The Implementation of Rewind in Braid
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ธ.ค. 2016
- In this GDC 2010 talk, Braid creator Jonathan Blow breaks down the technical and design challenges behind implementing one of the most iconic time-travel mechanics in video game history.
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Now I can understand why Jonathan started writing his own presentation program in 2017!
He did? What is it?
@@tech6hutch I don't know if he published it, but he made a simple program that just displays text on the screen and lets you flip through it, and he said "Now it's better than powerpoint!"
@@Elavid oh lmao
@@Elavid what do you mean by flipping through it?
i don't understand the difference
Yea, but Office 2007 in the release year, it was the most aesthetic GUI I've ever used.
No other software made similarly strong positive feelings in me.
THAT needed to be a 1 hour talk. Not enough time~
If only we could rewind!
trolololol
he needed the ring!
For the past week I had been trying to implement this rewind mechanic, with the constraint that I wouldn't look up how he did it, to see how far I would get.
The first idea I had immediately discarded was to record state frame by frame. I was trying to go for an interpolation system coupled with serialisable commands.
The headache was real and so today I decided to see how he did it, and my mind was blown.
Like duh. Why would you discard frames by frame saving? The only thing that seems difficult to me is to rewind audio (maybe just play a reversed sound and cut it by your needs)
@@joepeters8746 frame by frame saving is easy if you don’t worry about memory management. And that’s exactly what makes it complicated.
@@joepeters8746 Frame by frame saving would take an insane amount of memory without forward planning and serious optimizations. This is essentially the equivalent of brute-forcing the rewind problem. The fact that he managed to do so for an infinite rewind system without crashing everyone's computers is really impressive (I'd certainly consider it difficult). Rewinding audio is much easier as you could record, compress, and play back the game's sound using pre-built systems. Also, lets not forget that in this case it was a simple platformer with few moving elements - if you wanted to do this for a more complex game with a lot of information, this approach would probably not work for you.
@@jeangodecoster if you browse prebuilt gaming PCs, 32gb is not uncommon. Anything below 16 and you have to start explaining you don't mean VRAM. 40mb is extremely frugal. With entry level nvme latency < 100us, you could probably ignore ram and stream gigabytes to disk.
Saving the whole world's state frame by frame at face value seems like the naive (ie. stupid) solution. I think every programmer would try to solve it a different way at first. Also it's not because it was the best solution for Braid that it is the best solution for you. Jon had to do some serious compression trickery to be able to use it.
such a shame for the cut-off, it was a good talk
It's a real shame that they cut him off. I could have listened to him talk about this for hours.
There needs to be a change, honestly. A Game Engineering Conference would help with this current schism in priorities between technical talks and design/art/motivational talks.
"You've got to have this if you're gonna save the world...file."
He should have been given an hour.
It's impressive how simple such a seemingly complex system can be. Now I want to play Braid myself.
Watching a video in 2022, of a talk uploaded in 2016, of a recording made in 2010, at a point when windows Vista had already been released, but it was still acceptable to be running Windows XP as a "current" operating system. But still feels totally modern.
I really can't believe you cut him. To me it's almost like an insult to the gaming and Dev community and to Jonathan that is an inspiration for many.
come on pablo they've, got a convention to run and a lot more people would be messed up by them allowing people to go over their designated times, it's his fault for not timing his presentation properly.
@@fisheatsyourhead the thing is they should have schedule more time for him. Most GDC talks last at least one hour and they gave the man 30 minutes to explain a system with a lot of technicality. But you know, it was 2010, fuck indie devs right?
@@GuilhermeNeubaner "When I submitted this talk I was like 'Oh sure it's pretty simple. I'll be able to talk about everything in 25 minutes.'... Doesn't seem to be how it is." - Jonathan Blow 0:13
@@Michael_800 *sarcasm*
why the hell would you cut him off?
One did simply cut Jonathan off. Unreal.
Me at the start of the talk: Wow! That's the biggest screen I've ever seen.
Then instantly realising I'm dumb.
This guy is quite impressive, to say the least. Wow.
Probably cut off so someone could give an uninteresting entry-level motivational talk
no, cut off because they day has a bunch of parallel tracks with simultaneous interesting talks going on, so they have to keep things on schedule.
Actually it was right before lunch, and I was specifically given that slot in order to be able to go over time, but the CAs (conference associates) were being total jerks. I also wasn't given time beforehand to make sure my laptop was set up and working with the display. You can't see it in this video, but one reason I keep hitting escape and going into PowerPoint edit mode is because people can't see the whole slides, because they were being displayed at 16:9 aspect ratio on a 4:3 screen and there wasn't time to detect this issue and fix it. (I guess whatever recording they made of the feed has the whole slides).
It was a pretty terrible experience, and as a result I do not give speeches at the GDC any more!
+Jonathan Blow I appreciate you responding. I was understanding of them if you were on any other time slot, but being given the one right before lunch so that people actually could choose to stay with you overtime... I'm sorry you had to deal with that. Not to mention all the technical issues you were already dealing with...
Hi. It's a shame the talk could not be finished - it is always a pleasure to listen to your takls and interviews. Even tech-heavy ones, despite I'm not a programmer.
That was super interesting to understrand your thought process in this very technical feat. I'm a begginer at programming and game making and even though I didn't understand every technical detail, I feel like you've helped me understand a thought process path I should take. Even though your experience with GDC left you bitter, I hope you do come back because we the audience, are all interested in what you have to say. I feel really bummed we couldn't go through the last 6 slides or your presentation. Thanks for your talk!
It was 10 years ago and I'm still upset about how he was cutted off.
Thanks for the reupload!!
ty for the reupload
Actually happy to see the comment section being mainly people complaing mr. Blow was cut off, because that was disgraceful. Jonathan probably doesn't care anymore: But we're here for you buddy :D
25:33 Windows clock changes from 11:33am to 11:32am.
rewind effect
Aw man I wanted to hear the rest of it, very interesting.
Thank you for fixing the sync issues!
Yeah, it was a worthwhile rewind. :)
I see what you did there.
thanks so much for sharing. its a bit over my head though. dont know how you come up with this stuff, very very awesome.
Just absolutely beautiful!
DEAR GOD. WINDOWS XP in Fischer Price mode. 0:33
Jonathan Blow talks about how to save the world.
file
I'd like to see a more indepth talk about this with a few code samples thrown in
Mheeeen, the talk was just starting!!!
When this talk started I thought the screen was on stage... wow.
WTF is going on with slides? Are they recorded in different time by someone who can't stay away from keyboard for longer than 30 seconds? Thumb up for the talk, but thumb down for the slides being randomly changed.
Sound and picture are out of sync.
That was a really good talk. ...But the cut-off at the end was such a shame. He was talking about really interesting stuff!
Does someone know a place where Jonathan explains this? I've always wondered how it was pulled off.
A couple years ago , I saw Jonathan Blow released his source code of the compression part. But I can't find that anywhere. Any ideas ? Thanks in advance.
This? number-none.com/product/Arithmetic%20Coding,%20Part%202/index.html
Michael Campagnaro thanks :)
Is the fact that this video about time reversal, dilation and compression is out of sync intentional?
I love it
What good are the diffs if you don't do entropy coding? Especially since floating point numbers were implied. With ints I'd assume you'd use a smaller integer type for the diffs but that would've been worth me mentioning.
If I understood correctly, what he meant by a diff was not that he did delta encoding (as he explicitly said he didn't). He seems to just skip entities/properties that has not changed between a frame and its base frame. But for things that has changed, he stores the full new value.
Ok, I can see how that would work with key-value pairs or with some form of diff format that encodes the position of the changes in a serialized binary blob but ... yeah, like I said, it would've been worth saying like three more sentences here to make it explicit what went on IMHO.
Penny Lane Yeah, I agree. He probably glossed over it for a lack of time. As someone else said, this needed to be a 1 hour talk at least.
Yes, totally agree!
Thumbnail says “implementating”
What do you mean?
That's a perfectly cromulent word. It embiggens the title and you can't misunderstimate it.
Sounds like 1980 sound quality. Why. The tickets are 1k each.
All the money got spent building the time machine to go back to 1980 and get the microphones.
Because it's not you paying :D
I watch a lot of music/audio and game talks, there is a noticeable difference in priorities.
All I can think about while watching this are persistent data structures...
How does no one have questions for Jonathan Blow?
GDC should have just rewound time so Jonathan could get to the other half of presentation
gets me thinking of that one time when the grammy awards cut off frank sinatra back in 1994.
"run on consoles" "wanted to sell copies" shots fired at pirates
Sooo you decided to cut off every indie devs idol? Why not just extend the schedule for about 10 minutes for him? He deserves it.
why not doing it online in first place?
What I want to know is how do you eat if you're spending all your time creating a game and starting a company? How do you buy food during that whole process with no income?
Implementating
...
Not sure if I up vote because of jon, or down vote because of gross GDC cut/interruption.
WTF?!? They asked him to talk, he was giving a good speech they kept fucking up his slide and then they cut him off. WTF
The video is still out of sync......
I think it's Implementationationing
That said Windows XP had its charm
Oooo that's Windows XP
Horrible to be cut off like that.
bada$$
That cutoff was embarrassing. Screw your schedule, let him finish his talk.
I remember when the GDC was a place to discuss game dev instead of tutorials on how to properly humiliate yourself for the cancel pigs after being cancelled.
The GDC is dead.
god why windows xp
Because its the biggest PC platform for games.
***** Nope, win 7 & 10 dominate the field with 70% market share, then comes win xp and 8 (then Linux, then OSX). Win XP is not supported anymore, you should under no cicumstances stay with it, unless you want to be extremely vounorable to viruses etc.
also I think most XP users are either old grannies or companies who were unable to make the switch yet - both of them are not exactly the target audience of video games
Merthalophor Oops, I didn't see XP at the end. I thought you are one of the hipsters who only use Linux for everything.
***** well, to be honest, I _am_ one of these guys, but I understand people who use windows.
You realize this talk was given in 2010 right?
can program complex logical systems, but powerpoint is too complex for the human race
Kelda Hanson the capability to write programs does not imply the capability to use other programs.
To quote Joanathan Blow himself: "You can't see it in this video, but one reason I keep hitting escape and going into PowerPoint edit mode is because people can't see the whole slides, because they were being displayed at 16:9 aspect ratio on a 4:3 screen and there wasn't time to detect this issue and fix it. (I guess whatever recording they made of the feed has the whole slides)." This is in a long list of issues with how the GDC handled his talk. It was a pretty terrible experience for him.
Implementating is not a word.
Please change thumbnail.
That is all.
What's wrong with conversating about implementating? :P
Yeah I don't know why he's complainting.
And they haven't changed it in two years, so I guess he'll just have to acceptate it.
Instead of allocating heaps, he could have used a ring buffer.
Do it yourself and prove him wrong. Oh, true, taking is easy and free, working is not
didn't he just talk about that
Should apply rewind to writing the title card, because "implementating" isn't a word.
Umm can anyone translate this
Games hard
Drives me mad that people here think he was cut off. look at the damn time, we was 5 minutes over. It was 11:35 when they cut him off. That's it -- that's the end! They might have had other talks in that room, and even if they didn't, you don't get to be special Jo Blow, you get your time like everyone else!
Apparently he was told he could spill into the lunch break I think.
Why would you want to make a single player game that strictly tries to prohibit explotations? When you want to cheat that is not the programmers concern. He set some weird goals.
you're conflating cheating and bugs/exploits. one is absolutely the programmer's concern, while the other, although related, may not be.