Hi guys,
I've always been into watching replays of professional electronic game matches for quake 1, 2, 3 and starcraft for quite some time. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, replays/demos allow you to record exactly what happens in a game and then watch it back at a later stage. To watch, all you need is the game installed on your PC and the associated demo/replay file.
Anyway, I thought it would be awesome for video game fans to be able to launch demos/replays from within media center. I envisage that it would work in a similar way to the music collection, with an image representing each replay (probably the map/level screenshot), and the categories across the top could be for each game, or you could even split it by players or maps. Then, you could click on the replay for more details (such as the player names, game duration, tournament name, etc) or play it immediately. It would then launch the replay and display it to the user. While watching, the stop or back button would kill the replay and return the user to MCE.
In the future, would imagine that the plugin could be enhanced to subscribe to feeds and automatically download new replays and the necessary maps. It would be very easy to configure, with just the directory of the replays and the application location needing to be entered. This could even be automated or guessed by the plugin. With the aid of tools you could even use the fast forward/rewind buttons to go backwards and forwards in the replays (probably wouldn't be widely supported though). Another feature could be the ability to watch VOD (video on demand) files, which are quite popular as they are published from large esports events and usually have live commentary.
A pluggable architecture would be easy to create, with different people being able to add support for different games over time. The first game I would attempt would be starcraft (probably with the help of the ReXplorer tool at
http://repasm.net/rx/), with others to be added later. I can imagine all of the quake series would be easy to add they can be launched from the command line.
Would anyone be interested in using this plugin if this was created? With professional gaming becoming more popular as time goes by, I could see this being very handy for gamers who have media center.
Thoughts?
Scott
