What a lot of games do is run a strictly deterministic simulation in lockstep. Then you don't save the path of every unit, you save one move command for the whole group. Then the game replays inputs, and the pathing algorithm should give the same result if there are no desyncs.
Yes you are definitely onto something! Love to see more people talking about deterministic games.
My game is strictly deterministic, so I get bot movement for free - but the player has agency so I need to capture their deviations
That’s the tricky part! Right now I do capture input (actually just deviations) and can replay whole games, but I think I’m at the limits in terms of compression - talking bytes here not KB
How much did your clever approach save over a naive approach + file compression?
I will post back with real numbers tonight, but naive approach did not compress well at all (KB easily).
But of the “smart” approaches (pre compression):
- 5 move motif over 2 bytes - best
- 2 move motif - insanely small
- 2 move motif with non linear tick delta even better
- “naive” 1 byte cardinal directions (worst)
- less-naive - byte relative direction changes (middle of the pack)
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But post compression with brotli the naive approach was second best and the less-naive approach was first (2-10% better than naive), I was so bummed that the better ones didn’t compress as well (about 10% worse than second best on average)