A bit about the rewind. Last night we were all working on P & R or Vitagen, and the discussion about the rewind came up. About how it worked and how long we could possibly store up to, in other words if somebody left the game running for a week would the rewind crap out. The answer is no.
About a month ago I spent about 3 days trying to get a general setup for the rewind. One of these is the model we'll be using for the actual game rewind. How it works is this; it only records events WHEN THEY HAPPEN! Not the entire time the game is running, although there is a game timer that is compounded each frame to track the time and this is minimal on the system resources too.I actually put it to a bit of a real test today, where as last night we were trying it with times of about a minute and a half, today I tried ten minutes. By that I mean I start the rewind test, let it run for about ten minutes, came back and held down the rewind key for a whole ten minutes. It worked right on the dot! With about a second or two of error, which isn't bad considering it was ten minutes!
A question that Andrew brought to mind about the rewind was what if a player walks over, runs into a wall, and keeps holding down the movement key into the wall. Will it record all that? No. How the collision and movement were setup it wouldn't record this, because the movement handler for any object is ONLY called if there is a legit movement, that and the rewind data is sent throught the movement handler also. Time, direction and and animation going on too. That's right we have to make all the animations in reverse too.
Another thing that we got working was how to properly export animations out of Maya. So very soon we'll have what is the outlines of a decent beta coming very soon.
