[flagged]
Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
31–40 of 273 posts
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#32One 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…
Interesting you mention StarCraft. The replay feature could diverge off due to the non deterministic nature of the game.
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#33When I first played the NES the pause feature impressed me even more than did the graphics. Apparently Atari already had the feature on the 5200 console, but even as late as 1988 it felt like magic to hit a button, go and eat dinner, and an hour later resume my game with another press of the button.
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think if it were as simple as "remember the RNG seed", game developers would do it every time. But determinism also means, for instance, running the physics engine at a deterministic timestep regardless of the frame rate, to avoid differences in accumulated error or collision detection. And that's something that needs designing in from day one . Thank you for still prioritizing it.
Tying physics to framerate at all is a mistake. Like, should be filed as a bug mistake.
There's no scenario in which that's desirable.
And yet even Rockstar gets it wrong. (GTA V has several framerate dependent bugs)
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#35One 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…
Related to that is the ability to watch games using the game-client too. This used to be a promoted feature in CS, with "HLTV/GOTV", but sadly disappeared when they moved to CS2. Spectating in-client is such as powerful way to learn what people are doing that you can't always see even from a recording from their perspective.
This absolutely still exists - I have a library for reading Source 2 (CS2, Deadlock etc) demo files and streams (HTTP ones like CSTV).
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if it were as simple as "remember the RNG seed", game developers would do it every time. But determinism also means, for instance, running the physics engine at a deterministic timestep regardless of the frame rate, to avoid differences in accumulated error or collision detection. And that's something that needs designing in from day one . Thank you for still prioritizing it.
Tying physics to framerate at all is a mistake. Like, should be filed as a bug mistake. There's no scenario in which that's desirable. And yet even Rockstar gets it wrong. (GTA V has several framerate dependent bugs)
I completely agree, but it's an easy mistake to make.
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related to that is the ability to watch games using the game-client too. This used to be a promoted feature in CS, with "HLTV/GOTV", but sadly disappeared when they moved to CS2. Spectating in-client is such as powerful way to learn what people are doing that you can't always see even from a recording from their perspective.
This absolutely still exists - I have a library for reading Source 2 (CS2, Deadlock etc) demo files and streams (HTTP ones like CSTV). https://github.com/saul/demofile-net
Demo files work, but I'm talking about spectating live. The "Watch" tab was removed and the ability to just browse and spectate the top games currently being played.
I'm sure the technology still exists in the engine, but it's no longer the key feature it once was. HLTV/GOTV was launched with some fanfare back in the day.
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if it were as simple as "remember the RNG seed", game developers would do it every time. But determinism also means, for instance, running the physics engine at a deterministic timestep regardless of the frame rate, to avoid differences in accumulated error or collision detection. And that's something that needs designing in from day one . Thank you for still prioritizing it.
Tying physics to framerate at all is a mistake. Like, should be filed as a bug mistake. There's no scenario in which that's desirable. And yet even Rockstar gets it wrong. (GTA V has several framerate dependent bugs)
not framerate of rendering but physics running at (its own) fixed frame rate.
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think if it were as simple as "remember the RNG seed", game developers would do it every time. But determinism also means, for instance, running the physics engine at a deterministic timestep regardless of the frame rate, to avoid differences in accumulated error or collision detection. And that's something that needs designing in from day one . Thank you for still prioritizing it.
> running the physics engine at a deterministic timestep
As well as using special library versions of floating-point functions which don't behave the same across different processors I suppose, if you want to be safe.
Eg cr-libm[1] or more modern alternatives like core-math[2].
Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
#40One 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…
Supreme Commander 2 savefiles appear to be a list of timestamped user interface inputs and unit commands