A practical replay system for Dead by Daylight
TLDR: Unreal Engine already has built in replay technology that Behaviour could use to create a simple DBD replay system, making it much easier to report cheating, teaming, bugs and exploits.
Here is Unreal Engine’s official information about it:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/unreal-engine/using-the-replay-system-in-unreal-engine
Left 4 Dead is older than DBD but it uses SourceTV. Players can still use it to replay matches and check if someone was cheating. I understand this is Valves program but Unreal Engine ALSO has a built in replay system. It can record the match information and recreate the match later. It can also support pausing, changing the speed and moving to different parts of the match.
I understand that Behaviour would still need to make the replay menu, camera controls and other DBD-specific features but, the basic replay technology already exists. so they wouldnt need to create everything from scratch. A simple version could:
Save the match information on the player’s computer.
Keep only the last few matches.
Automatically delete older replays.
Let us watch each player’s view.
Include pause, rewind, fast-forward and speed controls.
Protect the replay files so players cannot edit them.
Let players attach a replay to a report.
Only support replays from the current game update.
It doesnt even need to record a normal video, it could save a smaller file containing the match information and DBD could then read the file and recreate what happened during the match. At the moment players have to record every match themselves, edit the video, upload it and send a separate support ticket. Most players dont record every game and dont want to waste their time doing this to submit a ticket. Ive thought about this and DBD already saves game logs. Support sometimes asks players to send these files when investigating bugs, so, cant they just expand the system to save enough match information for replays?
Behaviour could begin with a basic first person replay system and improve it over time. They could also hire a separate team with experience in Unreal Engine replay systems to intitially set it up and impliment it into the game faster.
Unreal Engine already provides a starting point/template so it seems worth exploring
Comments
I'm pretty sure the devs at some point said that a replay system wasn't possible, but I'm not really sure why when—you're correct—there's a built in system for that exact thing in the engine they use. Probably more issues because of terrible spaghetti code.
I believe they said years back that a match replay system would have had been originally coded back in 2016, that it's too late now due to the code. If so, even them upgrading engines might not be enough.
I feel like at this stage, it is possible and a lot easier with UnReal Engines program.
A Deadlock-like replay system would be perfect. It is compact, weighs a few kilobytes and allows you to see everyones perspectives at any time as well what was used at any given moment. Would be cool but probably never happening