[Arkblade]

hi,
i request mission replay/demo system. (like quake and some race games)
It reviews my mission from another angle, and the others' super-play is enjoyed and researched.
and the situation of exciting multi play can be recorded.
I think that it makes FS2 more interesting.

[Turey]

hi,
i request mission replay/demo system. (like quake and some race games)
It reviews my mission from another angle, and the others' super-play is enjoyed and researched.
and the situation of exciting multi play can be recorded.
I think that it makes FS2 more interesting.

Frankly, this would just waste the coders' time. just use gamecam instead.

[Arkblade]

Replay from another angle cannot be done in usual capture.
If this feature is usual capture, it is unnecessary as you say.

[Goober5000]

There is a half-written demo system already built into FS2, but it's not complete and none of us really knows how much work it would take to get it finished.

[taylor]

It's at the very bottom of my very looong todo list.  I played with it while I was doing Valgrind tests on the icculus.org project back in '03 (I used it to automate memleak checking while in-mission), but haven't really touched it since.  It's by no means complete, but it could do with some work and then be modified for much easier use by the general public.  The main problem with it was that the save game files were MASSIVE.  By the time we got it working better the save files would likly be 100+ MB.  If we go with a serious upgrade then that could probably be taken care of as well.  But, this is such a ho-hum thing, that I don't think you should hold your breath waiting for it.  One of us might work on it at some point, before we die.

[Backslash]

Quick, somebody figure out how to clone the coders!

[Flipside]

Heh, the problem with setups like this is that the game sometimes doesn't do the same thing twice. Many a homeworld replay has ended up crashing because a frigate or the like managed to survive for some reason. It would be good to see, and handy for building promo videos etc, where you can choose what you are recording and from what position.

I just wish there was some way to stop your camera from aligning itself with it's target, or possibly adding some kind of spline path, so the camera moves like a following ship, with appropriate 'softness' to the movement. I could be completely wrong here, but I think Freespace 2's 3D maths system isn't the best suited for that.

Also, while I'm at it, an interesting buglet is that if you are in front of a ship in the camera, it can't actually shoot anything, shots and missiles will hit the 'camera' object I'll have to Mantis that....

[asyikarea51]

Heh, the problem with setups like this is that the game sometimes doesn't do the same thing twice. Many a homeworld replay has ended up crashing because a frigate or the like managed to survive for some reason. It would be good to see, and handy for building promo videos etc, where you can choose what you are recording and from what position.

I got this in RalliSport Challenge 2 once.

[IPAndrews]

Alternatively play the missoin through using an AI controlled Alpha 1 and use SEXPs to randomly change your camera angles.

[WMCoolmon]

Also, while I'm at it, an interesting buglet is that if you are in front of a ship in the camera, it can't actually shoot anything, shots and missiles will hit the 'camera' object I'll have to Mantis that....

This is quite interesting because there's no such thing as a camera object. In order for shots to collide with a camera (one using the cutscene SEXPs) the game would have had to do a major rewrite on itself of the lower-level object code.

[Flipside]

Well, that's certainly confusing, because if you position the camera in front of the ship, that's exactly what happens, you can even hear a 'shield impact sound' when they hit, or an explosion in the case of missiles. Maybe it just plays the sound but doesn't destroy the missile etc, though that's not what it looked like. I'll check again later today

Note : This is not the cutscene camera, this is the 'orbital' camera that you use in-game.

[DaBrain]

If you ever get to work on it, could you please consider this request?

The recording feature is useful, but it might get even more useful as benchmark feature.

Playing the whole scene on two different PC and comparing the lowest fps rate on both systems would help a lot with the performance optimization. At least I think so.

[Flipside]

Quick update on that 'bug' I found, wonder if someone else can try it and see if I'm right...

Just use the external camera on a ship you have targetted, not the players ship, and rotate around the ship till you are right in the line of fire. Now, if that ship fires off a few rounds or a missile, it certainly seems to me that the weapon gets no further than the camera before you hear an explosion or shield hit noise and the shot does not seem to go beyond that point.

Can someone check this just to make sure I'm not imagining it?

[Backslash]

This wouldn't surprise me.  I've been looking into a similar bug, in that if you external-view your target, it will often play flyby sounds.  From what I see, it is testing whether the closest object to the viewer (assumed to be the player) is close enough to play the sound -- however obviously if the viewer is NOT the player this doesn't behave as one would prefer.  I bet the bug you mention involves similar code.

Hmm, to test the bug you mention, sounds like a job for slower-than-normal time compression!  Will do when I have some spare time...

[bizzybody]

Is there an Observer feature for mutiplayer? In some games like Unreal Tournament, you can join as an Observer and just flit around from player to player to watch the action.

One time I was watching a game with the max number of bots fighting each other and the last two survivors both decided to camp at the same time, waiting forever for the other one to run by!