Hi, I noticed on the most recent snapshot, the replay functionality has now been pushed from 2021 to 2021-2022. Why? Is an embedded replay system that difficult to implement? Xplane 11, P3D, even infinite flight (mobile sim) all have replay modes that require no third party applications. What’s the deal here?
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I suspect it’s probably not that difficult but it still takes time and resources and as the problems with the sim have piled up lately their focus is probably on fixing broken features as opposed to adding new ones.
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Given MSFS is somewhat based on an ‘always live/time keeps running’ concept (and hence there’s no real pause function either), it may be more complicated than it first appears.
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I’m wondering the same thing since release. They kept saying since early alpha builds that they were working on a replay system but it was nowhere near complete so they had to use two pc’s for capturing their promotion stuff.
It can be complicated yes. But is it so complicated that it takes more then a year? No. As 3rd party (pay&freeware) had allready proven prety fast after release.
I don’t think it has anything to do with bug fixing either since this progress is also going prety slow.
Probably xbox version was main priority right after release.
Somehow content updates were no problem at all to invest time in😒
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My sentiments exactly.
Seb said at the end of last year that they have an internal replay system they use for testing and they just need to make a user friendly interface. So there must be some major challenges to getting to build this interface in the last year.
They took a few months (probably longer) to focus on optimizations and heavy lifting to prepare for the release on Xbox. No doubt at all that Xbox was their main focus.
During that time, there weren’t really any features worked on (like replay) nor bug fixes to speak of. Well, compared to the open list of serious issues, barely any progress was made in these areas. At the very least, we could say that a vast majority of their resources were dedicated to Xbox.
From my viewpoint, the good news is that since Xbox has been released, a lot of resources will be freed up to work on bug fixes and issues that affect ALL areas of the Sim (benefiting both PC and Xbox).
We also have two Sim updates coming fairly close to each other. This shows their intent to focus on the issues that have been ignored over the last several months.
I’m optimistic that things are going to be moving in a positive direction. But man, they’ve got a HUGE backlog of work to do. And I suspect they desperately need to fill the open job positions ASAP.
I think I would be upset if I’m following someone who just landed with multiplayer on and I’m next in line that’s cleared to land. Then suddenly they decided to replay the landing and spawns right on my nose.
Replay is a good idea. But we need to apply some ground rules on when people can use it. For example:
- Replay is always disabled on Live Multiplayer, as do starting flights on the Runway.
- Replay is only available when Multiplayer is set to Off.
- Replay should be saved first, and replayed on a separate flight instance, not within the same flight instance.
- If they need to record the telemetry for the last few minutes of landing, they need to make sure this recording process doesn’t take too much performance away from actually doing the landing. In other words, this process needs to be optimised on the CPU side. There’s no point in the sim trying to record the telemetry ready for your replay only for it to start lagging and affecting your actual landing.
For me, I just record it to YouTube and review it on another time.
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I know there are mods people have that can do replays. They do the landing and then show the same landing from different viewpoints.
I’m curious if it’s difficult to do the same replays they do.
To do it ‘right’ requires a ton of data. Next to your plane you also need the weather and telemetry of all the other planes in the area. 3rd party replays simply control your plane while time and weather has already moved on. Atm you can’t even pause time, weather, traffic and fauna.
It doesn’t have to slow down the sim to ‘record’ all that, throw a memory buffer at it and it depends on how much ram you can spare to how long the replay buffer can be. Yet inserting it all back into the sim is likely a major headache.
However it’s not really a replay if you can’t replay that near miss with another plane, birds, lightning strike etc.
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Good points everyone. I just hope they can implement one fairly soon… the third party apps are okay for now but I would rather not run another app to see my landing
Why exactly do you think, replays of other simmers would have to be rendered on your Screen anyway? Another player replaying his landing would/should simply be paused in his Session and disappear on everyone elses screen.
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It’s only hard for Asobo. You can find two very fine replay tools at flightsim.to, Sky Dolly and Flight Recorder. They work pretty well and are very easy to use. For non MSFS aircraft it doesn’t record all of the events but it’s still pretty good.
Because that is also equally upsetting, For realism and immersion purposes, you don’t want to see other players pausing, and standing stationary on the runway just because they’re doing a replay. Making them disappear is also immersion breaker, like they disappear to thin air. The only acceptable reason for the disappearance should only be when they have CTD. But ideally, CTD should never occur in the first place.
That’s why I’m okay with the replay functionality, it’s just that it needs to be done right that isn’t immersion breaking for everyone else. It’s more on the technical side on how to get it to work properly. Make some rules in place so that you can only enable replay if you’re flying alone or in a group that’s in a separate instance from the Live Multiplayer, then it’s fine.
Or maybe a replay is a “dual” render. Where your aircraft is still doing what you’re doing, like you’re still taxiing, but the sim can render a separate Picture-in-Picture mode where you can replay the landing that you want. But then again, I also don’t want to see other multiplayer standing around in taxiways just because they’re busy looking at the replays. They could access it when they already parked at the gate.
Or better yet, there’s a record button that you can press, where the sim starts to record the state of the flight, and when you finish recording, press the same button again and it will save all that flight data into your local drive. You can only access the replay from the main menu, though you can’t access it during an active flight session to avoid the same reasons I mentioned above.
Once the flight segment is recorded, you can go back to the main menu, Replay it, and the sim will generate an isolated session that only you can access and it reloads and replays the recorded segment from your flight, without bothering other people compared to when you’re doing it while in the same active segment.
if you play MSFS with “live players on” all having their own good or bad internet connection or real life situations making them just end their Flight mid-air, I think you cannot determine, what’s acceptable with the goal of your personal immersion not being broken. If you don’t like, what other players do, switch them off.
Asobo could of course allow the playback of previously recorded flight Data only outside the active session (i.e. from the Main Menu), but they simply cannot prevent players from just quitting the sim session in flight / on the runway just because they want the playback immediately and have no interest in taxiing to their parking position first.
I think its just not worth the hassle of “doing it right”, as there is already the option to fly with equal minded people in a group and ignore the others - whatever could be implemented to “guarantee” the experience being immersive can be circumvented by people just disconnecting for whatever reason.
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It’s not difficult, otherwise we wouldn’t have have freeware replay addons made by one person in a month or so.
It’s just not on a priority list, it’s a feature not bug fixing and bugs along with other improvements must be a priority.
No, just no. I always fly with all players enabled and i use replays often. I don’t want to do otherwise. If it bothers you it’s you who should disable online functionality. You won’t have a so called realistic experience with multiplayer enabled anyway, doesn’t matter if they use replay or not. Fly with group only on AI traffic because flying with random people will never feel authentic. I’m totally fine with that, it’s a game, we do what we want and fly how we like.
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Well, I have multiplayer on and I don’t see anyone anyway… SEA server is very quiet… 
There’s some stuff I’ll never fully understand. They’ve had a functional prototype of a reply system since release that only they have access to…we have freeware and payware reply programs, my Asobo still hasn’t finished theirs.
Another one is auto save…they don’t seem to think it’s that important, but it’d help those who suffer from CTDs. Orbix introduced the ability to auto save the sim every 5 minutes with Volanta Premium. It also includes aircraft state saving, so you can start your next flight exactly as you left off from the previous one… something else I’ve seen people asking for.
Now, if someone can create a mod or program to get rid of the logbook pop-up…it appears that 3rd party devs are our only hope for this type of stuff.
I guess the more third-party and community freeware addons able to fill in the gaps, the less likely there’s an incentive to do so as a built-in feature. They would end up playing catch-up but never get there.