Serialization change coming in a future patch

[danielsamuels]

Just had an email from a Rocket League developer, thought you might also appreciate a heads-up:

Hey just letting you know there will be a small change coming up with replay data serialization. Currently part of the data for an actor looks like this:

1 bit (new bunch) 10 bits (channel index) 1 bit (channel is open, not closing) 1 bit ("Spawn Bit" to inform to spawn a new actor)

if ("Spawn Bit" == 1)
    ...actor spawn data...

We're adding a "name" property for the name of the actor after that "Spawn Bit" if the "Spawn Bit" is 1:

if ("Spawn Bit" == 1)
    ...index in name table...
    ...actor spawn data...

This change won't be in the next patch, and probably not even in the one after that... but maybe the 3rd patch from now?

[tfausak]

Thanks for the heads up! Sounds like getNewReplication would have to change. Do you know what format the name index will be in? I would guess either a 32-bit unsigned integer or a compressed unsigned integer.

I'm assuming that the "names" are what I call replayWithoutFramesNames. As far as I know, nothing currently uses them.

[danielsamuels]

Unfortunately I don't have any further information than that email and I don't know enough (any) Haskell to be of any use here either 😞

[tfausak]

No worries! Sounds like I've got some time to make the change.

[rustyfausak]

Hm, has any data ever been in the names meta? I wonder what the goal of a change like this is.. Doesn't seem to be related to rumble mode since that is slated to release in Sept and 3+ patches from now is probably further than that. Maybe RLCS / replay / spectator something? Maybe more information about custom items?

[tfausak]

Yeah, some replays have names. For example, this replay has these names:

0: ESLMonthlyElite
1: Countdown
2: Season2GrandChampion
3: Active
4: PostGoalScored

I don't output the names from the octane executable because I don't know of anything that uses them. I'm not even really sure what they mean.

[danielsamuels]

Aren't they player titles? 0 and 2 are, and I imagine 1, 3 and 4 are the item-related titles?

[tfausak]

They're definitely not all player titles. And it's weird that there are no spaces in the names.

I counted all the names from my 4k local replays:

Name	Count
Active	1614
Countdown	1614
ESLMonthlyChampion	1
ESLMonthlyElite	2
PostGoalScored	1413
Season2GrandChampion	22
UtopiaStadium_Dusk_p	10
Utopiastadium_p	6
XP	3432

[tfausak]

I'm closing this because it's not actionable. When the replay file format changes, I'll update the parser to handle it.