Size of replay files. (ChronoCam)

Hello all.

So in the 3rd of may livestream someone asked about the size of a replay file, and as a response we were told it would vary between how big the match was.

I think the question was more directed to getting an example just so we have an idea about how much space we should set aside for that kind of thing, and whether it will be easily uploadable to various replay websites.

So just for the sake of having something to relate to lets say a 30 minute 3 person match on 1 planet the same size shown in the 3rd of may livestream.

Or just show us how much the ChronoCam file from the live stream is. Please.

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Your sig is amazing.
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Yes I would also like an idea of size, of course they can't give us much accuracy but just a ballpark figure would be nice.

I´d like to see compressed files like in World of Tanks. 1 Replay (with free camera and that stuff) is only a few MB big(Or KB (dont know)).
But because PA has lots of more features and models and that kinda stuff, they will be bigger than just a few MB.

Here's their answer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQavbTGa ... age#t=612s

Models would have nothing to do with it... It would be purely number of units, (more players, more units) size of solar system, length of game.

This is still very hard to estimate even with 30 mins, 3 people, 1 planet. Each game could vary hugely in the number of units produced. Say for example one person created 10,000 t1 kbots. And in another game the same person built 100 battleships instead. (the 10,000 kbots would result in far more recorded data than the 100 battleships)

Really... just wait until the game ships and then you can get an idea for file sizes. It won't be crazy enough that you will need a separate hard drive, just for replays.

They will most likely use a library like 7zip for compression which should keep the size down. (it is just text data, so it will compress 90% or more)

It's very unlikely to be gigabytes of data. Stop freaking out.

Well yes, which is why I ended it off with.

But I'm thinking more on a web perspective because from that angle whether it's going to be 1mb files 10 mb files and 100 mb files, is going to determine how many websites will offer storage, and that will limit, to some extend, how the game spreads.

With or without file compression?
and what about the repay system currently being unoptimised?

What useful data are you actually hoping to get here?

As I've edited above, I'm trying to find out how widely accessible replays will be.

I have yet to see a replay system that makes the replays huge in size. This is a very similar replay system to what LoL has, or at least I think so. Those replays are a few MB each.

FAF replays are 20-100 KB each. There is no reason to think the replays will have any significant amount of bytes. In this day and age everyone has TBs of hard drives so the space shouldn't be an issue.

You can always buy a new HDD, storage drives aren't all that expensive :mrgreen:

PA replays will probably be far larger because they have more information. The ChronoCam feature might take up quite a bit of space to be able to jump to any point in the replay. Also SupCom replays can easily jump to 500-1000kB with longer games or more players.

I don't think the real issue is HDD space, it's bandwidth/time. If replays aren't really going to exceed a couple of meg then it's no real issue. If replays routinely exceed several meg then it makes sharing much more time consuming and awkward. Remember not everyone has killer internet speeds!

If PA replays actually hold all the information within them to play why would you need all the data at once?

Could it not be Streamed?

For sure, I'm not concerned with getting replays from Uber, I'm thinking about sending/receiving replays to/from other people (I do this a lot).

For a multi hour game with hundreds of thousands of units?

It's more likely than you think.

it has to be (hopefully) many hours... many many hours before it would reach a gig for what I would believe any way.

replays are kinda like vector files they keep a lot of information stored in mathematical expressions, rather than keeping every pixel worth of information.

EDIT: hundreds of thousands of units proooobably wont be the case either, maybe thousands, maybe even up around 10k but 100k and above probably... probably wont be the case for common computers, and games.

1 million units is neutrino's aim.

Getting even... 1% there is still beyond the scope of most other games.

The short answer is we simply don't know because the game isn't done.

Certainly the replays are going to be larger than any other game you've seen because the game is larger and it's pure client/server, not synchronous.

On the flip side there is no reason why you need to have replays saved on your computer, so why should you care? We are going to be archiving all replays from any games connected to UberNet and we'll allow you to browse/download/watch them.

Once we start getting our front facing pages going you should be able to just navigate to our website, look at the history of all games you've ever played and then click on one of them to view it. Of course since the UI has a web browser built in this should also work from in-game...

As far as the size goes... this is a next-gen RTS engine built to take advantage of fact that computers are fast and disk space is cheap. Does it really matter how large these files are in the scheme of things? Delete a few gigs of porn if you run out of room.

LOL