How to design a replay system

Posted by daddz on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by daddz
Published on 2010-11-30T16:47:26Z Indexed on 2011/02/08 23:35 UTC
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Filed under:

architecture

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data-structure

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file-format

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game-recording

So how would I design a replay system?

You may know it from certain games like Warcraft 3 or Starcraft where you can watch the game again after it has been played already.

You end up with a relatively small replay file. So my questions are:

How to save the data? (custom format?) (small filesize)
What shall be saved?
How to make it generic so it can be used in other games to record a time period (and not a complete match for example)?
Make it possible to forward and rewind (WC3 couldn't rewind as far as I remember)

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