Replay server fixing - volunteers needed!

@swkoll said in Replay server fixing - volunteers needed!:

@arma473 Even if this issue was fixed, the preferred method for tournament casting is still likely to be live observer because there is no way to sync 2 casters watching a live replay.

A mod does exist to do this I believe? At least I heard about it, never actually tested it out myself.

@ftxcommando
It worked really well in the past, haven't used it in years though, so idk what the state is.

https://github.com/fafafaf/livereplayserver
https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=5774

@aulex Despite it's name, I believe this is only for syncing replays that already finished, ie where a full replay file exists not live replays. I remember hearing this was broken too, but I haven't tested it recently.

Is there a way to use the synced replay feature to "step into" a match at a particular point in time? E.g. if tex and swkoll had a match on Point of Reach, could I start a synced replay with a pal, and at 8 minutes, I take Tex's position (his units, his buildings, including all existing orders) and my friend takes Swkoll's and we play the game out from there?

This would be a lot of fun and it would let people settle disputes like "if I didn't lose connection, I totally would have won" or "If I didn't forget to build TMD, I totally would have won" or "I think at 15 minutes, blackheart had a stronger position, but at 22 minutes, Blodir is in the stronger position" -- we don't have to just guess, we could play the match out multiple times and see what happens.

@arma473 If this was possible, I would run a "relay race" tournament where a team of players swaps control of a 1v1 game every few minutes.

If I'm available I'd be happy to help test this. Not sure about my availability though because I'm traveling a lot atm. I've had all of the issues mentioned in this thread, the most annoying for me has been the live replay randomly ending when the game ends.

Also, out of curiosity is there any possibility of being able to go back in time in a replay? I'd love that feature but have no idea how easy or even possible it would be to do that.

Edit: I'd like that feature enough that if it's possible to do I'd consider personally putting in some dev time to accomplish that if I can find some bandwidth in me to do some more dev work outside of my main job 🙂

@arma473 @Swkoll If it's possible I love those ideas

@swkoll said in Replay server fixing - volunteers needed!:

@arma473 If this was possible, I would run a "relay race" tournament where a team of players swaps control of a 1v1 game every few minutes.

@swkoll I never understood why this isn't possible. You can save the game in single player mode and resume at that exact point without having to rerun the simulation so clearly there is a serialization format for saving the current state of the game. I'm sure it's possible to adapt it to multiplayer, just not very easy 🙂 .

@Exselsior running the replay in reverse will probably never be possible as that requires running the simulation in reverse which is not possible in the engine afaik.

As for multiplayer saves I think the hardest part about that is getting the correct save.lua to every player in order to start the game and not have any desyncs.

@sheikah Hmm unfortunate. Thanks though!

@corvathranoob yea tbh I misunderstood his post. I thought he was just complaining but after reading it again I see that’s not the case.

It should be possible to stop a replay and take over playing at any point, but it's probably something that we would need engine access to implement. It wouldn't require saving or sending any game state information because you can just simulate the same number of ticks into the replay and start from there.

You could maybe create savegames in certain intervals throughout the replay, and then have some way to automatically jump to a certain save and replay from there. But that probably would require some intense dev work.

Hey, an announcement. Here's my idea what we will do.

  • We meet up on Sunday, June 6, 18:00 UTC. I think it doesn't collide with any events. That's a provisional date, if you have better suggestions please let me know.
  • We meet on IRC and Discord. I'll be in Discord's #faf-testing channel. If IRC on the test server works, I'll also be in client chat. Voice chat is an option I guess, I'll be in one of Discord's voice channels. Apparently my mic sounds like a WW2 fighter pilot, but we'll manage 🙂
  • We login to the test server. This means: log out if you have autologin enabled, select "Test server" in the dropdown menu and use 'foo' as password.
  • We organize a few games, some people play, other people watch live replays, no particular format. I hope we can get maybe 4-6 games.
  • I check if everything works as it should, you report if the short replay bug is gone. I go back to dev chat with results and we decide if and when we deploy the new server.

Let me know what you think.

You can message me on Discord(TrustTheFall) and let's see if I got time 😄

Soon™️

That time should work for me, I’ll try to be there

A quick reminder that we're starting the test in 2 hours.

The test has ended, mostly successfully. We had 1 case of a replay prematurely ending, of course we failed to reproduce it afterwards. I'll have to think about it. Other than that the server seems to work fine. Many thanks to all the testers!