Recorded games

[flash9286]

Mark are u going to let us upload our recorded games, and are you going to make like a system where u could can tell who played in the game and what teams they were on and etc..

[MarkG]

it's a thought

[flash9286]

u never give a straight answer do you

[FrustratedPoet]

Does anyone know how the recorded game feature will work?

For example, in Warcraft 3 you can watch recorded games, but only if it was played on the same patch as the one you currently have installed (e.g. v1.4 recordings won't run if you have v1.3 or v1.5 installed).
The reason is that the programme literally does "re-play" the game, instead of just showing it like it was a TV show or something. This kind of sucks, obviously.

In Age of Mythology, however, the recorded game feature works in a much more sensible way, so that the recordings work no matter what patch you have.

How's it gonna be in RoN?

[vovan]

Originally posted by FrustratedPoet
The reason is that the programme literally does "re-play" the game, instead of just showing it like it was a TV show or something.

That is not only the case for Warcraft, but for all RTS's that have the replay feature.

And will be the same for RoN. The game will know the initial state of all players, and then just record all the interface commands, literally replaying the game.

In fact, right now, there is a slight bug with the replays (which will definitely be fixed by the time the game is released, but I thought I'd post it, since it is pretty funny. If I am violating any rules here, please tell me). The bug is this: if the player plays against the AI, and it is a very close game, watching the replay might result in a different outcome! Say you win a very tight game. Then during the replay it might just happen that you see yourself loosing and vice versa. Now that's what I call rewriting history!

So, I wouldn't get the hopes up for any game to choose a different approach in the future. The reason is simple: if you actually record a video, then imagine how much space it would take. Consider that a MPEG video takes about 10 megabytes per minute. Now, consider a game that lasts about an hour. That's 600 Megs. Definitely not acceptable. But then, remember also, that 10 MB/min is fairly low-resolution video. If you want the same quality you see during gameplay, you would have to give up many times that much space.

Now, consider the way RTS's record games now - by remembering the interface commands. One file wouldn't be more than a megabyte in size. An improvement in orders of magnitude, at the cost of very minor problems, like the lack of the rewind feature.

So, no matter how obviously you might think this sucks, it's not going to go... Unless some smart person comes up with a revolutionary way, that is.

[FrustratedPoet]

Like I said, it doesn't work like that in Age of Mythology. I don't know exactly how they do it, but it is perfectly possible to watch recorded games from old patches in AOM.

[FrustratedPoet]

Just to clarify: when i used the example of a TV show I didn't mean that there would an MPG file of a whole game - but simply that it would always work and always show the same thing regardless of the patch you were running.

Unfortunately I don't have AOM installed, and it's been a couple of months since I played it - so I'm only 90% sure of the point I was trying to make in the last post.

[Solver]

Like I said, it doesn't work like that in Age of Mythology. I don't know exactly how they do it, but it is perfectly possible to watch recorded games from old patches in AOM.

I keep in touch with ES programmers . AoM recordings are very small. Sure, they are also re-played, with a list of commands.

However, savegames are tagged with the game version. So, if your AOM 1.05 loads a game tagged than 1.03, then it also "remembers" the differences in game statistics, and plays then. Much better than Age of Kings did it.

That's how Play Fast command works there, too... it doesn't go faster at a fixed speed, it processes commands as fast as it can. On a comp just slightly above minimum requiremements, it will go only a bit faster, on a new comp, it will run damn fast.

[vovan]

Right. The fact that some games support "inter-patch replays" and others don't doesn't mean the replays are recorded differently. It is simply a decision the programmers made. In Warcraft, the replays may be incompatible due to the different processing of interface commands or whatever, while in AoM, the patche changes weren't that radical.

[HuangShang]

replays in C&C were nice, i didnt play AoM or WC3 to now how are they

[Brian Reynolds]

It's a cool idea -- mostly the difference between patches is any rules/balance changes that have been made. If we, by way of example, increased the attack strength of Tanks for some later patch, then a Tank using the same string of interface commands (and yeah, recorded games are pretty reasonable in size) would achieve better results than it did in the game you actually played, and the recorded game would rapidly go "out of sync" from the result you expected to see.

So to do this we'd have to make sure each patch "remembers" the rules.xml, unitrules.xml, buildingrules.xml, and so forth from the previous patches, maybe storing them off in a directory or something--so when someone wants to watch an earlier recorded game the game just uses the old values instead. I'm sure ES does that or something analogous, and whoever thought of it deserves a pat on the back--pretty slick!

No promises, but when we get to the point where we want to release a "rules/balance patch" we'll check it out and see if it's do-able. If it turns out to be too late we'll certainly put it on the list of good ideas for future stuff.

Brian

[FrustratedPoet]

Good response Brian, thanks alot*!

*Even if it is an "It's on the wish-list" response. We get enough of that from Firaxis ...

[Solver]

Good update Brian... from what I figure, the ES patches actually append some info to the files with unit info, so that the old value also gets kept...