I was thinking - is it possible, that sometime in the future, we could have Cortex Command record our actions in-game into a demo or replay file?

That way, it will be easier to record footage of Cortex Command; when playing back pre-recorded sequences, the CPU will not have to be used, as all the simulation data has been saved.

A similar example is Source Recorder for the Source Engine: it's built in, and it records all the actions of all the players and NPC's - when you play the demo, the CPU usage is very low (since all processing has been done already, as it were) and thus, even on quite CPU-intensive areas, you get smooth playback.

I feel that this would be very useful for making CC machinima, and so on - since it will allow us to run a screen-recording application (should we want to capture sounds) without a framerate or game speed issue.

The only thing that may bother some people is perhaps the large file size of all those calculations being stored for next time - but hard-drives these days tend to be much larger.

Yes, it's called PRNTSCRN.

Perhaps you should google it.

Or search.

Perhaps you should read my entire post, Thor.

I'm not talking about merely image capture - I'm talking about capturing an entire match, being able to share replay files with friends, displaying them in the Epic Moments thread, and being able to capture sound without the aid of another program running in the background besides CC. Also, I'm talking about saving simulation data - this is quite different from merely capturing images.

If you have any useful criticism, I'd like to hear it.

The main problem with this is that CC's engine has a lot of randomness to it. Running the exact same simulation will have different results every time. Unless CC's engine were to record what these random numbers were, and insert them at proper stages throughout the simulation, recordings would be very inaccurate. That would involve a lot of rewriting of the engine, so I have to say that I doubt it will happen.

I would love to see it just be able to video record the game with sound. gif making pisses me off.

Since it would record all the physics calculations (supposedly) you could also be able to scroll to different pasts of the map that you didn't view in-game, to find out exactly how that Rocket Mk2 flew into your dreadnought. The recording could possibly be laggy while playing, since CC has to be doing physics calculations while storing the results some where.

It would be infinitely easier if CC uses seeded randomization. This would also enable limited multiplayer without as horrible syncing problems. At least as far as I can see. But then again, I am not a programmer

Laggless Multiplayer:
1. There is a Host and one or more Guests
2. Host computer does ALL physics calculations and sends Guest screens to them as images/frames/video to Guests
3. Guests only receive images/frames/video and sends control information (user press fire, walk, jump, ect)
4. Host processes controls and moves things accordingly. Repeat steps 2-4

That's my idea.

Edit: I need to learn to stay on topic.

This isn't a thread for discussing online play. We've already discussed that exact method plenty of times.

Still, if CC only uses 1 core of a CPU, and they use fixed point math for calculating, it would be deterministic.

It's because it already uses 1 core (so you have to worry about Hyper threading or synching or whatever), so why not the fixed point math?

Is it too slow? I don't get it.

At least, that's what I'm guessing is the source of the troubles.
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/ ... istic.aspx

EDIT: Or maybe this could help: http://nicolas.brodu.numerimoire.net/en ... index.html
But I don't know what libraries are like when you use them for retail games.

Double EDIT: He's asking if it can record all the Postions and Vels and Rotations and stuff for every object every frame.
What he is asking doesn't involve resimulating anything, just playing back the stuff that already happened.
That would be laggy to record with, and the file size would be ginormous.

Also, apparently, C++ doesn't do fixed-point much, so I guess streflop is about as close as you can get.

Since you are a lazy ♥♥♥♥: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EehYIyDWes

This is the only way to do it, unless you want to mess with screen capture programs. /thread.

It sounds like he's asking Data if it is possible to include this feature, or for some Lua modder to create a thing that can read and write files like these.

'course, melon, you'd have a better chance at forwarding this directly to Data, or putting this in requests if this is your intention.

The point of Replays is that they last longer than gifs, and you can manipulate (pause and stuff) them like a movie.

For now Fraps or some other game recording application (as Thor stated) would be your best bet. (Since I doubt data will officially implement this).