Play recordings

[wolfmat 2]

Like you know it from a roguelike, not like you know it from FRAPS.

While a player plays, his movement and his surroundings are recorded. AI decision outcomes, player movement and damage and so on end up as scripts (basically path nodes and animation triggers with timestamps). Inventory management is reduced to a timestamped textlog to make things suck less for viewers (animations and sounds being preserved).

The player can choose to have a recording bookmarked, can set a recording start in the past (within reasonable bounds) and keep recording seamlessly, and can also end recording, which exports the recorded data from recording start to end.

Recordings are ArmA demos for playback with the DayZ mod being enabled.

Most notably, the randomness that occurs in-game is eliminated completely from the view of the recording; spawns and stuff could result from a seed-timestamp-relationship.

This is highly dependent on ArmA's and DayZ's determinism and inner workings, needs lots of CPU cycles, disk writes, optimization, encoding and all that.

(Think about it, you stream a chunk of the world state to disk continuously.)

Particle physics wouldn't be recorded, but rather still simulated upon playback of such a demo; same for negligible stuff like flying birds or randomized foliage sfx (you can't touch that stuff anyway, right?).

I have to be honest, I don't really know how much happens around a player in a given timeslice (it's hard to estimate from a player's perspective). Obviously, it's a lot. The question is, does it exceed a reasonable filesize? Is it possible to get that data into a proper format for playback?

All things that only an experienced modder of ArmA can really tell (well, and a Bohemia core development team member).

I am not sure about the feasibility because the granularity in comparison to roguelike recordings is obviously on a much higher magnitude, and not necessarily synchronous.

But it would be awesome to have such play recordings; especially when it comes to fights or cooperative efforts between players.

I guess it's really nebulous as a concept. Sorry.

If you like the idea, then maybe think about how you'd implement it for a while, then do a bit of educated guesswork regarding engineering efforts required / resources claimed / time eaten, then make a call concerning feasibility.

[LondonHyena 7]

Or you could just use an external recording program with a hotkey for when you want to start/finish recording.

That would do pretty much the same thing? I mean yes, COD has something similar but the engine was probably designed with that built in. I imagine it would be a real issue putting that into ARMA2's already ageing engine.

[wolfmat 2]

It's more on the level of CoH's play recordings. The cool thing is that you can pick viewpoints freely, alter playback time and all that with such recordings.

If you want to record a video, you can record a video, and that works alright, but sometimes, you had that moment and wished you had recorded it, to name an example for a usecase.