Replay video viewer from multiple perspectives

[quiet meteor]

Just throwing idea maybe somebody with skills finds this fun to try:

Replays are not shippable and rewindable because of how engine simulation works, the best we can have that allows that is just somebody doing a video recording.

I wonder if it wasn't be cool to do multiple recording of the same match from different perspectives as videos and then allow to switch between them dynamically. For some nicer games like tourneys.

E.g. if it's 4 player game, record top view, view from each players perspective, and maybe one dynamic.

Probably plenty of work, and I wonder if video timing will match even with tricks like recording at 0.5 sim and then speeding up, but I think it would be fun 🙂

[oblique bloom]

Out of curiousity as a side question how hard would be to add serialization/deserialization into the engine?

[warm kindle]

What do you mean exactly?

[oblique bloom]

Hmm you could implement rewinding by taking state snapshots every x seconds

[warm kindle]

Taking snapshots would require a lot of CPU work and will increase size of replay

[oblique bloom]

True but isn’t this the way StarCraft did it ?

I mean it is a big change

[warm kindle]

If do that, then only pretty rarely. Like once in 10-30 min.

[quiet meteor]

According to engine devs working on simulation: hard. E.g. engine already has saves, but can't use that because those are not sync safe for some reason: loading up save, and replaying identical steps on top of it doesn't guarantee to give the same results

[oblique bloom]

Huh that’s actually interesting

[warm kindle]

"then allow to switch between them dynamically"
Switch dynamically where? On YT, twitch stream, local video on drive or?

[quiet meteor]

I don't think that engine and games are really written in a way to support this efficiently anyway. The state required AFAIK is pretty spread around and overall pretty large.

[oblique bloom]

Tho there must be a neat trick that could be pulled off Hmf

[quiet meteor]

I don't know if there are existing players that support it, but I think it should be easy to do in web technologies, to switch between the video sources dynamically.

[oblique bloom]

You could just have a couple players opened in a tiled desktop environment and then just full screen one with interesting action

[warm kindle]

Honestly for me it's feels like it's gonna be much simpler to run many instances of engine from many accounts, but it's gonna be more overhead ofc.

[quiet meteor]

I don't understand your idea with multiple engines

[warm kindle]

Like you can just run many clients of BAR and connect to the same server.

[oblique bloom]

Also afaik the tournaments usually employ spotters which seek interesting action and then direct the casters towards it

[quiet meteor]

Yeah, but you still can't rewind, and you can already switch between players in single instance, and video is nice because you can also run on the phone or laptop without much power etc

Also I don't mean necessarily live

Just as a type of recording after

[warm kindle]

About rewind and live games. I think it's would be good to have ability to pick desirable delay. So you can run one machine being in real time and another machine being like 30 seconds behind, in this way you have time to focus camera on that event on the 30 sec delay machine.
Not perfect yeah ofc.

P.S I wonder if recoil still can record .avi 😄
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring/blob/a88446274eca376d2cabcc55acdcebe8fe71ac7c/rts/Game/AviVideoCapturing.cpp#L45

[fervent olive]

Doesn’t spring have a built in recording system