alt Hacker NewsI'm pretty sure it's because it's in fact 'just' a cool side effect to a common network architecture optimisation from the time where you could'nt send the 'state' of the entire game even with only delta modifiers and so you make the game detertministic to only synchronize inputs :) an exemple article I remember : https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/1500-archers-on-a-...
The main downside which probably caused the diseapearance is that any patch to the game will make the replay file unusable. Also at the time (not sure for quake) there was often fixed framerate, today the upsides of using delta time based frame calculation AND multithreading/multi platform target probably make it harded to stay deterministic (specialy for game where you want to optimize input latency)
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Fun fact, overwatch must have done a similar things because they would let you play back games up until some release when you could no longer replay them unless you'd saved the render.
I think if I remember right there were also funny moments where things didn't look right after patches?
You don't need to tun the whole game at a fixed framerate, only the physics. That's actually common practice.
The bigger problem is that floating point math isn't deterministic. So replays need to save key frames to avoid drift.
Quake used fixed point math.
I think it's more the patching thing that made "collect and replay inputs" less common.
Networked games have a "tickrate", just for the networking/state aspect. For example, Counter-Strike 2 has a 64Hz tickrate by default. They also typically have a fixed time interval for physics engines. Both of these should be completely independent of framerate, because that's jittery and unpredictable.