{"id":92644,"date":"2019-04-26T19:36:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T19:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/341578"},"modified":"2019-04-26T19:36:00","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T19:36:00","slug":"video-how-blizzard-designed-and-built-overwatchs-replay-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/04\/26\/video-how-blizzard-designed-and-built-overwatchs-replay-tech\/","title":{"rendered":"Video: How Blizzard designed and built Overwatch&#8217;s replay tech"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From its inception, the replay system for Blizzard&#8217;s multiplayer shooter <em>Overwatch&nbsp;n<\/em>eeded to support a variety of customer-facing and internal needs.<\/p>\n<p>In a fast-paced, team-oriented first-person shooter&nbsp;like <em>Overwatch&nbsp;<\/em>&#8220;kill cams&#8221; help you understand how your hero died, Highlights and &#8220;plays of the game&#8221; celebrate individual prowess and team excellence, and replays prove invaluable in reproducing bugs.<\/p>\n<p>At GDC 2017, Blizzard&#8217;s Philip Orwig&nbsp;gave an illuminating talk about how these systems were built, digging into (among other things) how to develop a replay system in parallel with your network model, how to generate and transfer reels within a hard respawn deadline, and&nbsp;how&nbsp;(and why) Blizzard refactored their game client architecture to support an interruptible kill cam.<\/p>\n<p>It was rich in technical details, and now you can <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=W4oZq4tn57w\">watch it (completely free!) over on the official GDC YouTube channel<\/a>!<\/p>\n<p>In addition to this presentation, the&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gdcvault.com\/\">GDC Vault<\/a>&nbsp;and its accompanying&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UC0JB7TSe49lg56u6qH8y_MQ\/feed\">YouTube channel<\/a>&nbsp;offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gdconf.com\/\">Game Developers Conference events<\/a>, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.<\/p>\n<p>Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC&nbsp;already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gdcvault.com\/inquiry\/\">a GDC Vault subscription page<\/a>. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gdcvault.com\/demo\/\">GDC Vault group subscription page<\/a>. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gdcvault.com\/contact_us.php\">contact GDC Vault technical support<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From its inception, the replay system for Blizzard&#8217;s multiplayer shooter Overwatch&nbsp;needed to support a variety of customer-facing and internal needs. In a fast-paced, team-oriented first-person shooter&nbsp;like Overwatch&nbsp;&#8220;kill cams&#8221; help you understand how your hero died, Highlights and &#8220;plays of the game&#8221; celebrate individual prowess and team excellence, and replays prove invaluable in reproducing bugs. At [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}