Replay System and Lua's Flexibility about blog HOT 6 OPEN

@TimelyToga Hey, glad you liked the post. And yea, that seems like a good idea that I hadn't considered. The optimization steps I worked on only dealt with not saving static objects over and over, and that about halved the replay size from 10mb to 5mb per 10s. But it seems like your idea would be something much better to try and maybe then I can get replays to a reasonable size even with this technique. Thanks for the advice!

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Very well-written post! I enjoyed it a lot and am thankful that you took the time to write it.

I do have a suggestion for maybe reducing the filesize of the files that you make when creating replays. Instead of storing all the state every frame in your ReplayObjects, I would suggest dividing this load into two different sets. ReplayGameState and ReplayGameStateUpdate objects. The first to be essentially a mirror of the objects used in your post, while the second are just the deltas between frames. So when you initialize a new enemy / player / item for use to replay, you store all relevant character data, but in the requisite frames after that, you merely provide the fields that changed since the previous frame. Most likely the entity's x and y coordinates will change every frame, but their health and Layer won't necessarily change every frame (in the case of health) or potentially over the duration of the replay (in the case of Layer).

At any rate, thanks again!

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@adonaac, very good post and very learningful. I was about to suggest something the same enhancement @TimelyToga mentionned. But anyway, very good post, as usual. I am sharing this on #gamedev. Keep it up!

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Thanks for great articles.
Link is broken: https://github.com/adonaac/ld34

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I really appreciate you writing this article. There is a lot to think about here. Thank you.

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Interesting post! Thanks.

I'm working with Lua on Playdate, which is a low powered embedded device. Memory and CPU is a concern. In my game I have a fixed number of objects in each level that mostly stay still, and my system is completely deterministic. I'll look into recording and playing back inputs!

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