Discussion on separate console/PC leaderboards for Buckyball race events.

Stinja

S
Added some comments over there.

I will reply to something said here though:

Alec Turner said:
Note: for this to work you console guys NEED to take part! I mean here's the thing that gets me ... I've been doing Buckyball Races for 5 years and for the first two I was WAY down the bottom of the leaderboards. I didn't care - there's no prizes (usually) and these are bloody good fun. So where the hell are all the enthuasiastic (if potentially disadvantged) console players?
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I think racing is very niche in ED, and despite your best efforts at promoting, even as a PC player Buckyballing passed me by in 3301/02.
Racing first came to my attention on Reddit iirc, with someone showing off the station racing, and a Google search thru up Buckyballing as a hit, and arguably wrong result :p "what kind of weirdo times themselves to Sag A*" I thought at the time.

Not sure how much console players venture out of the PS4 / Xbox subforums, but if they do it'd be to Dangerous Discussions, and i'd guess Events is waaaay down priority.

If you want more console players, you need to spend more Arx on advertising.
 

madmattnz

madmattnz
Hi Alec, here's is some honest feedback from a PS4 player...

I was interested in the latest Buckyball as I had heard of it before through the forums and a few YouTube videos on the subject. And with Frontier’s latest interest in it, ‘Full Throttle’ at Pareco piqued my curiosity.

However, when I read how to participate and saw some examples of how many times someone had landed in the time period I considered all the processes involved. I would have to take multiple screen grabs then locate and copy them over to my Mac from my PS4 on a USB stick and then I would have to signup with an image platform (you suggested Imgur) which I would never use otherwise – so it seemed like quite a lot for me to do just to have some fun. But despite my laziness, and having limited playing time, I am still never saying never as I still like the concept – I have always been into racing games and part of the pleasure of Elite is flying spaceships – so flying them as fast as possible sounds fun! So maybe next time?

Addressing the performance issues...

I have a T.Flight HOTAS 4 so control is not a problem. However, I have watched lots of Youtube videos played on PC and the transitions for jumps, supercruise, HUD screens, station screens etc.. are much slower on PS4 than PC (Old Duck having recently moved over to PC can probably confirm this) and I am on PS4 Pro too. So that might add additional time to PS4 player runs. Does this put off console payers participating – I don’t know, I guess that if I do ever participate it will be interesting to see how I fare against PC players so listing the ranks with platform type might help.

As for separating them out I am not so sure – with Sony’s recent news about allowing cross-platform play (and also being an ex PC gamer) I am really hoping for a future in Elite where PC, Xbox and PS4(5) players can play together in this awesome Elite Dangerous Galaxy that Frontier have created for us.

One last note – I know others have already mentioned varying internet/network speeds etc... but I am a Brit living in New Zealand and we have super fast fibre (so much faster than where I lived in Surrey) and whilst speeds can vary slightly by time of day/week etc... I believe the consoles are still much slower at running ED.
 
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Alec Turner

Alec Turner
madmattnz said:
Hi Alec, here's is some honest feedback from a PS4 player...
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Thanks madmattnz, great feedback.

On this particular point ..
I was interested in the latest Buckyball as I had heard of it before through the forums and a few YouTube videos on the subject. And with Frontier’s latest interest in it, ‘Full Throttle’ at Pareco piqued my curiosity.

However, when I read how to participate and saw some examples of how many times someone had landed in the time period I considered all the processes involved. I would have to take multiple screen grabs then locate and copy them over to my Mac from my PS4 on a USB stick and then I would have to signup with an image platform (you suggested Imgur) which I would never use otherwise – so it seemed like quite a lot for me to do just to have some fun. But despite my laziness, and having limited playing time, I am still never saying never as I still like the concept – I have always been into racing games and part fo the pleasure of Elite is flying spaceships – so flying them as fast as possible sounds fun! So maybe next time?
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.. I do sympathise with the apparent overhead of taking part in our races and actually spoke to this point on the Frontier livesteam a bit. I appreciate that signing up to something like imgur just for a race might seem like a bit of a faff but it's easy and free and once you've done it you're all set for future races and can also share screenshots on the forum and in places like the SPVFA facebook group. As for the ease of taking screenshots (or maybe video?) on the PS4, perhaps someone else who take part in the race on PS4 could comment on how they went about the process.
 

Stinja

S
It's a faff, and I do pretty much as maddmattnz said:
  • record video of race
  • review video (PSN app)
  • take screen shots
  • insert USB stick into PS4
  • copy to USB stick
  • start PC
  • transfer images to PC
  • start web browser
  • goto Imgur (you don't actually need to sign up, I've only ever done "temporary" images)
  • upload
  • grab links to submit
  • etc
Sure most of those need to be done by PC racers too, but yeah it's a hinderance.


Compare all that to Hello Games introducing racing modules (start points, checkpoints, finish terminal - which shows results / race times, boost pads), so players can make their own race tracks. Maybe it wouldn't work for Buckyballing, but it shows how a small studio can support niche events if they wish to.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqNffOCPtyE
 
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Ultravi

Ultravi
Record the video and then send it or screenshots from it is the easiest way to do it. In case of screenshots you don't need to use a flash drive, send it to your friends or to your second profile using ps messages. Grab them from phone or pc and Bam! Use them as you wish. On the subject of complexity I agree, many Challenges and Buckyball
races look overwhelmed and require careful preparation. This can scare away some people who want to try their hand at it. That's why I haven't participated until now.
So I started with something lighter like an EliteRacers events. Three races later I want more. The ships are ready for more, saving Cutter without fuel falling on the planet with a racing Courier showed me what crazy things I like to do.
Full Throttle seemed more accessible and easy to join.
News that Alec will be posting races on Xbox and Ps4 forums in the future is great. Someone will come and tell friends.
This is a good start.
 

Raiko

Raiko
Is there a way to upload your gameplay directly from PS4 to the internet? Eg twitch? Maybe something on the playstation network that's visible from the internet as a whole?

My own BRC races are usually on the more complex end of things, and so do require more screenshots, but even though we prefer screenshots and recommend imgur if you can upload screenshot or video to anywhere that I can view on my PC/phone then I'll accept it as evidence. At the end of the day we just need the evidence that you completed the race. I'm more than happy to watch a recording on twitch or whatever - and I have done a few times for my races.

You can also email us the screenshots, I'll always happily provide my email address to racers, or send via twitter / facebook messages. Basically any way that gets your evidence off your console and to the race organiser is acceptable. We're already giving up our time to organise the race, so the more competitors we get the happier we feel. If it takes a little more effort to view the evidence we're generally okay with it, as we appreciate your participation. Ideally you can send us a single url pointing to the evidence, but if not we'll work out the best way.

Also, if ewe can work out the best way to send evidence from each platform we can reuse it for future races, and so make things easier for console racers to participate going forwards.
 

Stinja

S
Raiko said:
Is there a way to upload your gameplay directly from PS4 to the internet?

… but even though we prefer screenshots and recommend imgur if you can upload screenshot or video to anywhere that I can view on my PC/phone then I'll accept it as evidence. At the end of the day we just need the evidence that you completed the race. I'm more than happy to watch a recording on twitch or whatever
Click to expand...

For me the easiest way would be to capture video (built in PS4 feature), trim extraneous bits at each end, then upload direct to YouTube: which would be much less faff getting them accessible.
Then to make it easier for the race organiser, we could add timestamps in the comment section to the relevant parts, eg: 00:05 = start, 00:12 = flyby Jacksons, 00:16 = dock LHS 20 Ohm City, etc

This would put more burden on the race organiser though, instead of quickly opening a message and ticking off the 14 items say, you'd need to open in tab/browser, click-pause through each checkpoint and so on.
If things did kick-off with 20 console players each race, I wouldn't see it as right to use up so much time, currently you spread the load.
Counter-argument is yes, if it stops people playing to start with it's all moot.
 

Raiko

Raiko
It's less of a faff than you might imagine. With the images, the date/time is critical as that's the evidence that you visited the waypoints in the correct order during a run. With a video it's enough to skim through and see that you actually visited each location, usually only the start and end times need verifying.

It is quicker to look through screenshots, but only when they're arranged into order. So I'd rather review someone's video evidence than a set of screenshots that are in a random order. Also, as my races are often a bit complex, I generally accept just a start and finish screenshot if someone is going to upload a video before the end of the race - to save you needing to upload runs every day - although that does risk your run being disqualified later if the video evidence shows that you forgot something.
 

Terrorsidic

Terrorsidic
Stinja said:
For me the easiest way would be to capture video (built in PS4 feature), trim extraneous bits at each end, then upload direct to YouTube: which would be much less faff getting them accessible.
Then to make it easier for the race organiser, we could add timestamps in the comment section to the relevant parts, eg: 00:05 = start, 00:12 = flyby Jacksons, 00:16 = dock LHS 20 Ohm City, etc
Click to expand...

THIS!
SO MUCH THIS!
It's what I've given buckyball race organisers for years.

Both base consoles can record or stream and have editing software.
Where on pc, it can be a pain to trim before uploading to youtube,
but youtube lets you trim after upload at least.
(and the latest youtube trim editor doesnt crash most of the time anymore).

Video capture is also what I request for my Okinura sprint time trial
(a video at least, which almost makes for some interest comparison videos).
 
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Nerix

Nerix
Regarding sharing content from the PS4, at the bottom of the first post (spoiler tags) I made a short tutorial how to trim videos on PS4: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/gameplay-videos-share-your-adventure.386451/

Apart from that it's really easy to share videos.

- One option is to save the video after you finished the run. The last 15min of gameplay is recorded automatically (you can increase or decrease that time in the settings). Press share button and square, then the video is saved.

- another option is to stream your Gameplay to YouTube (or Twitch). Then it's saved automatically on your channel (at least for YouTube that's true, don't use Twitch often).

Another tip: would recommend changing the share button settings to easy screenshot. One short press = screenshot, hold it + square = saving video. You can even disable the small icon that appears after a screenshot, annoyed me after a while and could be seen on screenshots taken directly after the first one.
 
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