[Suggestion] Total annihilation replay.

as a huge fan of the supreme commander games, there's one thing I would like to mention that would really be great for Planetary annihilation.

In supreme commander 1 and 2 you can watch replays of your match after the game, this is really great as, if you loose, you can see what you did wrong and what the enemy did right.
now there's one thing I would really love to be added if there's going to be a replay option in PA and that is to have the option to see exactly how the players screen looked like.

in supCom2 you can't see which technologies people are upgrading, or how they are microing their units.

so if you could like make "lock to player" to both have his fog of war, and mouse movements, instead of being able to freely roam, you'd be able to see how the player did what he did.

While I support this suggestion, it shouldn't take too much resources, a youtube video can do the same.

a youtube video xD
You do understand that a youtube-video uses up more resource in every single way?
Implementing this feature would not use up any big amount of resource, all they need to do is store all Interactions that the User does with the Gui. Thats doable and I would like it.

I agree I hated not being able to see what upgrades the Commanders were building.!

How do user generated youtube video require more dev resources?

I thought resources=computing power and bandwidth needed.
Sure user generated content is easier for the developers.

For computing-resources my statement is true:
First you need to record the video, which puts the load of playing + record on your machine.
Then you have a rather big videofile that needs to be converted and uploaded.
After all this is done, the user has to watch the video, which in turn downloads the still big file to his system.
A replayfile will only contain a few kilobytes of commands.

The replays as they currently exist are just logs of events, right? That should be even easier with a client/server architecture.

yes

Yes and no.

Replays are pretty much the same difficulty to create, but you have to get them off the server, because only the server has all the events and game parameters "on file".

In SupCom's synchronous model, each client has everything available, and only shows part of it to the user.

In PA, the server can (will?) actually withold info from the clients depending on what they should and shouldn't know. Both from an optimization standpoint (traffic), as well as a security standpoint (cheats).

Exactly. The server controls the sim and the clients basically just feed commands to it and receive back updates based on what they should know.

You should be able to download the replay from the server later (assuming the server allows this...)

DERP - Ignore me.

Of course such a feature doesn't serve a gameplay purpose, as it is a replay feature.

However, the function OP describes seem to me like a nice feature to have for the competetive players. Not a must have, but if one of the devs is bored in the lunch time...

EEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.....I just realize I posted in the wrong thread, my bad!

Mike

I wonder what this means for the bandwidth-requierments.

So would it be possible to have replays for planned event matches? It would be awesome to watch a 40 player match from every angle.

Also, if we have our own private servers (?), could we extract the replay from there?
Same goes for offline/LAN games?

If the simulation is completely deterministic (meaning no truly random events occur), you could even recreate the entire game by issuing the same commands at the same time they were issued in the original game.

You could even take over the game to play it by yourself at any time of the replay, and play it differently from the original (of course the other players should also be taken over).


If I'm not wrong, it was sort of the way how TA Demo Replayer was programmed, it issued the same commands as the original game; but since the replay would unsync after some seconds, they would load the entire game state at that time, and continue from there.

BTW that's how video compression is done, one key frame(full state), then many intra frames(commands/animation vectors), then another key frame and so on. There are even some hybrid techniques where you only reload the state of small area instead of the full thing. Cool and, more often than not, insanely hard stuff.