(Feature request) Replay that last battle...

[HunterMcJesus]

Replay that last battle... WITHOUT pauses.

 

When we all played these kinds of games, half the fun was planing and excecuting an amazing fight sequence where you mowed down your competition and (hopefully) none of your party members died. How did you do this? Lets put it this way...

 

Pause, attack, unpause, pause, attack, unpause, PAUSE, health potion...; rinse and repeat.

 

This crazy task of stopping time to give orders could take on the order of tens of minutes to orchestrate. when in actuall game time it was maybe a minute or so of fighting.

 

Since this is the begining of a new project, I would like to request a small feature to the game. I would like the ability to replay the last minute or so of actual battle to watch the level of incredible badassery i just unleashed upon those bad guys.

 

Just a small request.

Thanks,

Nick

[Hassat Hunter]

Based on the title I was just going to say "use savegames"...

Probably want to word it a bit better if you want people to read it.

 

I don't recall pausing that often. See no harm adding it depending on the technical difficulty...

[khango]

Battle replays would be awesome.

[khango]

Agree the title isn't clear, though.

[sparklecat]

...this would be so cool.

[Ieo]

Hm, would require intelligent video recording addition to the game core? That seems like too much work and probably not something Unity can provide; I'm not sure what other technical solution there might be, though.

[PsychoBlonde]

I don't recall pausing that often. See no harm adding it depending on the technical difficulty...

 

Yeah, I consider the effort of giving commands while the battle is going on to be part of the challenge. However, I make one exception for this--commands that take more than 2 clicks to execute. If I have to select a character, select a menu icon, pull up the spell, target the spell, then click to cast it, imma pause.

 

I'm hoping they're smart enough to make pretty much everything a two-clicker--click the hotbar icon (I want to be able to put all of my abilities on the same hotbar), click the target, whammo!

[khango]

I don't think it requires intelligent video recording... it ought to be a lot like making a demo in quake or something, Probably replayed from recorded input and effect data, rather than video.

Edited October 17, 2012 by khango

[AwesomeOcelot]

It's possible, a lot of FPS and RTS games have this functionally, but it's not simple to implement, and has less utility or demand in RPG games.

[khango]

The utility of epic wizard battle replays can't be underestimated.

[LadyCrimson]

If it was within their time, budget and capability to include it, I'd have no objection. That said, I kinda doubt it will be. One can always record your game session and then edit out all the pause/commanding of the battles. More user-work and not quite the same I know, but better than nothing.

[khango]

If it was within their time, budget and capability to include it, I'd have no objection. That said, I kinda doubt it will be. One can always record your game session and then edit out all the pause/commanding of the battles. More user-work and not quite the same I know, but better than nothing.

 

Yeah, I can kind of see how it might be a lot of work if the engine doesn't have hooks for something similar to begin with.

 

On the other hand, if there are going to be 'hands off' in-game cut-scene style sequences, it seems like a number of the hooks (for replaying a sequence with the same effects) probably exist already?

 

*shrugs*

[Ieo]

If it was within their time, budget and capability to include it, I'd have no objection. That said, I kinda doubt it will be. One can always record your game session and then edit out all the pause/commanding of the battles. More user-work and not quite the same I know, but better than nothing.

 

Yeah, I can kind of see how it might be a lot of work if the engine doesn't have hooks for something similar to begin with.

 

On the other hand, if there are going to be 'hands off' in-game cut-scene style sequences, it seems like a number of the hooks (for replaying a sequence with the same effects) probably exist already?

 

*shrugs*

 

But would the cut-scenes be stored as recorded video clips already?

[Carmelle]

This kind of thing isn't *that* difficult to implement, if you factor things out from the get go.

 

Inputs/actions can be sent to a 'logger' or an 'executor'. The format the logger saves in can then be read back later, and sent back to the executor as well. The executor actually leads to the on screen rendering at some point. If you have data on the world state at the beginning of a battle, plus this log of all actions that occured during it, then have it prune out the pauses... it shouldn't be all that bad.

 

That said, I'm just wondering how much use it'd get? I think it'd be pretty cool to see the first few times around, but after a while, I'm not sure if I'd still be doing it?

[Uomoz]

I'd love this feature. *remembers the first Gorion battle in BG1*

[HunterMcJesus]

That said, I'm just wondering how much use it'd get? I think it'd be pretty cool to see the first few times around, but after a while, I'm not sure if I'd still be doing it?

 

I'd agree that you wouldnt use it all the time. And because of that, its not high on my "this absolutly needs to be a feature list". However, I would use it occasionally when I fought a particularly hard battle.

 

I figured its better to mention it now before they really get rolling and maybe it gets into someones mind over there at OE.

[deathwing]

Isn't something Unity built-in, but there are third-party assets that do exactly this job on Unity. For example this one: http://www.softrare.eu/ez-replay-manager-demo-1.html#.UH6_sMUxrHQ

[AwesomeOcelot]

This kind of thing isn't *that* difficult to implement, if you factor things out from the get go.

 

Inputs/actions can be sent to a 'logger' or an 'executor'. The format the logger saves in can then be read back later, and sent back to the executor as well. The executor actually leads to the on screen rendering at some point. If you have data on the world state at the beginning of a battle, plus this log of all actions that occured during it, then have it prune out the pauses... it shouldn't be all that bad.

 

That said, I'm just wondering how much use it'd get? I think it'd be pretty cool to see the first few times around, but after a while, I'm not sure if I'd still be doing it?

 

I'd counter that with a lot of RTS and FPS games do this feature badly, and it's not necessarily to do with what you write about, but what you have to put on top of it to make the experience informative and usable for the player.

[rjshae]

Hm, would require intelligent video recording addition to the game core? That seems like too much work and probably not something Unity can provide; I'm not sure what other technical solution there might be, though.

I'm not sure about this, but it actually might actually be a useful feature for play testing. I.e. replay a battle up to a certain point, then turn it live and try the action that caused an issue.

[Archmage Silver]

If it was within their time, budget and capability to include it, I'd have no objection. That said, I kinda doubt it will be. One can always record your game session and then edit out all the pause/commanding of the battles. More user-work and not quite the same I know, but better than nothing.

I second this. The money should primarily go towards making the game a complete cRPG experience. Any vanity replay cam features are secondary, and should only be considered if there's really that much extra time and money to go around.

[imatechguy]

I like the concept here. I have an old game, Flatout, that records every race and gives you the option to watch the full replay at the end or skip and that games pretty old so the functionality ought to be fairly easy to implement. Rather than going to the effort of doing this for every fight it might be easier to add the right triggers in for just major quest and boss fights and of course pausing would pause the record feature. Schedule the recording so it doesn't stop until the scene is over (any cut-scene included) and throw in an option to save the recording as a file on the HDD. For that matter allow users to configure it in the options. A simple Enable/Disable toggle with another for auto-saving it to the HDD. Now users can watch them outside of the game and go back to watch videos from previous runs. I think the feature might see more actual use that way than if it was generally available for any just given fight.

[The Guilty Party]

Honestly, this feature would be totally cool. But unless they're just overflowing with free time, I'd rather see them make more story, more locations, more monsters. And this feature seems like it'd be tricky to get right.

[Kith]

I would love an option like you suggest (though as others have said, the title needs work ), I always meticulously plan out my battles in turnbased games and it'd be great to see it all unfold without gaps after a particuarly hard battle.

 

Even more fun if you could export those replay saves into a transferable file - setup a respository for people to upload their epic battles for the world to see (or learn from).

Edited October 18, 2012 by Kith

[HunterMcJesus]

I'm sorry, I'm a nub here how can I change the title of a thread?

[wickermoon]

Great idea! Nothing more to say to this.