Will there be some way of accessing the server data remotely at all? If the data is presented between server and client in an easily parse-able fashion (I think I read json somewhere?) I guess spectator access to the servers would do the job for the basics. General off the top of my head thoughts would be - Read only: Player count and other general live game stats. - Read write: Adjusting resources, access to in-game chat, automating user access (white/blacklist, boot, ban), no doubt many other things I've not thought of Quick use cases would be stats for guild/clan websites and potentially even bigger in the sense of a full blown e-sports league system. Along the e-sports thinking and specifically game commentary, will the server be able to record the game data for later replays? Easier than gathering the replay data from each of the players involved for each player's point of view Cheers for your time, looking forward to Alpha (Convinced myself beta access wasn't enough!)
Json is used for map data, where else we don't know yet. You'll be able to mod UI for your own servers using webtools (JS and the like) so making custom lobbies and the like should be pretty easy. The server is having the replay, since its the save of the game while at the same time being the data the game is played from. :mrgreen: Have you taken a look at the last livestream they did? They have an extremely powerful replay system in it allready.
interesting in this context would be if the replay format will be open (or an accessible reader library). With something like that you could fiddle with some statistics for yourself, independent from the client interface.
I seriously doubt that any simulation-data will be sent as json. The gameplay-data will probably be heavily bandwidth-critical and therefore it will probably be a highly optimized binary protocol targeted at using the least bandwidth possible. Stats like you are asking for would probably be best presented as a SOAP-Webservice that is specifically written for the purpose to communicate gamestats to 3rd party systems. It would be nice, but I don't think it is a very high priority, if it is at all on UBERs todo-list. A short documentation on it would be really nice. However since it works radically different from other RTS it will probably need more documentation than the replayformats of other games.
Thanks for the responses. I was probably somewhat lacking in coffee when typing the original post. Client-Server game data would probably be using something lightweight and UDP based rather than some form of streaming json or whatever I was thinking Of course I wouldn't expect any of this to be priority over any of the actual game, just a wonder for the future Regarding replays I have watched the latest livestream however I'll have to give it another viewing later today to let a bit more sink in I think!
A nice feature would be to have a dedicated window for replay so that you can go backward and while playing watching what happened a few minutes ago, instead of going backward in the main window (which means you would miss what's currently going on). Unless of course i misunderstood the replay explainations during last livestream