[quake3] feature: advanced demo navigation

[Neil Toronto]

Lovely self-reply...

Neil Toronto wrote:
> *snip*
>
> Server-side demos might be easier to do in-engine. We had to jump 
> through quite a few hoops to make it work well.

It was here we learned that the QVM has the same endian-ness as the 
architecture it ran on, which surprised us a bit. We had to write our 
own hton*() and ntoh*() functions...

Anyway, *supposing* someone did this, it might be easiest to record 
every player's commands and userinfo strings, and play them back as if 
the players were actually connected. Then the mod wouldn't need support 
for the feature - it would just think some players were connected. Well, 
it would need to know when a demo was being played back so it could keep 
players from joining the game.

This assumes, of course, that server events proceed deterministically. 
Hmm... maybe this is harder than I thought.

The engine used to have a "serverrecord" command that recorded 
server-side demos, but I don't know how it worked or what's become of 
it, and I don't know how to play them back.

Neil