Suggestion: spectator + replay system for races
5,870 views, 88 replies
2 months ago
A server-side spectator and replay system would be one of the highest-impact features the team could ship this year. The case is strong for both competitive integrity and community content creation, and the technical overhead is manageable. Here is the concept in detail.
Tournament dispute resolution is the clearest immediate need. Right now, admins handle contact disputes using screenshot evidence and manual review, which is slow and often inconclusive when the key moment was unwitnessed. A 90-second rolling replay buffer per player would let a mod scrub through the exact moment of contact, verify intent, and close a dispute in under five minutes. It also opens up kill-cam and highlight-clip functionality for player-generated content, which is the most effective organic growth the network can get.
On the technical side, storing position, rotation, velocity, and input state per player per server tick with delta compression adds up to well under 1 MB per player per match at 30Hz. Implementation priority would logically be Race first for the competitive benefit, then Battle Royale for kill-cam, then extend to other modes. If a developer wants to collaborate on a full specification document, I am available to help write it.
2 months ago
This would transform how we run tournaments. Our admins currently watch live and take notes because there is no replay. We missed a clear intentional contact incident on the final lap of qualifier 2 last season because nobody had the right angle. Server-side validation would close that gap entirely.
2 months ago
From a content perspective, a 90-second clip export button means every session produces shareable highlights at zero extra cost to staff. That is effective organic marketing. Strong vote in favour of this feature.
2 months ago
The delta-compressed position state approach is technically sound. The main challenge is synchronising the replay clock with server ticks at high player counts. Worth a careful spec pass, but definitely achievable with the existing architecture.