Arena Screensaver!

[Navydragon]

I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I love watching an arena fight. Seeing 4-6 npcs battle it out on horse and foot just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside! What I'd like to see is a seperate .exe program that simply loads some random battles, one after the other. That way, while I'm not working on my computer, I can walk by and see a glorious battle between some depraved galdiators, fighting to the death for my enjoyment!

 

[Volkier]

Yeah, just add extra blood, gore, dicapitated limbs flying all around the screen and stuff like that : I have something similar for a screensaver, but that actually is something like an X-Ray of a python digesting a rabbit which is still alive... Don't really use screensavers much though... they tend to 'save' your screen at the most inappropriate times...

 

[svart]

Heh, ye i enjoy watching arena battles too, the wooden balcony you stand on is really fantastic and adds a lot to the feel.
Though i doubt they'll actually release a seperate .exe for this, maybe instead have the arena getting cleaned from the fighters and then a new wave of fighters will storm in, but i doubt that will happen any time soon either.

 

[Yoshiboy]

i have programs meaning i could record areana fights and compile them as new screensavers. Saying that they could take time to load and be huge files.

 

[svart]

I thought he meant random fights, it's like watching football

 

[Navydragon]

Yeah, random. Much like a football game, only with armor instead of padding and arrows instead of balls...
It seems to me that it wouldn't be that hard of a program to section off. The mechanism is already all there, but instead of having to load a game, load any of the character elements or gameworld, all the program loads is the character models, AI, arena map, and the random generator, and there you go. Instead of the view from the balcony, I'd say you'd just keep a stationary camera at approximately the same location, and angled to face the arena. Although, if you wanted to get really creative you could make the camera rotate, or follow different combatants.
The point is it'd be something that you could occasionally glance at and enjoy, but wouldn't require a ton of memory, space, or load time since it's not a pre-rendered video. And you'd get a different performance every time!
"Dance puppets, Dance!"

 

[Janus]

Hmm, actually I don't think that would be hard to mod, to have it keep looping back through tournaments until you hit tab to exit. You could have it randomly pick between fight types too. Hmm... maybe an idea for my Arena Expansion mod.

 

[Navydragon]

Exactly. Although I was hoping there would be a way to execute it from the desktop for easy access, but if I have to go through some extra steps, I don't think it'll be too much of a bother.
And I have yet to try your Arena mod, I hear good things though, so I'll be downloading it as soon as I get home

 

[Morbo]

Hmm I kinna like this.
And the idea of having a stationary cam or a cam that follows the combatants would also be nice for when you're playing a tourney yerself. I hate it that you get kicked back to Zendar town as soon as you get knocked out. I'd like to see how my team fares after I'm gone, and wanna see who ultimately wins the fight.

 

[Skyrage]

That would be quite a cool screensaver. Bit of a resourcehog, but cool nevertheless :p

Thing is though, is it even possible to make such a thing?

 

[Jhaerik]

Well my PC as been on night and day for the last two months anyway. Might as well punish it some more.

Seriously though, I really like this idea, would be the first screensaver I would actually not disable after a week.

 

[Janus]

I'm pretty sure it's do-able with the Module Builder to have it just keep randomly choosing and running battles. The viewpoint being outside of your body would be a problem (not sure if that's possible), but the spectator position could be moved for a better viewpoint. Since each new battle would reset the spectator (you), it would have to be in a good initial spot.

The only major thing is, it would need to copy and cannibalize a lot of code which would almost perfectly match what's already there, causing grief in updating it having to change each instance.
There's a module_scripts file which I think will make this much simpler, but it's not currently hooked up in 0.704. I'll be happy to try adding this overall idea to my Arena Expansion mod once separate reusable scripts are supported.
Without that functionality, it would be quite a mess trying to keep it updated.

 

[Laos]

As much as I like this idea, a screensaver like this would keep me at the computer. I wouldn't be able to let my PC idle if I needed to go somewhere, because I'd just keep watching it like football.

I'd just be sitting in front of the PC at five in the morning in nothing but a smile shouting "Come on, blues! Come on! Snipe that swordsman!".

Wait, that sounds like a blast. I fully support this idea.