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in game replays?


tyrspawn

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You know......this whole time for some dumb reason I always thought there whole game replays when the match ended. Now that I have read there isn't....why the fudge not? Why can't it replay the whole Wego match in real time after the match in a replay? Doesn't make sense.

Edit: Sorry  Tyrspawn, didn't mean to mislead you.

Edited by Oakheart
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Why can't it replay the whole Wego match in real time after the match in a replay?

Look at the sizes of the turns. Multiply the number of turn files by the number of turns. 13MB/turn ish. *60 turns for an hour. 780MB per hour. It's about the size of an actual movie. Now, that's okay if you just want to stream it, but if you want to load it into a program that can change your viewpoint, you're looking at quite the memory hog, given that a 13MB turn expands to 20 times that size when opened in the game client. There's probably a way of doing it that doesn't involve loading a 30Gig file for a 2 hour game, but it isn't "just lowd orl the turnz". Also, given that it can take more than a minute to load a single turn, you'd be doing a mite of hangin' about if it was "just lowd the turnz wun at uh tym". It probably isn't beyond Charles and Phil's skills, but is it worth the time to write a specialist "CM cinema" application?

It might be different, if the game file architecture wasn't so determinedly "this stands alone", but it is: turn files are the whole scenario at the point of the save, not just the differences between the start and now, or a record of orders that gets processed up each time using the recorded results of randomisers. It's all precalcultated and the results in terms of pixels moving and variables changing is recorded, and that's what's rendered when you replay a turn. Regardless of the pros and cons of that approach, that's the approach that everything else has to derive from.

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30 gig file for a 2 hour game? I don't think that's how replays work in video games, but ok. It would be 30gigs if it physically recorded the game in mp3. But for a video game with a internal replay system what most game developers do is each replay is a set of instructions for the AI. Just a small couple kb (few mb at most) file with a bunch of instructions to make sure the AI play out the game exactly as it was originally played out. But I guess that's impossible and womble feels the need to be condescending to prove that.

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Would be great if there would be a way to save the replay phase of a turn (automatically) into cumulative battle-report(s) and be able to view those as a replay/AAR after the battle. This is very different from recording the screen output, which is a feature that can be fullfilled quite easily with 3rd party software. I haven't tried Nvidia's hardware accelerated shadowplay function, but I read that it supports recording any game.
In theory one can sort of do AARs already by saving each turn and loading and playing all of the subsequently after the battle, I have never really invested the time to do so.

 

Although I agree with Womble insofar that I think that the nature of this game is unlike many other games, which have a small instruction set of a few KBs of metadata compared to hundreds of MB's of visual entertainment for a certain amount of gametime.

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30 gig file for a 2 hour game? I don't think that's how replays work in video games, but ok. It would be 30gigs if it physically recorded the game in mp3. But for a video game with a internal replay system what most game developers do is each replay is a set of instructions for the AI. Just a small couple kb (few mb at most) file with a bunch of instructions to make sure the AI play out the game exactly as it was originally played out. But I guess that's impossible and womble feels the need to be condescending to prove that.

 

The replay file for wego isn't just a video file, since you can move the camera around and so forth. And from previous comments from the developers we know that it doesn't just store the inputs and recreate the events of the turn from that. That kind of thing is possible, depending on the game. It isn't what happens in CM, for whatever reason. The replay file contains all the events of the turn, not just the 'seed' needed to recreate it. Consequently the replay for each turn is pretty large, and for a whole battle would indeed be unmanageably large for most people.

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Being able to view entire battles without fog of war and GUI elements would make combat missions a lot more YouTube friendly games and so directly more appealing to people watching those videos. If the file sizes would really be as large as womble estimates then that could be a major problem but I don't think the game necessarily has any inherent need to load all the action in one go as there is the real time mode which renders and calculates action on the go. Replays are not the most important feature to be had but it would be nice and maybe smart from marketing point of view.

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Huge files. How do you think Chris manages to handle the files from his preview playthrough streams

 

But he just recorded a simple video feed - one possible camera viewpoint, zoom, angle, unit selection of an infinite number of possible choices.

 

30 gig file for a 2 hour game? I don't think that's how replays work in video games, but ok.

That could be. I think what @womble is talking about is what would be needed for a full free camera movement across a 3D landscape play back experience. Frankly unless clearly specified otherwise that is the only conclusion to reach as soon as someone says "WEGO has playback". If you are talking about just recording what flickered across the computer screen as play back well that is something different and you might as well handle that with an existing 3rd party app.

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That could be. I think what @womble is talking about is what would be needed for a full free camera movement across a 3D landscape play back experience. Frankly unless clearly specified otherwise that is the only conclusion to reach as soon as someone says "WEGO has playback". If you are talking about just recording what flickered across the computer screen as play back well that is something different and you might as well handle that with an existing 3rd party app.

That's why most developers when adding replays do instruction sets for the AI. Rather than recording what happened on the screen and/or what ever battlefront does to save their replays.

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But you cannot use that ability to calculate that action because things might turn out differently - not much of a play back if the tank that survived the hit dies on the replay ;)

 

Yes I know that replay can't be calculated on the go but existence of real time mode shows that at least the engine isn't completely dependent on everything being loaded into the RAM which could make full replays more technically plausible. Don't really know how the engine works so I'm just guesstimating.

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That's why most developers when adding replays do instruction sets for the AI.

 

 

existence of real time mode shows that at least the engine isn't completely dependent on everything being loaded into the RAM

I see what you guys are saying - record what units actually "did" and then render that using the engine in real time. I guess that could be doable. That would be quite a lot of work I would imagine. Honestly guys I can think of 100 things I would rather have that this and I don't thing I am alone (plus many people's 100 things would have no overlap with mine) so I just don't see this getting the dev's attention. I could be wrong too and we will all be surprised one day.

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