[endgame]

This idea of having idealised curves that get sampled at discrete points in time reminds me somewhat of Functional Reactive Programming and its predecessor, Functional Reactive Animation. Were any of the architects familiar with that world when they planned all of this out, or was it an independent discovery?

[forrestthewoods]

There was at least one FRP fan on the team, but it was not a meaningful source of inspiration.

IIRC the motivating goals were:

    * Client-server architecture (not p2p)
    * gracefully degrade under constrained bandwidth
    * replay support

The in-game replay was a by-product we simply thought was cool and novel. I’ve yet to see anything else like it!

The system also served as the basis for save/load. I think if you had a full replay you could resume from any point. Pretty sure we shipped that feature, although it’s been so long I forget what shipped and what was merely an idea!

[SXX]

Yeah you certainly shipped it. You can load into replay from any moment :-)