How do recordings work?

[EdJaws]

Perhaps I'm mistaken but I thought starting the game, clicking on replay and choosing a .cor file in the recording folder replays the game as you played it. When clicking a speed to start the recording I get a dialog that pops up asking:

Click yes to continue recorded actions anyway.
Click no to continue without replaying actions.
Click cancel to break into the debugger.

Clicking yes or no replays the recording but with a different outcome to what I just played. Clicking cancel and I get a CTD.

Am I missing something or should the recording play back the game as I played it?

Here are the 2 different outcomes of the AAR screen. The first is what I played, the second is from the recording, which in the recording I didn't touch anything to do with issuing orders.

 

[Dave 'Arjuna' O'Connor]

Recordings work by saving the orders you issue and the random seed and a series of checksums each minute of game time. When it is started it sets the random seed to that stored. This syncs the AI into making the same decisions provided your orders are recorded properly and the AI's execution of events does not have any variance other than the random numbers. When the game kicks off it pulls in the orders you issued during the game at the same game time as you issued them. In that way your orders are replicated. So we have your orders and the AI decisions all in sync. However, to catch any variance in the implementation of the AI and your orders we check the checksum each minute and if this varies we pop up that out of sync alert message.

This tells us that we have an out of sync issue. I will need to track down the cause of that. I have not given this priority at the moment. My first focus has been on crash bugs and then on those things which are not working as designed for the single player. Once I have these sorted I will turn my attention to this out of sync issue.

 

[EdJaws]

No worries , Dave. It's not a game play issue and quite rightly very low priority.

I just thought I was off my rocker.

 

[Dave 'Arjuna' O'Connor]

I just thought I was off my rocker.

Whose to say you 're not!