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[GG2RBY]

Hi

So a while back (more than a year and half ago I believe) there used to be a mod that, if you hosted with it, the host could download replays of a match. What makes replays different from normal pov recording such as camtasia/hypercam is that

• Everything is "recorded", not only your pov, so you can see what happened on the other side of the map while you were doing something. This means that the replay can be rewatched in gg2 so you can record a sequence from multiple pov's.
• The hud isn't shown and neither or plugins. This is way more enjoyable to watch in gg2's case than someone's cluttered pov.
• Replays can be shared. If someone wants to recast a match they don't have to rely on the recording of another person, they can just rewatch the raw replay and look at parts they find interesting.

This is what makes it so appealing for video creation. It will be a lot easier to record gameplay/ create enjoyable gg2casts, which mght attract more video creators.

I realize this may vary well be impossible or pretty hard to code, but is this possible as a server plugin? Say, pressing (button) after you died saves a replay of the events that happened during the match while you were alive, basically TF2 replays. If you're a spectator and you do this when the scoreboard is shown, it saves the entire match.

[GG2RBY]

anyone?

[notarctic]

no one knows how lol

[Phantom Brave]

no one knows how lol

if you don't have anything worthwhile to say. .. . ...

[RebelINS]

no one knows how lol

if you don't have anything worthwhile to say. .. . ...

his post count would be in the single digits
give him a break

[notarctic]

no one knows how lol

if you don't have anything worthwhile to say. .. . ...

his post count would be in the single digits
give him a break

i am having trouble deciding whether to laugh at this or feel offended by this

[Orpheon]

Having been the person who made the replay mod, I'll leave what I remember:

It's actually much easier than it would look like as the game already tries to convert the game state into a byte string and vis-versa for networking, so all that's really needed is to fork and store the stream of bytes sent every frame. This is easiest on the server, I have not implemented it on the client as the client never receives something en masse, it calls for data piecewise. It should still be possible in theory by modifying the receiveMessage function (or whatever it's called).
Displaying a replay is done by taking a client and hacking the receiveMessage function to take all data from the file. The client then automatically converts that into a game, and simple locking to TEAM_SPECTATOR prevents the watcher from influencing the game, and also removes HUDs etc. Fast-forward can be done by raising the game fps.
It's also necessary to be able to separate different frames of input so that the client doesn't "receive" everything in one frame. I did this with a length-prefixing, maybe there's a better and more stable way.