PA Replay and Spectating tech

As an active caster and stalker of many replays of many different games I am completely demolished by thrill!

It looks and works exactly how I expected and its just pre-alpha. I will give my full thoughts in a video tomorrow, absolutely awesome work and I'm thinking of cashing out more money now :lol:

Nothing to do with Achron at all. If you start from the mid-point of a replay you've created a completely new timeline.

Time travel is not a feature we're looking to include. There are other games that have explored that game play idea, but it's not in line with the game play we're interested in exploring.

Think of starting a game from an arbitrary point in a replay as the same thing as loading a save game. You are starting a new game from a common point in time, but there are unique games.

Another way to think of this is imagine playing an single player FPS game holding down the quick save button (assuming there's no performance hit). Every moment in time is captured for you to return to, but doing so has no effect on the previous game already played.

Oh, I totally understand that PA is not going to have any messy time travel. But half of the challenge of a time travel game is having a functional timeline at all. PA's replay system, at first glance, appears to take care of that by default. It's a very powerful feature to have.

seems like with this base architecture there could be some really interesting mods experimenting with time travel

The ability to turn back the clock and see why X happened is the feature that excites me the most, and it makes perfect sense as well. Just because you weren't looking at something doesn't mean your units don't have data on it. Though it does reduce the effectiveness of sneak attacks a smidge, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

The replay part was awesome to watch! Congratulations!
Can't wait to get my hands on this! =D

Very cool to see the replay system in action!
Also, something you may want to consider (if you haven't already) is implementing some sort of replay-forwarding system, where the game server would only be sending data to the players and one additional replay server. Spectators would connect to the replay server, reducing the load on the critical gameplay server. This would make live spectating of tournaments easy and widely accessible.

Make the server run many games at once with some sort of communication between games.

Oh wow... So this is like the multiverse? You can go back in time to whenever you want and create an infinite amount of different 'paths'?

Uber... You are awesome.

Almost all singleplayer games give players the ability to go back in time to create different paths. Time travel is so prevalent that a there is a genre, roguelikes, mostly defined by the lack of time travel. In most (non-console) games, time travel simply requires the forethought to 'bookmark' the timeline with a point that you can jump back to.

Maybe we can't make a archon 2 on PA, but perhaps we can create a super micro intense RTT mod with Braid like rewind (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqtSKkyJgFM).

So much for the tech talk. -.-

Of course, but that requires us to create a savegame for every second we play.

Answer to my own question: Yes, they said it in the live stream May 3rd.

Technical follow-up question:

Will the client be able to cache game states while playing the game and just fetch the missing pieces from the server while actually watching the replays?
This will save a lot of bandwidth and make replaying smoother.

A thought that I had after watching the latest live stream is, If we can resume replays from any time, even those from older versions of PA.

What would happen if you had a replay that you resumed of an older version, would the rest new fork in the timeline of that game be still the old version or would it be updated so you could play it with the current version of PA that you had whether it was 1 patch ago or 20 patches ago? I'm not sure if that made any sense.

I'm guessing it would just stay with the current version that the game was recorded with.

I thought the question about replay sizes was a valid one - especially if we're talking about posting game replays and downloading them, etc etc. And yes I'm one of the poor suckers in Australia who worries about bandwidth .

So for example, the livestream demo game, when it was complete, how big was it? Does it compress down a lot in a zip? Are we talking game replays being 100s of kb, 10+mb, or 100+ mb?

This Would be very helpful for instant replays in slow motion, kind of like in real sports games. Im very excited to use this technology.

@pawz, what's the matter with bandwidth? Does Auz only have like one Telco?

It's not that there is only one Telco... every Telco has bandwidth caps, its even like that here in New Zealand were I live. There are some unlimited bandwidth plans that are offered, but often these are not suitable for gaming of any kind.

Having said that the plans are reaching quite large amounts now with 80 - 120GB being quite cheap, whereas 2 - 3 years ago it was really expensive for 80GB plans.