In this, the second episode of River City Ransom: Underground: Underground, I demonstrate our loop recording features and how I do live code editing.

The loop recording features are inspired by Handmade Hero, specifically episode 23. (Also take a look at episode 22, where Casey shows of how he does live code editing – it is a bit different because he is using C and we are using C#.)

We had the engine features required for loop recording from a very early stage (because they are essentially the same as our networking features). And it’s something I’d always wanted to add after seeing an article about the folks at iD doing something similar on Quake. But the Quake method always seemed very “heavy” and unsatisfying (I believe their method involved restarting the app – although I could be wrong about that).

So it wasn’t until I saw Casey showing off how easy it was to add, and how dead-simple the UI could be, that I actually took the time to implement it.

It only took a couple of hours to hook everything up nicely. But that has by far been the most effective use of time over the whole project. Those couple of hours have saved us hundreds – if not thousands – of man hours of development and debugging time. We probably couldn’t have made River City Ransom: Underground without this feature.