Lokasenna
Posts: 9297
Joined: 3/3/2012
From: Iowan in MD/DC
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tiemanj
quote:
Also, the replay is generated once and then played back to you. What you see as happening in real time, as it were, in the replay has actually already been determined by the game when the Japanese player opens up the turn file and sees the "Saving combat replay" message.
I don't think it works this way... if it did, there wouldn't be a sync bug at all. Rather, I think what happens is the game in effect "stores" a list of "random numbers". When it reaches a point in the turn resolution where it needs a "dice roll", it grabs the next random off the list. Since both players have (in theory) the same list, the results come out the same.
If it was simply replayed there would be no synch bug.
Also, if you go to single player mode (or as the Japanese player in PBEM) and repeat the turn resolution (without changing anything), you get the same results. This prevents the Japanese player from simply re-running the "resolution" if he doesn't like the result. He can rerun all he wants, the randoms are pre-determined, so the results won't change.
All that said, simply alt-tabbing or clicking off isn't some kind of guarantee to cause a synch issue. It is quite possible that the game just "speeds up" due to not rendering. My guess (and it is just a guess) is / was based purely on the differences in turn replay mechanics between single player and PBEM and statements from JWE about the game never being designed for windowed mode - and because of this having some issues. It is certainly a week case... as I said, just a guess.
You're partially correct, yes. What you're calling "stores" and "random number lists" are called seeds for... well, random number tables.
Lowpe is correct - the replay is saved instantly when the Japanese player loads the turn file. You can close the game and send the replay to your Allied opponent immediately if you wanted to, without having even watched it, and he would have a 100% correct replay (unless a sync bug occurred, but that would have happened or not in any case when the replay was generated).
The reason that you can generate different replay results in single player is because it does not seem to store the random number table's seed number unless you are playing "PvP" - hotseat or PBEM. As the Japanese player, you definitely can reload the turn on the pre-combat autosave and it will generate different results - you just can't change any orders first, so if your poor results are really because you flubbed an order (say, running KB into Pearl) then you're still going to have KB run into Pearl but the actual die rolls will all be different.
As the Allied player, if you load the pre-combat autosave, it allows you to change orders first. I suspect this is an artifact of how they set it up for PBEM, and having both PBEM/hotseat and Vs-computer use the same code for loading saves. I've loaded pre-combat autosaves hundreds of times for both Allies and Japan.
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