Best way to implement game playback?

Question

I'm creating a grid based game in Java and I want to implement game recording and playback. I'm not sure how to do this, although I've considered 2 ideas:

1. Several times every second, I'd record the entire game state. To play it back, I write a renderer to read the states and try to create a visual representation. With this, however, I'd likely have a large save file, and any playback attempts would likely have noticeable lag.

2. I could also write every key press and mouse click into the save file. This would give me a smaller file, and could play back with less lag. However, the slightest error at the start of the game (For example, shooting 1 millisecond later) would result in a vastly different game state several minutes into the game.

What, then, is the best way to implement game playback?

Edit- I'm not sure exactly how deterministic my game is, so I'm not sure the entire game can be pieced together exactly by recording only keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Answer 1

A good playback mechanism is not something that can be simply added to a game without major difiiculties. The best would be do design the game infrastructure with it in mind. The command pattern can be used to achieve such a game infrastructure.

For example:

public interface Command{
    void execute();
}
public class MoveRightCommand implements Command {
   private Grid theGrid;
   private Player thePlayer;

   public MoveRightCommand(Player player, Grid grid){
        this.theGrid = grid;
        this.thePlayer = player;
       }

   public void execute(){
     player.modifyPosition(0, 1, 0, 0);
   } 
}

And then the command can be pushed in an execution queue both when the user presses a keyboard button, moves the mouse or without a trigger with the playback mechanism. The command object can have a time-stamp value (relative to the beginning of the playback) for precise playback...

Answer 2

Shawn Hargreaves had a recent post on his blog about how they implemented replay in MotoGP. Goes over several different approaches and their pros and cons.

http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2009/03/20/motogp-replays.aspx

Answer 3

Assuming that your game is deterministic, it might be sufficient if you recorded the inputs of the users (option 2). However, you would need to make sure that you are recognizing the correct and consistent times for these events, such as when it was recognized by the server. I'm not sure how you handle events in the grid.

My worry is that if you don't have a mechanism that can uniformly reference timed events, there might be a problem with the way your code handles distributed users.

Consider a game like Halo 3 on the XBOX 360 for example - each client records his view of the game, including server-based corrections.

Answer 4

Why not record several times a second and then compress your output, or perhaps do this:

recordInitialState();
...
runs 30 times a second:
recordChangeInState(previousState, currentState);
...

If you only record the change in state with a timestamp(and each change is small, and if there is no change, then record nothing), you should end up with reasonable file sizes.

Answer 5

There is no need to save everything in the scene for every frame. Save changes incrementally and use some good interpolation techniques. I would not really use a command pattern based approach, but rather make checks at a fixed rate for every game object and see if it has changed any attribute. If there is a change that change is recorded in some good encoding and the replay won't even become that big.

Answer 6

How you approach this will depend greatly on the language you are using for your game, but in general terms there are many approaches, depending on if you want to use a lot of storage or want some delay. It would be helpful if you could give some thoughts as to what sacrifices you are willing to make.

But, it would seem the best approach may be to just save the input from the user, as was mentioned, and either store the positions of all the actors/sprites in the game at the same time, which is as simple as just saving direction, velocity and tile x,y, or, if everything can be deterministic then ignore the actors/sprites as you can get their information.

How non-deterministic your game is would also be useful to give a better suggestion.

If there is a great deal of dynamic motion, such as a crash derby, then you may want to save information each frame, as you should be updating the players/actors at a certain framerate.

Answer 7

I would simply say that the best way to record a replay of a game depends entirely on the nature of the game. Being grid based isn't the issue; the issue is how predictable behaviour is following a state change, how often there are new inputs to the system, whether there is random data being injected at any point, etc, You can store an entire chess game just by recording each move in turn, but that wouldn't work for a first person shooter where there are no clear turns. You could store a first person shooter by noting the exact time of each input, but that won't work for an RPG where the result of an input might be modified by the result of a random dice roll. Even the seemingly foolproof idea of taking a snapshot as often as possible isn't good enough if important information appears instantaneously and doesn't persist in any capturable form.

Interestingly this is very similar to the problem you get with networking. How does one computer ensure that another computer is made aware of the game state, without having to send that entire game state at an impractically high frequency? The typical approach ends up being a bespoke mixture of event notifications and state updates, which is probably what you'll need here.

Answer 8

I did this once by borrowing an idea from video compression: keyframes and intermediate frames. Basically, every few seconds you save the complete state of the world. Then, once per game update, you save all the changes to the world state that have happened since the last game update. The details (how often do you save keyframes? What exactly counts as a 'change to the world state'?) will depend on what sort of game information you need to preserve.

In our case, the world consisted of many, many game objects, most of which were holding still at any given time, so this approach saved us a lot of time and memory in recording the positions of objects that weren't moving. In yours the tradeoffs might be different.