Ingame features at the ESL ONE Hamburg Major
Here is an overview of the features we’ve brought to the Hamburg Major. Big shout out to Bukka and Matt for spending absurd amounts of time coding and having little to no sleep in the last few weeks to bring you all these innovations.
We’ll only tackle our new features in this post, please take a look into the “Ingame features at the Manila Masters” post if you miss something in this post that you’ve seen on stream.
Caster Control Dashboard
We made an easy to use dashboard for casters to access information and push graphics they want to show the viewer themselves.
- We asked ourselves: “How do we minimise the disconnect between production graphics and casting?”
- Casters talk about whatever they want, and can now bring up our graphics to help viewers understand their reasoning
- This is all controlled by the casters in a dashboard running on a Microsoft Surface Pro
- Gives casters access to the information first, then they can choose to bring it up, or just use it without bringing it up on the stream
Combined Glyph/Scan Icon
Shows the Glyph and Scan cooldown of both teams simultaneously.
- The feature had a surprising amount of bugs, so it took a while to ship it
- Our expectation is, that Valve will implement this soon
Live Spell Stats
Several spells have specifically added custom statistics.
- Entirely different statistics from what viewers are used to
- Full focus on live-stats
- Much more are planned in the future, ideally for every ability
Live Item Stats
Hand of Midas has specifically added custom statistics.
- It went batshit insane with Tempest Double
- Helps understand just how much the item contributed to overall networth
- In the future, we will add XP to that as well
- More items are planned
Gold Breakdown - Pie Chart
Shows a breakdown of the gold sources for a single hero.
- Midas, Summons, Illusions, Abilities (Track, Devour, etc) are part of the “other” category to reduce clutter
- Turns out, generating the graphics on the fly is incredibly challenging
- Mostly helps to explain comebacks (Secret.Ace’s Juggernaut in their game vs EG)
Gold Breakdown - Versus View
Shows a comparison of the gold sources for two heroes.
- The logical extension from the single-hero pie charts
- Comparing two x-positions is more applicable
- We added live-updating graphs that make it more interesting to look at
Advanced Drop-Down Stats
We added several new stats to the drop-down feature: Building damage, healing, time spent dead, buyback gold spent.
- Focus on relevant statistics that help tell storylines
- We implemented more stats based on caster feedback, Toby suggested “Time spent dead”, syndereN lobbied for “Buyback gold spent”
- These graphs were synced with historical stats of Digital Creativity Labs (University of York) to create intra-game-context
Problems
Live production is tricky!
- Casters sometimes want to show viewers a layerth-graphic when production wants to bring in a different one
- To minimise collisions, we implemented a “PGM LOCK” that stops casters from sending graphics directly to the observer machine
- Production retains full control with casters still having nearly complete freedom
Conclusion
We are really, really happy how the Hamburg Major played out. From the immensely positive feedback from fans and viewers to casters and analyst asking for more features, providing fantastic and constructive feedback and being all around very excited to use our software. Total setup time for the whole layerth stack was around an hour total with zero interaction needed with the production guys. That’s a new best for us and shows how easy it is to integrate our tools. It has been a blast to work on that event and we hope we’ll be back for the next iteration.
In the future, the focus will be on mainly providing more spell- and item-stats and we have some really big plans that go beyond “just” ingame production.
Lastly, big thanks to ESL for believing in our product and hiring us for the event, even though there was very little time.
