I know SaladOfStones already said something like this, but it was back in 2012 and in a small thread. Plus, the game has progressed a lot since then and now that we have all these new weapons and vehicles, I just have to say this.

Spectating Mode:
Pretty much explains itself. A mode where you can just watch what is happening on the battlefield. Has plenty of functionality.
1. In servers, lets say you had the option in the future to disable respawning. It would be a limited army. So, what would you do when you die but watch the carnage unfold!
2. To beta-test AI vs AI situations. Could help if you, say, changed the AI to make something more frequent/less frequent. For example, vests! I know we have been having lots of discussion about them with AI recently!
3. For cinematic things involving server RP. I don't know. Just sounds like a good idea.

Plus, the feature is pretty much close to there when you die. You can pan around a bit and watch the skirmish of your squad vs the enemy.
Tell me what you think in the poll above!

Original post with saladofstones:
http://www.modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=467
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EDIT:
I just got an idea. How about the option to run around as a civie and not be shot (At least, not on purpose) by the AI. This way, you still can interact with the battlefield, but are somewhat spectating the battle!
Oh, and this way you can still pickup items and create your own civilian militia. Of course, if you shot at a team, they would shoot at you.
NOTE: THIS EDIT IS NOT FOR THE POLL, JUST AN ADDITION TO MY POST
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EDIT 7/3/13:
Poll is coming to a close in 1 week.

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-The Not So Awesome Nation

In online, a spectating mode where your viewpoint follows another soldier would be possible, and should be fairly straightforward to hook up so it's possible that that will happen in the future.

In offline, you can activate debugmode and hit F4 and move around and zoom freely in the map. You'll notice that only the area around your soldier actually has real stuff going on, the rest of the map is in "simulation", so it's just being approximated what's happening out there.

As a side note, a server that doesn't have any players connected is actually doing simulation on whole map.

Later, once all the fancy modding parameters will be externalized, it will be possible to set the whole area as active, non-simulated. It'll cause a hefty performance hit, but I'm sure someone's PC can handle it

Thanks for the quick reply!

I did not know of that f4 thing, but it sounds like what I'm going for!

As for that performance hit...
What about an option of enabling/disabling the simulation, obviously starting off enabled.
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Would my part about being a civilian work for that simulation thing?

_________________
-The Not So Awesome Nation

I can see this being great for when/if competitive play becomes a thing.

Definitely. I'll have to poke pasik a bit to get there as he is not to thrilled for the game being competitive

I don't know what the issues are, mate.

Yah Let's just say that I'm using all resources I've got to finish the single player/cooperative side, the area that has been under focus since the beginning. My personal view is that for PvP to really shine, the game would need to be F2P, that's just the way of today with online games, period. And that's not gonna happen. Anyhow, PvP in some smaller form is possible, it's already possible, but no one has set any servers up for it.

I have a vague idea why, see below, but mostly I don't - I never play PvP games.

So, apart from --
1) spectating mode (probably comes, wouldn't expect it very soon -- seems reasonable too as it's not like there would be a lot of people wanting to spectate 2vs2 matches)
--- here's a workaround: have the matches feature another faction meant for spectating, this faction has a designated base and a spawn point and an armory in the map, the armory supplies only a special vest that transforms all hits to non-effecting, and a weapon that doesn't shoot -- voilà, you have spectating where you can run freely in the area and can't get killed (except vehicles driving over you) -- have these guys wear soccer referee uniforms
2) player-to-player communication markers (at least support is coming, as Invasion too needs the same system to show objective markers, maybe 0.91), should be pretty easy to set up in a server side script
3) the stuff Steam would provide (profiles, leaderboards, match-making, group/clan handling, serverlists, ...) (1.5?)
--- server-specific profiles are there already, there's a simple leaderboard too - with a bit of server side scripting, it would be possible to make server scripts communicate with a master server that would handle profile locking to prevent someone from joining two servers simultaneously, and so on.. easy to see why I'm not thrilled to get into that, as there's potential Steam would handle everything. -- so for now, just stick with playing on one competitive PvP server or deal with having several profiles.
4) simple two-base maps for quick rounds rather than 2 hour matches (where's all the map mods? )
-- what else would be needed for competitive gameplay?

I do think the eventual PvP mode people want to play is going to be a mod. My guess is that there's no purpose to have all the vanilla weapons or items in PvP, e.g. paratrooper calls don't make sense as they spawn bots, comms truck is a bit of a problem unless the whole map/match mode is about defending the comms truck, or something. That kinda says it, the problem here is that possibilities are about endless, and I personally don't have a vision for PvP in RWR.

Once we get more players we could set up a PvP server and see how it goes. For now it doesnt make much sense unless you have a scheduled session. For less casual gaming and long term interest (several years) there are no way around PvP imo.
I don't think the game needs to go F2P for that, there for sure are some shooter which are F2P but most aren't. Actually I don't know any shooter beside Team Fortress 2 that is F2P.

I think you are seeing PvP a little strangely, I will post a suggestion thread with a nice text wall for you all to enjoy Will post soon

Here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1282

I'm adding no_simulation command switch for 0.90, didn't remember I had everything already set up for it except how to actually get into this mode other than with a debug build.

So here's what it can do with debugmode:


FPS isn't great, it was actually more like 0.5-1 than 14, but the debug text display didn't want to update itself anymore when taking the screenshot. FPS should be a bit better than that ultimately, I've got a bunch of log traces enabled right now so the game's anyway much more stuttery than normally.

It almost could be enabled as a spectating mode for a server being hosted by the normal game build rather than dedicated, but it's currently denied to serve games in debugmode as you could exploit it to spy on your enemy players. Needless to say, this host PC would need to be fairly powerful to handle everything.