Friday, May 10, 2013

Pain is weakness leaving the body

Once again I have had the wonderful opportunity to face off against my colleagues in Unreal Tournament 3 at uni. This time with wires attached to read my sweat and pulse readings in multiple four player deathmatches in the map Deck (:D) with an armor and health giving catchup mod enabled. It was an interesting experience, especially as you have to sit rather contortedly and cannot move your hands as freely due to the sticky pads attached. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the test setup and hopefully one of my colleagues has gained some useful data. Unfortunately there still seems to be an apparent skill/experience divide, at least in UT3, which may have broke the mod on occasion (i.e. mod stacking 2-3 times more than it should), definitely noticeable at times. Plugging 5 rockets into someone and having them still standing was ... rather surprising.

Nevertheless, here is how one of the matches transpired. I would recommend watching it at 720p as UT3 looks god awful at low res:


Again I must apologise for the shoddiness of UT3's demo recording capability, especially client side. There is unfortunately not much I can do about the jumpiness and inaccuracy (aiming, audio repeating, some audio not working at all) of the replay as it seems to be a problem with the recording process. There are also no tools I know of that would allow me to play the file back more smoothly. My assumption is that it doesn't record scene-graph data anywhere near frequently enough, perhaps only 20 times per second. As a result you end up with very jittery playback.