[downandout]

>I wonder how long before games start being developed for server side rendering.

A while ago I was working on a flappy bird clone (as a test bed for the technology) that kind of did this. The app ran locally on the device, however it created a text-based record of all objects and their movements on the screen, and at the conclusion of each game, had the ability to ask you if you wanted to upload a video of the game you just played to YouTube. If you selected yes, the small text record of the game was uploaded to the server, where it was used to create a video of the game as you played it and upload it.

The idea was that if it were super-easy and used almost no mobile bandwidth to upload video of game sessions where people liked their results enough to share, it would go viral. The technology worked well in tests, but then flappy bird popularity kind of died before I released it. Now I'm working on implementing it in another game.

[Dragonai]

This is very reminiscent of two things for me:

- the introduction of replays in Halo 3 (which worked the same way - by saving the data of the entire session, one could freely move the camera around the entire map and observe any part of the game at any point in time)

- Super Meat Boy's level-end combined replays (which replayed all of the user's attempts simultaneously, creating a pretty amusing sort of "heatmap" effect)

I think this will eventually become standard for games where replays would be valuable or fun to watch. But I'm not sure about actually rendering live games server-side until we're at a point where input latency is unnoticeable.

[spartanatreyu]

Server side rendering for live games is a really bad idea. If there's a single hickup with a packet, the whole game will stutter on the client's side and they won't be able to do anything, not move, not look, not pause, whatever.

Server side rendering for replayed games on the other hand is totally fine, not everyone has capture cards. They actually had this service on Halo 3 where you could pay bungie for the number of minutes you wanted footage rendered out at.

[simoncion]

nod nod Replays used to be a standard feature of big-budget multiplayer PC video games. I spent many fond hours dissecting exactly how new-to-Descent2 or new-to-Starcraft me got his ass handed to him this time around.

It's a damn shame that more video dev houses don't spend time to create -at a minimum- single-POV client-side replays for their multiplayer games.

[scoggs]

Awesome anecdotes. Reminds me of map making and frag videos in Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc. Super Meat Boy's replay feature was a blast through and through. You have good taste!

[fpgaminer]

Very creative idea. A similar technique is used by a few games for high score validation. The server runs the player inputs through a local simulation of the game to re-calculate the score, thus preventing blatant cheating. TAS is still possible though.

I think TIS-100 and other Zachtronics games do that as well for score validation.

[pikzen]

> it created a text-based record of all objects and their movements on the screen,

Also known as what every single ID Engine / GoldSource / Source[1] / Unreal Engine / many more engines do for records and replays, except they do it in a binary format. It's not exactly a novel idea.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/DEM_Format

[simoncion]

> It's not exactly a novel idea.

True. But:

1) It isn't exactly trivial.

2) Someone who didn't play games in the 1990s, and doesn't like RTS games may very well actually have never played a game with demo recording and playback.

3) Hell, I was unaware that either Source or recent versions of Unreal Engine were capable of demo recording, and I've played the shit out of lots of games that use both engines.

[downandout]

In my case, it was new to me, and I have yet to see this functionality in any mobile game that I have played except for my own.

[simoncion]

I do hope you continue to refine your demo playback techniques and bring this functionality to ever more complex games! I also hope that game devs will push hard to take some time to add demo recording and playback to most of the games they build in the future. :D