Mikael Kalms from DICE about a Battlerecorder

[[RC]Hunter]

The spectator mode in older Battlefield games, match recording feature of Battlefield 2, that has been a real usable addon to the game.

We all know this is missing in Bad Company 2, so the community keeps knocking on DiCE´s door to get an answer about the Battlerecorder feature to come in future BC2 updates (dream on folks) or at least in Battlefield 3 end of 2011 ... so Mikael from DICE finally could not resist to probably discuss this matter internally at their office and to respond to certain questions in the EA UK forum.

Just read it, I prefer to copy & paste it in here, since we never know for how long it will remain visible if somebody @ DICE may decide it was not a useful piece of post from Mikael. However, I could not resist to get a sarcasm smile in my face, reading this post and imaging, that is actually from the software vendor of older Battlefield games ... unbelievable ...



---

The question is quite valid.


We haven't done a thorough analysis of it, but I'll present a rough overview:

The demo recorder that is being used to create the videos runs server-side. I think it's mainly been used on the console version of the game. At the moment I think it only gives a black screen when trying to play something back with the PC client, but it's likely some minor bug.
The record/replay code supports recording all players running about doing stuff. The replayer is extremely bare-bones; it launches the game with some tweaks in the startup sequence.
I don't know how accurate the recording is. It could be that the video editing people have to pick the best 5% because the other 95% are just looking strange. Perhaps all the footage looks ace.

In order to turn it into something that suitable to general use, there are a couple of things that would need to be done/investigated:

General bugfixing. fast-forward/rewind can make the replayer fall over quite easily. It's unknown how much work this is, or if there is something horrible lurking beneath the surface here.
The record/replay mechanisms are controlled from some custom development tools we have, and currently only work against dev builds. The retail builds need to get that functionality integrated too somehow.
The replayer needs to either be a stand-alone application, or integrated into the main game executable. There's both the dev aspect and the QA aspect to consider here. How much more complex does a full test sweep become in the future, for instance?
The replayer is for sure being used to replay 3p action, but I don't know how it fares with 1p action. For one thing, it is most likely not able to show the HUD of any player.
Optional, but it would be very nice if player names & GUIDs and stuff were recorded in the stream.
CPU consumption. Some devs around here say that the recorder consumes a lot of CPU, others say that it's negligible. Who is correct? If the recorder does indeed consume a lot of CPU, it will cause a bunch of knock-on problems if multiple game server instances are running on the same machine.
Disk access. Will the recorder's writing to disk cause hitches with game server instance(s) on the same machine?
Retrieval of the recorded files. The files will end up on a game server's harddrive somewhere. How does one download them from there? Will the downloading affect game server instance(s) on the same machine? If yes, can they be automatically copied to another machine using a less intrusive mechanism, and then normally accessed from there?
Those are the main topics that have popped up when discussing the demo recorder at the office.

Hope it stills some of your curiosity.
---



Original Post EA UK Forums

[iD]

lol retards...

spectator mode would be so great for admins and ppl who just want to go afk for some mins but not get kicked from the server (to prevent hacking, normal players should have restricted viewpoints tho). adding a hud off mode would make it alot easier to record nice videos either from 1st person or 3rd person as spectator... whats so tricky about it? dont get it?

and recording a whole match should be rather easy too, server knows all positions and orientations of all players at all times and also who just shot how many bullets using which weapon in what direction... just record the raw data (files wouldnt be too big) and let ppl download it. using the ingame renderer would allow u to jump back and forth in time while recording certain persons or just overviews.