I'm working in a free MMORPG and I have a problem.
I'm (with other people) developing a video recording system for the game. The idea is basically: we record all the packages sent & received with timestamps, plus some local data from the client, and then dump it in a file. For playing the video, we just emulate everything that's on the file. We also have an option to export the video to avi with ffmpeg.
The problem is: when we change between versions of the game, it is hard to maintain backwards compatibility for the video (commands added / removed, function changes, etc). Is there a good way to handle this problem? instead of having a bunch of different players and choose the right one for each version of the video file?
It would be helpful to know how does other games handle this situation.
Thanks for the help, sorry for my english.
Answer
Our basic rule is to never change an existing packet type. Everything is either added at the end of an existing one, or a new command. This also makes it far less likely for two people to stomp on each other's work.
No comments:
Post a Comment