replay mode

[Darth Ender]

Premise: Allow a user to activate a record function that records the movement and activity of all units in an instance that can be re-rendered later with full customization and control over camera view.

Goal: research and eye candy. For combat situations, it would be helpful to be able to see a battle from various angles afterward to make improvements / changes. For eye candy, it would be extremely helpful to create custom videos of intense sequences that can't be easily coreographed at the time with correct camera views.

The previous 60 seconds could always be temporarily stored in the case you want to replay the events that led to your unexpected death or unexpected other situation. death or the press of the end-record key would save it off and it can be replayed from the game menu screen ... returning to the instance location in the game and giving you a time-slider and allowing you to set any camera angle you want, including first person of any of the ships in the instance.

You could review via this method or using any streaming software, record the video under your selected views as you desire.

Something like that would probably be pretty cool to have.

 

[Sylow]

Based on how the game plays, 60 seconds might not be enough. Even before engineers that would've been rather short. I mean, you can't tell the enemy to stop fighting, as you want to watch the last minute of combat.

So unfortunately for it to be useful, it would have to be 10 minutes or more. For PvP use even up to 60 minutes, crazy as that sounds. That being said, having something like this would be awesome. The only question hard to answer would be, how much memory this would actually need and thus how feasible it's from a technical side.

Spoiler

Just saving the coordinates and orientation of a ship once every second (and interpolating their motion in between) would use 32.4 kB per ship and hour. Further interesting parameters could be hull and shield, as well as heat. A number of other things could be encoded in a single byte. (E.g. fire button 1/2 pressed, chaff triggered, landing gear out, etc. ) My first rough estimate would be 50 kB to 60 kB per ship and hour.

That's actually not that bad. So spending an hour in a RES might give you 2 to 3 MB of logfile. As long as the game cleans that up regularily, it is more manageable than I first intuitively thought it would be. The "rest" would be the engine reading in the logfile and displaying it, while interpolating the data from between each seconds data point. That's no limiting factor, but it sure is some coding effort to implement that. So I consider it unlikely that FD will ever do this, but I would like to have it.
(Seems more useful than fleet carriers, to be honest. )

 

[Darth Ender]

just to clarify. this is not to watch things while playing the game. You have to exit the game to "replay". The minute save feature is an auto-save that exists in case you dont have the time to activate the start recording feature. that could be longer ...if a minute is deemed too short. But you would also have the option of manually setting a start recording and then stop it for an arbitrary length recording.

This would be saved to a file directly so it wont take up memory. The size of the file and how much data is written would be no different really than the amount of data you have to transfer over the network between clients. So i wouldn't expect it to be very much.

edit: Also it would be limited to a single instance. Recordings that span instances would be broken into separate recording files that you'd have to replay separately. This makes replaying a recording simpler.

 

[Sylow]

This would be saved to a file directly so it wont take up memory. The size of the file and how much data is written would be no different really than the amount of data you have to transfer over the network between clients. So i wouldn't expect it to be very much.

Hmm. That could actually be the easiest implementation. For a given timeframe just log all net traffic into a file. Then when replaying, you switch it to a "camera only" mode of the client and process the logged data as if all ships involved are NPCs. And don't worry, i got the part that it would not be a "watch things while playing". I just wanted to point out that the one minute is much too little for most uses.

 

[Vetinari]

Back in the day we were more than happy just looking out of the Port window...how times move on

I like the idea, no idea how or how complicated to actually do but its a nice idea

 

[ebbrell]

why don't you use nvidia or amd to replay

 

[Sylow]

why don't you use nvidia or amd to replay

That's only a fraction of the functionality he is asking for. This serves for watching things from your own perspective, but the real power of the suggestion here is to have a free camera and observe what every other ship was doing. You can learn a lot more about a fight by being able to observe it from different angles.