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Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

kotaku.com

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Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#91

Post by abejfehr »

vintermann wrote: post #8

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…

You might find this talk interesting: https://youtu.be/W20t1zCZv8M

It’s one of my favourites

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#92

Post by teamonkey »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #58

I only know pausing games is funky because the highest my playstation fans ever go is pausing some games. Quite weird pausing is not just a feature of the game engine or runtime, especially as the menu and settings system seem to be totally separate in most cases anyways.

It is a feature of most game engines. Unreal has a standard SetGamePaused function, for example.

But like most things in game development there is no solution that fits every use case.

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#93

Post by jmorenoamor »

vintermann wrote: post #8

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…

Factorio follows that method also, given its complexity it's quite an achievement

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#94

Post by lordmauve »

From a lot of game jam games with custom engines, I have a pretty standard approach: I set the game clock to zero timestep, and push a pause gamestate onto the gamestate stack, where top gamestate gets all input. The trick is that you need many clocks, clocks for the gameplay/game animations, HUD animations, menu animations.

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#95

Post by zamadatix »

butvacuum wrote: post #50
recursivecaveat wrote: post #13

The strangest pause bug I know is in Mario Sunshine: pausing will misalign the collision logic (which runs 4 times per frame) and the main game loop. So certain specific physics interactions will behave differently depending on how many times the game has been paused modulo 4.

really? is one state the one where you fall through bridges? I can't play Sunshine because of that.

If it's the one in Pianta Village there is a well known glitch on that one to do with watersliding over it. I haven't heard of a general bridge glitch though.

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#96

Post by raincole »

greazy wrote: post #32
vintermann wrote: post #8

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…

Interesting you mention StarCraft. The replay feature could diverge off due to the non deterministic nature of the game. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21920508

The comment you linked to doesn't know what they are talking. (Edit: given the context, they know what they're talking about, but you don't)

A game having random mechanisms has absolutely nothing to do with whether it's deterministic.

Slay the spire is 100% deterministic, gameplay-wise. All the online poker games too.

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#97

Post by shaan7 »

RedNifre wrote: post #71
greazy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting you mention StarCraft. The replay feature could diverge off due to the non deterministic nature of the game. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21920508

The way I remember it was that replay playback would only break if you played a replay with a different game version than it was recorded with.

or, if you are replaying a single-player game that you saved+loaded (i.e. the replay only worked if the full game happened in one go without any loads).

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#98

Post by pcblues »

This is silly reporting with a couple of interesting stories. Forget about the technical ways of doing it. Doing it at all changes the game experience.

Pausing a game has a massive impact on the game experience. It lets you break the fourth wall experientially. Not wrong, but it changes the dynamic of the game.

Same as saving at any time does. As losing your loot or your life permanently does. Not wrong, but a hard choice that appeals to some players and not to others.

I used to pause pacman on my Atari 800 so I could run to church and sing in the choir or be an altar boy. Then I ran home and unpaused to continue. Sometimes in summer the computer over-heated and I lost everything while I was at church.

Lessons learnt? None, I think :)

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#99

Post by marcosscriven »

This reminds me of the Action Replay device you could get for the Amiga 500 in the ‘90s.

You could use a knob to slow down any game to a stop. You could also press a button to go to a console that let you change memory.

It would even figure out which bit of memory kept the number of lives of you deliberately lost a life and it could see what decremented.

Re: Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

#100

Post by _jackdk_ »

ndepoel wrote: post #51
vintermann wrote: post #8

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…

It wasn't really that much to do with determinism. Quake uses a client-server network model all the time, even when you're only playing a local single-player game. What the demo recording system does is capture all of the network packets that are being sent from the server to the client. When playing back a demo, all the game has to do is run a client and replay the packets that it originally received from the server…

Carmack wrote a really interesting .plan about this. It seems to be written between Q2 and Q3A, and cites the Windows message queue as a big inspiration:

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast...

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