the overviews on each release to explain what else I'm working on.

Player cams

To even further improve the production value of streams, we've implemented a player cams feature in a bunch of different ways. By adding them, we can see a player's reaction as they win fights and matches, and also if crazy or funny moments happen.

player-cams-highlights.mp4

The community response to this was awesome - community members shouted out the stream with its production value and love seeing the player reactions when they fall off the map or pull off a crazy play. It's really helped to humanize the online broadcasts.

The player cams use the same components as the caster cams - so we have full control over enabling them, the camera routing and any future updates we wish to add - like camera panning, cropping and effects. We've already iterated through it a little bit. In the first implementation, the camera feeds were sent 6+ times, directly to all observers and the producer. Then, I added a way to relay it from another PC so the load on player's PCs is much lower. That still needs some fine tuning since it overloaded some of the PCs.

Some things we still need to work on there:

• More quick controls for enabling/disabling POV player cams
• Enable certain teams on clients so only cameras that may be used are sent to observers
• Better relay system
• Free input of camera parameters and probably some changes so all of the camera overlays use the same params

Developer integrations

I've been working with a few different friends to bring them on to the SLMN.GG project. I've been delegating some tasks and working with them to set them up, code review and iterate on the additions.

I've created a new contributions guidelines file to set out some rules and enforce the same amount of testing and documentation that I would want from my own contributions.

So far, I've worked with the developers on some small changes - one to add some more clickable links in useful places, and another to add extra map text on overlays as we expand to new games.

User feedback

I've written up a new user feedback form and will release this out to all of the users at some point next week when we're quiet. I'll come back to this feedback in the future and see what directions we should go.