11–20 of 273 posts
It suggests a level of control way below what I would ordinarily consider required for game development.
I have made maybe around 50 games, and I think the level of control of time has only ever gone up. Starting at move one step when I say, to move a non-integer amount when I say, to (when network stuff comes into play) return to time X and then move forward y amount.
One of the things that impressed me in Quake (the first one) was the demo recording system. The system was deterministic enough that it could record your inputs/the game state and just play them back to get a gameplay video. Especially given that Quake had state of the art graphics at the time, and video playback on computers otherwise was a low-res, resource intensive affair at the time, it was way cool. It always s…
One of the things that impressed me in Quake (the first one) was the demo recording system. The system was deterministic enough that it could record your inputs/the game state and just play them back to get a gameplay video. Especially given that Quake had state of the art graphics at the time, and video playback on computers otherwise was a low-res, resource intensive affair at the time, it was way cool. It always s…
One of the things that impressed me in Quake (the first one) was the demo recording system. The system was deterministic enough that it could record your inputs/the game state and just play them back to get a gameplay video. Especially given that Quake had state of the art graphics at the time, and video playback on computers otherwise was a low-res, resource intensive affair at the time, it was way cool. It always s…
The main downside which probably caused the diseapearance is that any patch to the game will make the replay file unusable. Also at the time (not sure for quake) there was often fixed framerate, today the upsides of using delta time based frame calculation AND multithreading/multi platform target probably make it harded to stay deterministic (specialy for game where you want to optimize input latency)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on how your timers are implemented. If they are implemented as a "rendez-vous" absolute date (as in UTC for instance - not in local time unless you want to add "eastern eggs" related to daylight saving time...), this will cause bugs. If you implement your own in-game monotonic clock that you can stop, it should be ok.
>If they are implemented as a "rendez-vous" absolute date Do people actually do that? What's the plan for when the user sleeps their machine? All the events just inexplicably happen all at once when they wake it?
Inside the game loop, we would keep the global tick counter that incremented on every tick, and timeouts would be based on that rather than on UTC.
The tick counter was updated only when the game logic was actually running. Our approach to pausing was to not run the functions that handled frame updates or physics updates, and to only run the rendering functions.
Generally we would never care about actual world time other than for some timeouts like for network (as the time passes for everyone), or for easter eggs like changing the tree models for Christmas or so.
I don't think anyone serious would implement event timers based on real time.
One of the things that impressed me in Quake (the first one) was the demo recording system. The system was deterministic enough that it could record your inputs/the game state and just play them back to get a gameplay video. Especially given that Quake had state of the art graphics at the time, and video playback on computers otherwise was a low-res, resource intensive affair at the time, it was way cool. It always s…
One of the things that impressed me in Quake (the first one) was the demo recording system. The system was deterministic enough that it could record your inputs/the game state and just play them back to get a gameplay video. Especially given that Quake had state of the art graphics at the time, and video playback on computers otherwise was a low-res, resource intensive affair at the time, it was way cool. It always s…
As a kid, I couldn't wait to see what came next. Sadly, Q1 was rather one of a kind, and it was many years until anything else like it showed up.
One of the things that impressed me in Quake (the first one) was the demo recording system. The system was deterministic enough that it could record your inputs/the game state and just play them back to get a gameplay video. Especially given that Quake had state of the art graphics at the time, and video playback on computers otherwise was a low-res, resource intensive affair at the time, it was way cool. It always s…
Checking in as a random indie developer who still prioritises determinism in my engine. I don't understand why so many games/engines sacrifice it when it has so much utility.
One of the things that impressed me in Quake (the first one) was the demo recording system. The system was deterministic enough that it could record your inputs/the game state and just play them back to get a gameplay video. Especially given that Quake had state of the art graphics at the time, and video playback on computers otherwise was a low-res, resource intensive affair at the time, it was way cool. It always s…
What's totally insane is that the modern engine rewrite Aleph One can also play back such old recordings, for M2 Durandal (1995) and Infinity (1996) at least.