Replay bug discovered, understood and options to fix permanently

Just wanted to give an update as we have been fairly silent this week, late last week we uncovered a bug in how we are currently calculating boost/gravity directions that can add variability depending on device/browser the replay was recorded on and being watched on.

We started to get an increased number of replay failures on tracks that have a fair number of boosts / gravity starting on the 20th, which correlated to a new version of Chrome.

Basically what we found is that the new version of Chrome introduced an altered algorithm for some of the trig functions that lead to some new "angles" for boosts / gravity that is calculated on the client. This is not just limited to new versions of browsers but also different browsers may produce different values, the higher the precision the more likely values will differ. Unfortunately current Free Rider tracks were not created with understanding this "bug" and we have not dealt with it before as Free Rider 3 was insulated from this Flash was used to perform calculations which seemed to be more consistent.

Since a large number of replays were now "broken" that were generated on previous version of Chrome and watched on newest version of Chrome, we fixed the precision of direction of boosts/gravity to a number that should work majority of the time but would not break existing autos.

Now that we understand the issue we have a couple options to fix this permanently:

• we could either re-write the track codes in a way that would not push trig calculations to the web browser which would require a fairly big re-work
• version new track codes created with the Free Rider HD track creator so that we can perform calculations that will be much more consistent across browsers + devices than we are currently

We are leaning towards the 2nd option but have some more testing to do first.

Replays are currently not too important but we do have ideas to incorporate racing to play a bigger role in the game and to do that we would want a fairly solid replay system.

Well that may be a little heavy but thought we would share what is currently going on.