Instant replay

[Guest]

The telemetry is saved so what just happenned can be viewed from whatever angle you want, including tower view.

[Mr. Scruffy]

I had thought about this, too, recently. My thoughts:

Seems doable at first, thinking of games like World of Tanks, various racing- or flight sims. BUT there is a major difference to these games: They all have a limited number of entities moving and thus to be recorded. In KSP, you can theoretically have hundreds of ships with tens of thousands of parts flying around at the same time and this makes things difficult: Either you´d record the data for all of them, which would probably theortically result in huge amounts of data and maybe even a slowdown of the game, or you need to filter which vessels´ data be recorded - and that seems such a tricky process (docking, fly-bys, etc.), that i decided to stop thinking about it, right there.

[Guest]

What if you only have one? I am also speaking theoretically.

[Mr_Brain]

or you need to filter which vessels´ data be recorded - and that seems such a tricky process (docking, fly-bys, etc.), that i decided to stop thinking about it, right there.

What about saving those craft that are loaded (last time I checked, only crafts within 2.5 killometers of the current craft are loaded and put off-rails)?

[Dunbaratu]

I had thought about this, too, recently. My thoughts:

Seems doable at first, thinking of games like World of Tanks, various racing- or flight sims. BUT there is a major difference to these games: They all have a limited number of entities moving and thus to be recorded. In KSP, you can theoretically have hundreds of ships with tens of thousands of parts flying around at the same time and this makes things difficult: Either you´d record the data for all of them, which would probably theortically result in huge amounts of data and maybe even a slowdown of the game, or you need to filter which vessels´ data be recorded - and that seems such a tricky process (docking, fly-bys, etc.), that i decided to stop thinking about it, right there.

Uhm... anything other than the current craft is "on rails" anyway - and calculating where the object is "on rails" is *already* just a matter of plugging in a time for "t" to see where the formula says it ends up at time T.

Basically to make the replay idea work, you need to store data position at time T only for those craft you focussed on.

But then the problem is when you want to replay an explosion. suddenly you have LOTS of individual debris parts in range.

[SolarLiner]

Uhm... anything other than the current craft is "on rails" anyway

False. Else how would you dock to stations?

It is doable, even from a MOD point of view I think. I may use it too much for demo, but look at Orbiter. it can record flights for further watch. And don't have any limit on the number of ships available (but technically yes, it is the maximum number an unsigned integer can hold (around 4 billion)). So yes, this is possible, and theorically easy to do (save ship parameters in a fixed timestep (position, attitude, thrust amount, active parts/stage, landing gear state (stopped/moving, position 0 <> 1), kerbals inside, other stuff here). The timestep may be changed to not alter performances too much, and use simple linear interpolation between each points at playback. Since orbital elements are taken from the position and velocity of the ship, it shouldn't cause any map problems.

[Dunbaratu]

False. Else how would you dock to stations?

Technically true, but I guess what I wrote isn't what I meant. Change it to plural. "Anything other than the current crafts are on rails anyway." The point is I was replying to someone who was trying to claim that this idea is going to have a problem because "you can theoretically have hundreds of ships with tens of thousands of parts flying around at the same time and this makes things difficult:".

I doubt the "hundreds of ships" in that comment were all meant to be within 2.5 km of you. It was a comment claiming that there would be a problem because of ALL the ships in your campaign save. Thus my comment about how most of them would be on rails and thus this concern isn't valid.

[Mr. Scruffy]

Actually, my scepticism about the matter was more played than real to lure out some supporters - i would like such a feature very much, as well. You know, how you always hold the right mouse-button and drag it around when watching KSP-videos? Wouldnt it be wonderfull, if that actually worked (along with time-warp)?

Still, it would indeed take a considerable effort from the devs to do it, and i doubt it´s anywhere near the upper half of the priority list. The filtering of data to record, the recording itself (file-format), and the front-end for viewing the flights all would need to be well thought out and coded. It´s not impossible i guess, but not trivial nor done on an afternoon either.