How about instant replays?

Or not so instant, just replays. Yes, I'm aware of the demorecord function, but bear with me a bit and I'll explain why I mean something slightly different.

Way back before EA were evil incarnate and Need for Speed games actually allowed split screen gameplay, one of by far the most fun things in then was running a race with a buddy of yours and then watching an instant replay of it. The whole race from end to end, exactly as you'd played it, but from a variety of cool camera angles. Playing the game was fun, obviously, but while you're playing, you're more focusing on actually playing the game than marvelling at the details, and the in-game camera in pretty much every game, though it's good for playing through, isn't actually very good for a cinematic experience.

Now, City of Heroes DOES allow for a demorecording of gameplay to be made, but this has a lot of problems with it. I won't go into the HUGE HASSLE of playing one or the files' tendency to out and out break or not record properly, but even if all things work exactly as they should, all you really get is an exact replica of what you had in the game with the camera locked as you had it. It's pretty much the same as watching someone else play, which isn't actually all that entertaining. You can't even rotate the camera to get a better shot, to say nothing of spectating or having a stationary camera.

So here's something I would suggest - an Instant Replay function like what we had in Carmageddon 2. We can't quite pause the game in here, but let's just say we let it run. The system would record, say, the last minute or two of action and would allow you to rewind or fast-forward, speed up, slow down or just play the replay at normal speed. It would give you a few camera choices, like "as in-game," free-rotate, spectate, stationary and so forth. You know, all tools to allow you to watch your own actions, or the actions of other people, not as a player partaking in the events, but as a spectator watching what a veritable movie.

With the advent of... Just walking, I realised something about our game that I'd completely forgotten - sometimes it's just really cool to watch if you pick the right angle and just sit back. Back when I was a kid, by far the BIGGEST kick I got out of my games was playing them with a friend and marvelling at all the unexpected events our inexperience produced. Wrestle Mania was a gold mine for these, because the game was SO DAMN BUGGY that you ended up pulling off stunts you couldn't even dream of. And City of Heroes has its fair share of these. I still remember the old stories, like when two Gravity Controllers hit Lift on the same enemy at once and pancaked him into the roof among the rafters, causing both of them to burst out laughing on the spot, or the many occasions where you'd be fighting something, see an enemy fly DIRECTLY over your head and turn around to see your team-mate just standing around.

The reason I brought up Carmageddon is because this is practically me and my friends ever did in that game. We'd always try to top each other and pull off ridiculous stunts, so that we may then pause, rewind and look at the stunt like we were watching a movie. I had dozens of movies and thousands of screenshots from this game, all taken from its instant replays.

I know it's a silly suggestion, but I think it would go a long way towards making the game feel a lot cooler when we can record and file away all our cool moments, and then share them with each other. Never again would you hear "Man, I wish I'd taken screenshots of it!" or "You just had to be there!" If something cool happens, hit your instant replay and record it!

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

fraps is win

I agree with this idea, but only because implementing it would basically force them to bring demos up to a more malleable standard in the process.

I like the idea. Basically, the game would write a record in your user space of all actions by all characters. This info is already being sent over the internet, so it should be readily available to store off. Essentially, you could set aside a buffer (with adjustable size under Options) that the engine could write all actions to for later replay. The length of the recording would vary according to the number of actions that occur and the size of the recording buffer.

When something interesting happens and you want to save the recording, just hit a button and that will switch the recording stream to a new buffer and close off the old one, saving it to disk. The system will also need to save off costume data for all players and NPCs in the scene.

Once you have the list of actions and appearances saved off, you can reconstruct the play with a viewpoint from any angle.

From what I can see, there should be no real lag coming from recording, as all the information is being passed to your computer anyway. There may be a pause when you press the save button, however, as the actions file and the appearances will need to be saved to disk.

Naturally, players with slower CPUs or tighter memory could elect to keep the recording option turned off.

I should point out, by the way, that while I made it sound very simple, depending on the way scenes are rendered in the game it might still turn out to be very complicated or even impossible.

I do love replays and know EXACTLY how you feel in regards to the NFS speed replays, and I do love this idea, but (and there's always a but). With the rate of which things die so fast in this game, there would rarely be anything to watch. Just a giant flash of light then wham..."everything's dead already?"

Of course, solo players and smaller teams contradict this.

Like i said, i like the idea, that's just my one concern. However, a nice addition I'd like to see to your idea is the ability to view your teammates playthroughs. Meaning, if everyone splits up to look for the glowie and all of a sudden someone's health just dips all of a sudden, it'd be nice to see how it happened from their perspective.

Well, like in Need for Speed or Carmageddon, you will indeed spend the bulk of your time without anything worthy of replaying. To me, though, that is still worth having for that one oddball case of something truly spectacular which happens completely spontaneously. Like when you knock an enemy back and he lands butt-first in a box, Jackie Chan style, or your snipe pops someone right at the apex of his jump between two buildings, or you just go through a fight you can't believe you survived. It's there for when things happen, and they always do, sooner or later.

I do like the idea of seeing replays of your team-mates, as well. That'll both give you an idea of what happened, as well as give you an insight of what they did right and what they did wrong. A replay might also be a good way to solve disputes where the team wipes and it seems everyone's ganging up on the same person. "Why'd you aggro them?!?" "I didn't! They saw you!" That sort of thing. Instead of chest-beating, just check the replay and see what happened.

I understand something like this is probably rock bottom priority, but I still think we could get a lot of mileage out of it, and people who actually make CoH movies would get a kickass new tool for the job

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.