Possible addon with new Unity engine?

[Jesterman]

  I wonder, though i have no clue how realistic it would be to impliment, if at some point after the Unity engine port that a form of "Instant Replay" could be implimented.

 Obviously, due to the existance of the graphs and player/ai statistics within the game, there is some form of running real time recording of in game events down to the second they happen (I assume). Is it possible to use said information to extrapolate a viewable, speed adjustable replay of the match after you win or lose?

I realize the actual implementation of this would likely be much more complex than a simple reading of those charts, and of course said charts are extremely useful as is, but I personally think that having the ability to see where you went wrong or went right after the fact could be very useful and fun.

 For example these recordings would help identify a failed attack or defense strategy, something that the line-graphs can only vaguely convey.

This could have a toggle-able option (in the event that said recordings take a 'substantial' amount of memory on hard drive)

The differences from a simple regular recording done by a third party program  could maybe be by removing fog of war on relevant planets (boarder worlds even if they didn't have scouts at some point during the actual game for example) and allowing the viewer/player to view planets as they would in a normal game while units and economy play back on their respective planet in 'real time'.

Possibly to conserve resources, planets that, at whatever point during the game this rule would apply, did not have significant human or AI action/movement could be dimmed out and put in cold storage until required.
(A planet that either human or AI owns that simply isn't being used, (no buildings going up or fighting happening currently) would be cold stored)


TL;DR: simulated 'real-time' recording of a match for post-game study and enjoyment.

COMMUNITY: please say if this sounds useful or fun to you

CREATORS: I am curious if this is at all possible by any means considering the scale of the game.


*sigh* after getting my idea on paper, it sounds overly complex and convoluted but I just felt like getting this out there if even a portion of it could be utilized.


EDIT EDIT
whoops posted only half of it

[Fleet]

Hey! Wait! Don't pick up the ph{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER

[keith.lamothe]

The graphs are based on some really abstract summary data, which is lightyears distant from the kind of data necessary for an actual replay.

If we ever did a replay feature it would probably be based on a save game combined with all the GameCommand objects generated by the players and the AI.  So basically the game could run with the command interface and the AI thread disabled and just execute those commands as their turns came up.  But even that implementation would probably be pretty excruciating to get right and to debug, etc, so I don't see us doing it for a long time if ever.

And certainly Unity doesn't have anything to do with it

[x4000]

Keith is exactly right.  It actually wouldn't be that hard to get a basic replay system set up, all things considered, but the problem is ever having playback work correctly.  The reason: every replay is version-specific.  So if you were using 3.187 to generate a replay, you MUST have 3.187 in order to play it back.  If you loaded up a savegame in 3.186, played a while, stopped, upgraded to 3.187 a different day, and then played again... then you'd have two replays, one of which was only working in one older version, the next in a newer one.

The frequency of our updates to the game all but guarantees that no replay system would ever even be considered, because it would just be non-functional for most people, unfortunately.  On the brighter side, with the move to the Unity system things like FRAPS and XFire will capture the entire game screen now, including all the menus, rather than just the non-menu parts of the game.  So there is that.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh yea, forgot about the version change thing, that totally scraps that possibility

[Jesterman]

Keith is exactly right.  It actually wouldn't be that hard to get a basic replay system set up, all things considered, but the problem is ever having playback work correctly.  The reason: every replay is version-specific.  So if you were using 3.187 to generate a replay, you MUST have 3.187 in order to play it back.  If you loaded up a savegame in 3.186, played a while, stopped, upgraded to 3.187 a different day, and then played again... then you'd have two replays, one of which was only working in one older version, the next in a newer one.

The frequency of our updates to the game all but guarantees that no replay system would ever even be considered, because it would just be non-functional for most people, unfortunately.  On the brighter side, with the move to the Unity system things like FRAPS and XFire will capture the entire game screen now, including all the menus, rather than just the non-menu parts of the game.  So there is that.

Alright guess that answers my question XD

Also accidentally hit post too soon and only posted half of the thing. If you could take a peek at what was there, that would be appriciated (even if its impossible to impliment XD)

EDIT: that is to say, i fixed the origional post

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, I see the rest of it

At some point we may add some more detailed logging options, dunno; it can burn disk space for sure

[Spikey00]

(Backward compatibility?  SupCom's third party replay helps run the game with an older patch without trouble.)

[x4000]

(Backward compatibility?  SupCom's third party replay helps run the game with an older patch without trouble.)

Sure, but that only works because SupCom gets as many patches in a year as AI War gets in a week.

[Spikey00]

Could it not be done for AI War too?  The way it works is that it stores the individual patches and loads them with the game on a replay load, and since we all download the patches anyways, that would save some manual downloading of the missed ones.

[keith.lamothe]

Haha, that's pretty funny.  Does it actually close the "game" process, patch it, and reopen it?  Or what?  That we could probably do (in theory, in practice I think it's a bad idea with the volume of patch switches we could be talking about here).  Or is Supcom's external player actually "hot-patching" the game as it runs?  That would be pretty hardcore.

[x4000]

After one month of typical development, you'd need 300mb of extra space just for all the patches in that patcher.  Going back all the way to the original versions, just with the code itself, you'd need something like 3gb to store all that.  And if you wanted the actual graphics that were needed, you're up even higher.

Not to mention that the average replay for a 10 hour game would be well over 100mb and possibly more.

All this complexity... there's just no way I'd ever want to go near that.  There's perfectly good video recording options around, and those don't require extra coding and then months of bugfixing/complaints based on versioning issues, etc.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, massively impractical... but I think it'd be totally hilarious to have a replay of the "Kalzarius & friends" game; a  mammoth zip file with a 8+ MB save game and the like 200 different versions of AI War required to actually play all of it back

[Spikey00]

While I'm not too familiar with its process, the program doesn't patch the game as it runs (that would be amazing for third party haha).  It has an interface of which locates replays and displays the version and that type of information, then the user can prompt the game to load the replay (and load the patch and such with the game).

Here's a site with more details since I'm unworthy.

http://sites.google.com/site/supcomreplaymanager2/

[Spikey00]

(Well, you could still perhaps have it as an optional download, and the users can choose what patches they need to obtain from the server to view their desired replay, instead of downloading everything.)