Why Don't the Cars Drive Backward?

Why don't the cars drive backward when you pull the slider backward in replay mode? The short answer is "because we don't care enough to fix it", but a better answer might be "it would take a lot of programming time and suck up more resources from X-Plane to fix this...and we think our customers would rather that we focus our programming and your hardware resources on framerate."

The cars are an interesting special case of a whole number of sim phenomena that we don't attempt to track carefully in replay. Replay is designed to allow you to watch your flight - it would be cool if the scenery was doing the exact same thing during replay as during the flight, but I don't think it's essential for training purposes and it does come with a cost.

First remember: replay mode works by saving past values of the sim to RAM. So the more we save, the more RAM we chew up saving past history, and the less time we can save before we run out of virtual memory.

Now in some cases, the motion of dynamic sim objects is at least somewhat random. In this case we can't easily "reverse" the algorithm that generated the motion.

But the cars are more problematic.

Not only is their motion somewhat random (each time a car makes a turn at a fork in the road it randomly decides which way to go), the cars are maintained in memory in a way that allows us to figure out who has to make the next turn very rapidly without using a lot of CPU. As much as the cars are a CPU hog, they would be much much worse without this memory structure.

The problem is, the memory structure is organized based on time flowing forward. That is, we can only tell you which car needs CPU attention next if the cars are driving forward. Put time into reverse and we now know which car needed our help last! Not useful!

So to make the cars drive backward we would have to transform this data structure every time the flow of time changed. I think it would be more annoying to have this massive CPU recomputation each time you rewound the replay than it would be nice to have the cars move backward. Why not have two data structures, one for forward, one for reverse? Well, now we've saved CPU but burned RAM. Either way, we're talking about hardware resources that could be used for more scenery or more framerate.

The cars have yet another behavior that makes them hard to reverse: they are born and die! A car is born any time we realize that there aren't enough cars on the road for the given rendering settings. A car dies any time it gets too far away from the user's plane or reaches a point in the road where it can't procede. (Typically these are 1-way streets that dead-end. This happens because the road data we use has very poor flow information, leading to some really strange streets.)

This cycle of cars being born and dying maintains a reasonably constant car population over time, and a car population that is near your plane as you fly. But to reverse traffic, we would have to reincarnate cars that had died previously. This would mean spending memory on remembering what cars had died. (Even if the algorithm to decide where a car is born, the algorithm to predict where a car will die is quite complex, because it requires looking at the entire set of steps the car would make during its life until it reaches the "point where it is killed". So computing this information is out of the question.)

That's probably more information than you wanted to know. Generally speaking, if someting unrelated to the flight model doesn't replay in replay mode, it's probably because it would be too "expensive" to remember its history. The cars are the most complex example, but definitely not the only example!