Possible addon with new Unity engine?

[Diazo]

No, never played Spring. I think I've heard of it though, it's that Total Annihilation recreation right?

And I have no issues with the fact that the replay always plays the same and I'm not arguing that AI War could not have a replay system implemented if X and keith had the time to spend on it. (Please don't by the way.)

My contention is that the number of units and length of the game makes a replay impractical. Because of how the replay save system being talked about here works, if you want show something at 6hours gametime you would have to run 6 hours of simulation time first.

And the sheer number of units would dwarf the number of units running at once in spring (I assume anyway.) Okay, AI War is a simpler simulation in terms of physics but a couple hundred units is a big to very big battle for spring, where as I'm throwing a fleet of a couple hundred ships around by the 10 minute mark in AI War.

It does look like some of my original assumptions were off, which means the numbers I posted are no good, but the bottom line is that AI War games are expected to last about 12 hours, there are many, many battles with hundreds of units a side, a few to some battles with thousands of units involved. I do not see a replay system being really viable even if it was implemented.

It's certainly not worth it when you can set a situation up, pause, queue up commands then save and send that save file instead.

keith: Alright, so it's not actually random, just the results are unknown until the call is made to the random number generator with that specific seed. That does throw pretty much all my initial assumptions out the window.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

If you only had the lobby options used to create the game (not even a save is necessary, actually), then yea, you'd have to wade through the simulation all over again.  But if you have a save from the point you want to start at, that's all you need.

And yes, the scale of a spring game is different (I assume), but if he could store 50-70 hours of spring replays in 100MB, storing 15 hours of AI replays in 1GB isn't out of the question (and I imagine it would be less than that).

Anyway, not really trying to re-beat the dead replay horse, but I figure it's worth making sure that interested parties have an accurate understanding of multiplayer sync, at least

[Diazo]

 

Thanks a bunch for the info. I suppose it doesn't actually affect anything in my games knowing that, but it's always nice to learn something new.

As for now, I can't resist my bed any longer, it's bonus against me has gotten too big! 

 

D.

[keith.lamothe]

As for now, I can't resist my bed any longer, it's bonus against me has gotten too big!

Don't let the hybrids bite

[Lancefighter]

yeah spring is what became of the TA engine.. Depending on what mod your running, it can be either basically TA (ba) or not (spring 1944, for instance)
While id generally agree there are a lot less distinct UNITS in spring..
Every single item in the game must be synced - bullets, missiles, debris.. explosion debris (imagine 200 units of explosion debris that must be heading in the same direction.) The entire physics engine must be exactly the same.. a nuke must deform the land in exactly the right manner, while exerting the same amount of force on the units nearby (as well as damage.. and push all wrecks in the proper direction...)

AI war simplifies a lot of this, ditching any 3d or explosions for simplicity..

They are each a slightly different engine, but largely i dont think either of them is very different in how large a commands file would be

[Awod]

Unreal tournament 2004 had a nice 'demo' mode, where you could replay a game through the vision of anyone who played in it.

I think you brought up the command window(~) then typed "Demorec" to start recording and "stopdemo" to stop it. I'm really not sure how it 'works' but the file size it made was extremely small and you could convert it to an .avi which would much it much larger. A google search didn't explain much of the logistics of it but it seems relevant to the discussion at hand even if I can't explain it.

Anyone else ever play?

[keith.lamothe]

yeah spring is what became of the TA engine.. Depending on what mod your running, it can be either basically TA (ba) or not (spring 1944, for instance)
While id generally agree there are a lot less distinct UNITS in spring..
Every single item in the game must be synced - bullets, missiles, debris.. explosion debris (imagine 200 units of explosion debris that must be heading in the same direction.) The entire physics engine must be exactly the same.. a nuke must deform the land in exactly the right manner, while exerting the same amount of force on the units nearby (as well as damage.. and push all wrecks in the proper direction...)

AI war simplifies a lot of this, ditching any 3d or explosions for simplicity..

They are each a slightly different engine, but largely i dont think either of them is very different in how large a commands file would be

Well, actually I don't think the additional complexity of the bullets and debris and whatnot adds anything to the commands (it could, depending on how they did it in SupCom, but it doesn't have to).  Assuming a deterministic simulation and the same actual-UI-commands (AI players use the same command system as humans in AI War), that nuke will detonate at the same cycle at the same place and all the deformation and debris velocities will be exactly the same every time the simulation is re-run, with no need to store that information.  This should be evident in that your network traffic doesn't go through the roof when you blow up tons of stuff at once (well, assuming it doesn't in SupCom)

[Lancefighter]

dunno actually - I've never played multiplayer supcom.

i know when playing spring (nota mod) my cpu goes through the roof when a nuke goes off.. but as stated before, cpu and network traffic have nothing to do with each other :p