BFTV - the dream is nearing reality

Pictures from BFTV. Here the spectator follows a player in a BF109.

A lot of people have thought about it, a lot of people have even tried to go their own ways in hope of making the dream come true, a lot of people have cursed DICE to hell and back for not implementing this feature from the beginning, but these approaches haven’t brought us spectatorTV. SpectatorTV may be known better as HLTV from the games Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. A privilege that players of these two games enjoy today.

But luckily the BF gamer's prayers have been heard and the answer is saved on a computer in Sweden where namni|chipndala aka Andreas Dahlström is working hard on the final coding. If everything goes as planned you will be able to watch BFTV in a couple of weeks, being able to watch replays and live streaming of matches, freely spectating any player. No reduced quality of sound or pictures - just pure Battlefield 1942 as you know it.

For now BFTV has the following features:

- Record - record a match and save it on your hard drive.
- A so far rather buggy demo-player where you use the game as your player. (As some know it from the games CS/HL/DOD)
- Choose your own camera angle
- Fast forward

A lot more to follow

Pictures from BFTV. Here the spectator follows a player in a Stuka.

BFTV will include a many more features than those listed above, but it’s still unknown which features will make it for the first release. However, planned features so far are live streaming, changing between camera angles, pause and the possibility of chatting with other spectators while live streaming.

The development of the BFTV has not been easy at all because Andreas has not received any support from DICE or had other official programs at his disposal. As a result of this he had to map the code himself, which has resulted in a lot of late night programming. Not something his girlfriend was overly thrilled about.

Here at Boomtown we will keep a close eye on the development of BFTV. While we eagerly wait for the Christmas miracle to come true, we encourage all of you to support Andreas and this great project (Santa?) by joining his IRC channel #BFTV @ Quakenet and visiting his website.

Source: Boomtown DK
English version by: Heine Haals (FighterOfFoo)