Time Scale Question

Thanks, AllanR, for your response. Could you be more specific or can you provide an example or something? I'm not quite familiar with those dt and stuff.

here is a sample of ROJOhounds file that plays back at half the speed (although the new player sprite continues to record at the normal rate.

if you change the slowfactor variable to 3, it would play back at 1/3 the normal rate. This doesn't use dt so it assumes game plays at a steady 60 frames a second...

https://www.rieperts.com/games/forum/slowmo.c3p

to record only the last seconds you just have to start deleting elements from the array once it has reached the desired playback length.

every new frame is added to the back of the array, so you need to pop the first element in the array to remove that.

this will help prevent the array from getting massive if game play goes on for a long time.

if the player manages to die in under 2 seconds, you can calculate how long to show the replay layer by taking the width of the array, divide by 60, and multiply by 2 (since you are playing back at half speed).

if you want more than just the last 2 seconds, you can set a variable to how long the array should be, and then use the method above to calculate exactly how long the replay will take to play back. In my example I record the last 3 seconds...

https://www.rieperts.com/games/forum/slowmo2.c3p

Thanks, AllanR,

I still struggling to make it work in my setup, Initially, it works but after some time the reply sprite completely vanished. If I make it 1000 (The RecordLength) it stays more time before it has gone. and out of sudden, the SLOMO completely stoped working. lol. I must be doing something wrong. Still trying to fig out. Will come back and share my exp.

Good Night (Day).

once you get to the end of the array there wont be any data to position the replay sprite with. so it will be setting its animation, frame and position to nothing. you want to stop playing the replay when it gets to the last entry in the array. (which will be array.width -1)

the example I posted saves the last 3 seconds, not the first 3 seconds.

it takes 3 seconds for the array to fill up, but after that it starts deleting from the start of the array, and adds the latest player data to the end of the array. (so you always have the last 3 seconds of data)

you could easily record the entire run, and only replay the last few seconds, or let the player decide how much to replay... you could also make a system to save the recording so that they can show other people, etc.

The example I made was obviously based on the file made by ROJOhound. He made the player a container and put the array in that. If you set up enemies the same way then each instance would have their own array. You would need a For Each Enemy loop to play back the recordings.

the potential problem is if you kill an enemy, then the array will get destroyed with the enemy - making it impossible to play back. If enemies spawn and get killed regularly you will need a playback array that works differently than the player's array.

if all the enemies exist at the start of the layout, and they don't die, then their recordings would line up with the player and play back correctly. If enemies spawn after the start, then they would have to use the frame counter from the player so that their recording will match up with the player.

Thanks, AllanR, for the response. Now I got it. :)

you could easily record the entire run, and only replay the last few seconds, or let the player decide how much to replay... you could also make a system to save the recording so that they can show other people, etc.

Saving the recording sounds damn interesting, I will try to implement it for sure, Just wondering what would be the best way to do this, do we need to Record everything to a different ARRAY simultaneously?

As usual, there are probably lots of ways to do it. It depends on how your game works, how long a typical run takes, how many enemies there are, do they exist for the whole run, do they spawn at the same point or do they randomly spawn, do they shoot at you, do you shoot at them, etc.

ROJOhound's method records the Player's X, Y, Animation, Frame, and width every tick. If there isn't randomness to the game you could instead save the player's input and then have everything respond to the input in the same way to recreate what happened. There is also the Game Recorder object that can record a video of the canvas. I think that was meant to allow you to download the video, but it might be a way to play back exactly what happened without having to save all the things that move separately.

The more that happens in your game, the more you have to save - and the more memory required to do that.

One of my favorite games is Jetpack Joyride. At the end of a run they show you a snapshot from the run. Showing an instant replay is a lot trickier...