Size of replay files. (ChronoCam)

And that is why Jon Mavor got 250 bucks of my money the instant I heard he was making a new RTS.

So refreshing when there is no BS coming from the dev team ever. QFT.

I mean hell, even Comcast, one of the most draconian (American) ISPs just removed their 250gb monthly bandwidth limit. Granted I guess there are other parts of the world that are still limiting bandwidth, but its quickly becoming a thing of the past. Even if these things end up being 500mb, who cares. Its just not that big a deal anymore.

This is totally sick.

Mike

I'm guessing that if you're not connected to the internet it'll be saved locally until you do, and it'll upload in the background maybe?

I think neutrino was more so talking about games on Uber servers.....because that's what he said ;p

Mike

and I'm asking if we can upload our offline game replays, saved locally, to the Uber servers when we reconnect

If the files should end up above ~50mb it will be pretty hard to share them, unless your servers are used. People don't like to totally depend on your servers. Who knows how long they are around.
I doubt many people care about the size from a HDD-space standpoint. But bandwidth is far from free and online storage often pretty limited. I.e. a tournament might want to handle the replay's of played games via their servers. Up until now people are used to below 1mb replays. Most online sites that deal with replays are build upon that fact. So if you end up with 50mb+ replays it will break PA for those sites.

Well, the size of the data directly correlates with how much bandwidth someone needs to connect to their game. So it's kind of important.

Why? If a 2 hour game took as much bandwidth as watching a movie for 2 hours is this a big deal? Not in my world.

Maybe? Certainly not on my priority list but it may fall out of some other work. Certainly the emphasis on features like this is for when you are connected. I expect the vast majority of gameplay sessions to be connected to UberNet. Offline mode is really only for use when you don't have an internet connection or you are very paranoid (in which case you shouldn't be expecting all of the online goodness when you are offline).

'Course, was just a random thought that passed into my mind. I'm certainly always online here.

Crazy idea. But how about being able to restore a full game only from the input of the players plus the planetary seed?
Most games just store the orders of the players and simulate all the game with that data. If you do the same in PA you could simulate all the game and end up with the "complete" replay after that and save all the data generated by running the simulation again. You wouldn't be able to use the ChronoCam to see parts that hasn't been simulated and stored on your computer yet though.

I guess that it could be costly to maintain basically 2 replay systems though.

Costly and close to impossible. That would mean the sim has to be deterministic. Good luck making that happen with multi-threading.

Again, big replays, who cares? You don't need the entire file to start watching it.

If we're worried about uploading/streaming, isn't that what fraps/afterburner is for? Youtube? If you want the replay capability, then Uber's servers (which is great by the way) should work out fine enough.

If it takes 2 hours to download a replayfile completely it would be kind of problematic. Streaming is only a partial solution to that, as you can't assume that all replays are on your servers.

Also if replays are really big and you put them all (as in all games played online) on your servers your servers-costs will be pretty undesirable. Undesirable server cost tend to relate with shorter lifetimes for online-services. I don't want UBERnet to vanish like GPGnet did after 5 years. And GPGnet did not have to store movie-sized replays.

@godde: As far as we have been told PA's fundamental technical architecture is build in a way that makes it pretty hard to do that. Meaning a secondary replay-implementation like that is very unlikely. Even if replay files end up 10GB+ it would probably not be done.
But neutrino just beat me to saying this...

Net bandwidth is limited in some countries. I do care.

Unfortunately this game is being built for broadband. It's not something I can really control. It's not like there is an alternative

Australians are getting screwed pretty hard. Are you there? If not where?

Bandwidth would be the main concern for many, not storage requirements. I'd be happy with a replay file measured in the low tens of megabytes for a small 1v1, hundreds of megabytes for longer matches like a good 4v4, only measuring in gigabytes for the most epic of 40 player battles.

Thinking about it (insert wild speculation here), there may come a point when it becomes tricky to do chrono cam live without being slightly unresponsive, namely when you have to dump some of the replay to hdd and access it from there.

Anyway, in an ideal world the replays from uber servers or live would be compressed in a way suitable for streaming (seekable), which some standalone utility could decompress after the fact to allow a user to use a stronger compressor on it.

there are advantages to manageable replay size but it sounds like uber knows what they're doing

bandwidth is becoming less and less of an issue

Guys if we thought like the negative stuff in this thread none of these games would ever get made. TA pushed the limits of hardware at the time past what was reasonable for example.

Bottom line, these decisions are made based on the feature set we want to support. It ain't and can't change at this point.

How limited is limited? I really thought this stuff has been going away in recent years throughout the world.

The connection to the server itself is likely to need ~30 kbs to run. That's not really that much, but your making it sound like your counting megs while the rest of the world has been counting gigs for years.

Based on the tech info we've gotten so far (even though alot is pretty groundbreaking and hard for me personally to wrap my layman brain around) makes me think we are going to see something like 8 players, 1 hour game time = 150 megs (uncompressed). Compared to what we are used to, that's kinda massive sure, but its really not that big a deal. Obviously that's a WAG on my part, we are just going to have to wait and see when its optimized what it'll end up as.

Obviously uber has a large incentive to shrink them to something they can store cheaper however, and compression should be very effective as well.

I'd be surprised if it costs Uber more than 50 grand to buy enough storage for a hundred million replay files. Its peanuts money wise for a project of this size. The cost of the power to run and cool that much HDD isn't even that much anymore either. A few grand a month tops.

Bits are cheap (bitcoins however are quite expensive nowadays).