Why do replays exhibit pauses in games (And how to stop it)?

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Royal_Sir
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Why do replays exhibit pauses in games (And how to stop it)?

Post by Royal_Sir »

My brother and I frequently play games together, but we usually have to get up and do some things around the house during them. OpenRA is wonderful because we could, in fact, pause a multiplayer game.

The thing is, we also like to watch the replays and analyze them together, and one rather annoying feature is the game captures each and every pause, some of them lasting an hour.

...Why? And how to stop this?

abcdefg30
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Post by abcdefg30 »

Unfortunately you can't simply turn that off in the settings. I assume it has something to do with how replays work. Those store all orders the players gave during the match. Those need to be "replayed" (re-given) in exact order to simulate the right game state, so we can't simply skip some of them. :/

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netnazgul
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Post by netnazgul »

Chat is active during game pause, so in terms of replay the game is not paused at all, it's just the gameplay part of it that is stopped.

zinc
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Post by zinc »

Normally no one is going to pause a game for longer than a minute or two, or everyone would just disconnect anyway.

What is the pause key anyway??

DrLuke
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Post by DrLuke »

zinc wrote: Normally no one is going to pause a game for longer than a minute or two, or everyone would just disconnect anyway.

What is the pause key anyway??
Don't laugh but it's literally the pause key, which is to the right of the printscreen key.

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WhoCares
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Post by WhoCares »

It was not that way in the previous release, when you reached a "game pause" moment, you just got flooded by all the chat at once but not experience the pause itself. And it was "better", the pause itself in a replay does not bring anything just force you to fast forwarding in max speed until the pause is done and sometime you can even miss some action when the game resumes.

For the curiosity, if it's not a bug, i would like to know the reason why now the "real time" of the pause actually is respected/unavoidable in replays. If it's mechanic linked to the evolution of the engine or other reeason.

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Sleipnir
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Post by Sleipnir »

WhoCares wrote: It was not that way in the previous release, when you reached a "game pause" moment, you just got flooded by all the chat at once but not experience the pause itself.
Can you elaborate on this? As far as i'm aware, we made this change back in 2014 (#4792 / #4904) and the behaviour of replaying pauses has stayed the same ever since.

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WhoCares
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Post by WhoCares »

Sleipnir wrote:
WhoCares wrote: It was not that way in the previous release, when you reached a "game pause" moment, you just got flooded by all the chat at once but not experience the pause itself.
Can you elaborate on this? As far as i'm aware, we made this change back in 2014 (#4792 / #4904) and the behaviour of replaying pauses has stayed the same ever since.
I'll elaborate in a very simple fashion, I'm wrong.

I don't know why i was so sure about the behavious i described, having a lot of game/replay with pause on previous release. I reinstalled previous released to test and it behaves the same as it does now.

Appologize for asking question based on fake memories.

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Sleipnir
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Post by Sleipnir »

Ok, good to know that this isn't another new bug.

The short answer explaining the current behaviour is that replays store a stream of the network traffic, and so behave the same way as if you were observing a live game.

Its theoretically possible to add special case logic to automatically skip pauses, but somebody would need to put the time into planning a strategy to do that and work through the details.

Royal_Sir
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Post by Royal_Sir »

WhoCares wrote:
Sleipnir wrote:
I'll elaborate in a very simple fashion, I'm wrong.

I don't know why i was so sure about the behavious i described, having a lot of game/replay with pause on previous release. I reinstalled previous released to test and it behaves the same as it does now.

Appologize for asking question based on fake memories.
The memories are real. It's just misattributed to lag spikes. You know when people try to chat while the match freezes for a few seconds, it all hits at once when the lag stops.

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