Hello hello,

So I wanted to give a quick update from yesterday about the replays.

I have redone them. Dear lord above someone's gotta save me I am maybe 15 hours down in two days on this 

Live pic of me btw

So what changed, and why?

When I was working on the replays I kept running into funny little bugs, and I wasn't very happy with the replay size, and every time I went to fix the bugs, more cropped up. I had this future vision that I am going to get actually trolled to death by endlessly fixing replay bugs, so I decided to redo it based on what I learnt while trying to build the replay the first time around. 

Short version, I'd done this very weirdly. I'd collected data from the run itself, then tried to use the replay to sort of "patch and simulate" between given data reads, but the data I was collecting from the replay was very very frequent, but not very informative, which ended up having this issue of there being a lot ot reference from, but none of that information being very useful - not only that but replay scrubbing basically ran through the whole replay on the replay sided simulation of events first and then marked points to jump to.

You may wonder why that's really bad, or you may know enough to know that's massively stupid (I haven't made a replay system before, let me live), but if you are wondering it basically means that any mutations or drifting from the actual replay would just cause knock on effects, which the replay then tried to correct based on the actual data snapshots, but this led to a tug of war between the replay "making it the fuck up" and what was true, resulting in a lot of just genuinely bad playback

Now, to remedy this, I'd have to capture a lot more information that mattered, and different information, at different points, with different frequency. This sort of demanded ripping out the old system and replacing it, with timeline jumping in mind from the get go, so that's what I did.

Now, I'm happy to report that I believe (fingers crossed) replays are much more functional than before, and should hopefully have far less issues. I can still imagine there will be some, so if you use the replay feature at all and notice anything odd, please let me know... somehow?

When can you expect replays?

I want to continue work on it for a bit, because I don't like the idea of shipping something I think is "half way there", especially considering this project has drawn quite a few eyes (hi everyone), so I'd rather that initial use of the replay be as smooth as possible, and I want to make sure performance while playing isn't worsened either. I might add a toggle, so replays aren't recorded if you don't want them to be in the settings, for the sake of running the game on old/poor/dying/basically-a-toaster hardware. After all, a lot of people I doubt even want to use the replay system, so I might even make it "opt in" rather than opt out.

But for the future, it might make it more fun for people to share their play with each other, if they want to do that, so they can review each other's strats. I'm considering what to do about it, really. Ideally I'd like runs with good scores to always be downloadable from somewhere, because that would just be good for the sake of learning other's strats, but we'll see. 

Anyway, really yappy answer, but my guess is Another week. Might be less, might be more, but if it changes I'll be sure to post about it.

Cheers!