We can record and replay laps ... time for racing revival?

[qan]

How much interest is there in time attack races for various tracks, scoreboards, etc., racing against ghosts played by a bot?

ThePAP coded up a demo to show it's possible on TW, which initially surprised me -- thought timing would be more of an issue. If we could store each run efficiently, there's no reason you couldn't race against the top time on each track and try to beat it, or analyze great runs to see how you could improve on them. Or, if we really got it efficient and disk space wasn't an issue, we could record every player's best run for every track, and you could race against whomsoever you chose. Of course, racing against your own best time would also be possible ... trying to shave off half a second or two could keep many very nimble players busy for quite awhile.

Would be (really) competitive without requiring other players to actually be there, too.


If there's interest maybe it will get PAP wanting to code it

[bkgmjo]

Sounds very interesting, although I'd find racing your own times on balance-type things, mazes or even some pilotwings style missions you can play when nobody else is on more thrilling than race tracks. However, if you can manage to do this reliably it could open up many new ways of designing events and maps and keep players busy.

[Turban]

yes please.

[Kim]

A dream come true in ?go initialD

[roxxkatt]

u rly gonna spawn a bot for every player in the recording?

tw pop +50

[ThePAP]

Nah, of course we're not going to spawn 50+ additional bots. This module is still very much in development. (It's still in beta.) At the moment it is indeed that only one robobot can record one player at the same time.
Eventually it will be made in such a way that one multibot can record multiple players, if not all players in an arena at the same time, in certain scenarios.
It is currently capable of storing the data of multiple players and allows selecting which replay it will exactly execute of course.

Storage-wise the data doesn't take up that much space, but it can be improved upon. At the moment, the data usage seems to be 160 bytes per second of recording, on average, uncompressed. Memory wise some stuff can also be improved upon, as well as some other aspects, but that's all things that can be tinkered with in the future.

Anyhow, at this moment it's more of a proof of concept, that's still a bit user-unfriendly, but it's usable enough to be toyed around with. So, I hope everyone will enjoy it

(Will have to halt doing improvements due to some much needed work I need to do on a few other bots.)