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

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

#171

Post by Jare »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #12
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…

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.

Mostly because determinism is an all or nothing proposition. Either EVERYTHING in game logic is perfectly deterministic and isolated from everything else, or it pretty much as if nothing was. So if you want to commit to determinism, you have to be constantly vigilant and debugging these maddening types of bugs. Whether this investment is worth it or not is up to each dev.

Sometimes you can find small areas of the game that can be deterministic and worth it. In a basketball game I worked on in the 90s, I designed the ball physics to be deterministic (running at 100hz). The moment the ball left the player hands it ran deterministically; we knew if it was going to hit the shot and if not, where the rebound would go to.

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

#172

Post by trashface »

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…

The engine needs to save the RNG seed too and various other details, the goal is definitely to make it as deterministic as possible (and yes saving the packets is part of that).

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

#173

Post by herodoturtle »

netcoyote wrote: post #155

One of the fun features that I developed for Warcraft (the RTS) was to fade the screen to grayscale when the game is paused. Since the game uses a 256 color palette, it was only necessary to update a few bytes of data (3x256) instead of redrawing the whole screen, so the effect was quick. I also used this trick when the game stalled due to missing network packets from other players. Initially the game would still be…

This was a neat design choice I remember it well.

And also that my “sound card works perfectly!”

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

#174

Post by pull_my_finger »

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…

I always wondered how NES games, which were notoriously low memory, could have game simulation on the start screens. Think Super Mario Bros, but there are many others. If no input is received at the start menu, the game starts playing a demo run. You always see videos and posts about how developers were dissecting sprites and swapping color pallets to work around the small memory, so how in the heck did they manage having the gameplay demos?

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

#175

Post by jodrellblank »

cubefox wrote: post #123
esrauch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Evil megacorp" media is hardly new.

Murdering CEOs is extremism, saying something is an "evil megacorp" is totally different.

There's probably something eloquent by Hannah Arendt about how 190,000 Americans killed by health insurance companies goes unnoticed while one person killing a CEO becomes a spectre of "left wing extremism" held up as an example.

Or was it by The Joker from Batman?

Or was it when protesters in Latin America sat down blocking a road to protest environmental destruction and an American driver was so angry that he was mildly inconvenienced that he got out of his car and murdered one of them with his gun. And Joe Rogan's podcast commentary was "what did they expect?", more annoyed at the inconvenience to drivers than the murder of a human.

Or maybe when Just Stop Oil protestors threw soup and mashed potato on the glass in front of a painting, with the idea "look how angry you are at the damage to a valuable and irreplacable object, this is how angry you should be at the damage to the valuable and irreplacable environment which keeps all humans alive" and Fox News laughed at them for both damaging something important and not causing any real damage so they were ineffective. Then the judge gave them 2 years in prison on the grounds that throwing a can of soup at someone's face would be violence, so throwing it at a painting is violence. But no oil executives overseeing the Exxon Valdez disaster or the Gulf of Mexico disaster faced any jail time at all.

Or when the suffragette movement cut a painting of Venus de Milo to protest against Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested and rough-handled, and people were angrier about the harm to the painting of a woman than about the harm to a real woman.

Or when Fox News says "they aren't protesting the right way" so Kapaernik asked actual verterans how to peacefully protest respectfully and they told him to kneel during the national anthem, and the complainers didn't care a whit and said that was still the wrong way and disrespectable, and he lost his job and the president tweeted rude things about him personally, and the national football thingy made that kind of protest forbidden, almost as if the objection "protesting the wrong way" was all bullshit.

Yes, probably Hannnah Arendt could put it eloquently.

But you're right, murder is wrong, and that's all there is to it.

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

#176

Post by Jyaif »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #127
diath wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If memory serves well, that worked by replaying network packets, which is what some other games do as well, the problem with that approach is that for live service games unlike old games that were often "set in stone", the protocol always changes, so it's a huge maintenance burden. You either need to add conversion tools, keep maintaining backwards compatibility with older protocol versions, or you accept that replay…

> ... or you accept that replays quickly become outdated That's how Warcraft 3's fully deterministic save files would work. Old replay files would only work tied to one specific patch patch of the game. But here's the thing: it's still a godsend while in development and it was still a godsend to players too. "Battlenet user spiritwolf beat me even though I had the upper hand, how did he do it? Let's check the replay…

> not much preventing your game engine from having a pluggable system where you could have the various different patches of the game engine ship with every subsequent release of the game

Starcraft 2 does that. It's still quite an achievement.

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

#178

Post by stanko »

umvi wrote: post #154

Seems like a solved problem for consoles, at least. On the Nintendo switch you can "pause" any game regardless of if the devs implemented it by pressing the home button which suspends the entire game at the OS level

That is different, because you can't interact with the game anymore. In game pause can let you change your settings or map for example. Menus and map are still running in the game loop, so then you need to make they get the input events but not the gameplay part.

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

#179

Post by RobRivera »

Total self brag, one of the key foundations of my game engine is that every single instance of any object has an anchor to a timing system, and pausing can be propogated on the same cycle as the input-capture at the most granular level as desired.

I really need to start blogging my notebook

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

#180

Post by RobRivera »

netcoyote wrote: post #155

One of the fun features that I developed for Warcraft (the RTS) was to fade the screen to grayscale when the game is paused. Since the game uses a 256 color palette, it was only necessary to update a few bytes of data (3x256) instead of redrawing the whole screen, so the effect was quick. I also used this trick when the game stalled due to missing network packets from other players. Initially the game would still be…

Omg I love this! I have been finding excuses to do little animation engine features that arent on the critical path of development for the sake of creative self-indulgence. Such features shipped was alpha channel based fading using the fundamental opengl fade parameter (under the hood its a linear interpolation of alpha values over 256, pieced together over a provided pair of timestamps).

I tell you what I'll do today on my dev time, I'll try implementing grayscale without aby research on pause and then compare notes (I'm assuming this wc code is available somewhere, which may be a bad assumption)

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