BattleRecorder Petition

[zorplex]

BR needing more expensive servers? nah. The demo recording takes up very little processing power, it's bsaically just saving everything it communciates to players (enemy movements, when guns are fired etc) to another file. The only issue is memory, however that was solved quite easily in the Refractor2.0 days by simply deleting the oldest file when a memory limit was reached. I've g

I thought this same thing, but apparently that's not necessarily true. Certain engines, (e.g. Halo, CoD) are fully/mostly deterministic which means given the same input via a demo file will reproduce the game exactly from a very small file. For any random variances that might happen, required checkpoints are created where all state (location, orientation, velocity, etc. for every in-game asset) information is saved. The input can then be used to continue recreating the replay until the next checkpoint is reached and any random variances are corrected. The more random an engine is, the more checkpoints it needs, and the more data that must be saved which also correlates to higher processing and memory bandwidth usage.

As far as I'm aware, It's currently unknown to the public how deterministic the Frostbite engine is. I have no doubt that a battle recorder can be created, but the issue may not be as trivial as some believe.

Then again, if I let the paranoid cynic take control, there's a good chance EA is forcing DICE to save the Battlerecorder for BF5/Bad Company 3 to help move units.

[Ash2Dust]

Battlerecorder captures a lot of information. From the BF2 days.

Impact on server performance The Battle recorder feature can impact server performance in two ways:
A bandwidth hit (if the demos are uploaded on the same machine that is running the game server.) We strongly recommend that you do not run battlerecorder on the same server you are using to host gameplay. Instead, set up a separate ftp server to host demo files.
A performance hit - dependant on the demo quality setting, which is found on the BF 2 server launcher UI. The demo quality setting can range from the default setting of 1 (lowest quality / minimal performance hit) to 10 (maximum quality / biggest performance hit.) Depending on the server specifications, you'll want to set your demo quality appropriately. We recommend no more than quality 5, the highest quality was built in for users that are creating movies / trailers with the Battlefield 2 engine. Due to the demands even the lowest setting of quality can have, we do not recommend running Battlerecorder on any server that is configured for 64-players.