[WE'RE BACK] New Replay Format

[fraxiinus]

Initial Support for rofl2 is available for preview with the unstable builds.

Download the artifact from the most recent actions run: https://github.com/fraxiinus/ReplayBook/actions/workflows/main-branch-trigger.yml

A github account is required.

Original Post

Initially reported by "Melon" on discord

Hi guys, my partner and I cannot watch any replays, whenver we launch a replay in the lol client it says replay file corrupted
if we try it in replaybook it says replay load failure "RoflParser - Reading JSON Metadata: Arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow."

• Affects all replays, downloaded directly from the client
• Client cannot play these files
• File format does not match known ROFL container format, file signature is "RIOT 0x02 0x00"
• Are these related to replay failures occurring in NA? "Aulz" reports that spectate has been broken for about 50% of games in NA amateur scene. Additionally, 50% of those games have replays that cannot be downloaded or become broken. No example file yet.

Example file from Melon attached with file extension changed to "txt"
OC1-619631145.rofl.txt

[fraxiinus]

Example file from "Aluz" from NA, showing the exact same strange file format.

Spectate will sometimes die, disconnecting all spectators as the game still continues. Trying to download a replay at this point returns a file in this format. Perhaps this is a truncated replay file that only contains the replay information up to the point of disconnection. The stats object cannot be populated before the game ends, so this is a possible explanation.

NA1-4976306960.rofl.txt

[fraxiinus]

Riot has released a new ROFL format that is INCOMPATIBLE with ReplayBook and roflxd. This new format does NOT contain ANY METADATA for the game, only the unreadable replay data is left. This move means that going forward ReplayBook and other replay tools will no longer be able to extract game data, or provide a match preview without playing the replay.

Others have reported that the League of Legends executable no longer supports playing replays by dragging them onto the .exe. What most likely will be needed now is a webserver to host the replay packets for the client, much like how OP.GG batch files work.

If this is true, then I will likely stop development on ReplayBook and roflxd altogether. I'm tired. I understand that Riot never supported this avenue of data parsing; that was a risk I took. But I'm still just tired of working on this.

Riot has increasingly shown that they're not interested in keeping cool fan projects like this alive. However, the community has always been supportive and appreciative of my work. Thank you everyone who supported ReplayBook, roflxd, and even ROFLPlayer for the past seven years. What started as a project I made while I was bored at a summer internship, turned into something used all over the world, and translated to seven different languages! I would never have expected such an outcome, so I want to thank you all again.

The code and server will stay up, though I will archive the repositories and take down the website next week.

[JerryLiew]

I am very saddened to hear this news. As a heavy replay collector, ReplayBook and roflxd have been with me for three years. Thank you for your past work on this project.

[fraxiinus]

Thank you for your support with translation and code!

A Riot employee did respond to the situation, they will bring it up to the team to see how feasible it will be to add the data back in. Getting a response is already more than I expected, but I'm still not betting on metadata coming back.

In the meantime, I am considering putting together a "final" update to hopefully get some of my unfinished features out. No promises though, this situation definitely dampened my enthusiasm.

[NobbiHabogs]

Just as I was starting to get to grips with replaybook, Riot messes everything up again. It's a real shame to hear that the project will probably be cancelled and that there will probably be no convenient way to view replays in the future, some of which are only a day old because the game played was a day before the patch day.

[fraxiinus]

I guess I'm eating my words! Official response from Riot, we will be getting our metadata back!

Hiya! I'm Ridley and I've been taking on the work to re-add to the rofl files the metadata that your tool reads =D
We've added the metadata to the end of the file, the final 4 bytes of the file is the size of the JSON. We didn't keep the game version in that metadata but it can be gotten from near the start of the file. You should see the metadata added as of 14.11

[ain-soph]

@fraxiinus
Thanks for the great tool! Is it still working now? I see there's still the warning notice at the readme.md. I tried download the most-recent released version at Jan 2024, but it doesn't work for replay files after 14.9 (14.7 still works). Would you consider a new release sometime, since you've got good news from Riot?

I'm now suffering with the official replay download files corruption issue. It downloads rofl files with only 1-3MB, which is corrupted. I have to delete them and retry around 20-30 times and it will download the correct replay file, which is a torment to do it manually.
I'm tired of this and desperately desired to looking for some good tools to watch replay.

Others have reported that the League of Legends executable no longer supports playing replays by dragging them onto the .exe. What most likely will be needed now is a webserver to host the replay packets for the client, much like how OP.GG batch files work.

To correct, it still works for me to drag rofl file into the .exe shortcut. It cannot be the original exe file; I have to make a shortcut of it.