I hate to be this person, but see that button on the top right hand side of the screen labelled search. You might find it useful. If I come across as a bit harsh, it's just because I'm getting a tad tired of duplicate threads. So don't take it too personally.
Savegames require a serverside save of the replay to be loaded, as well as the server to load it into. So it is definitely after offline, but unpredictably anytime at or after that.
To my knowledge all Save Games need are the Replay files and those are already stored to some degree online, allowing for local storing would be a good thing long term as well. Saving isn't directly tied to offline functionality, having Offline available makes it easier/more convenient but in no way is it a strict base level requirement. They might be being worked on with the idea of a simultaneous or staggered release(with offline coming first) but we have no idea. Mike
I know an easy fix for right now. When a user clicks save it pauses the game. When he loads it it will simply unpause it for him. Although this might be quite inefficient.
Part right, part not. Saving is not tied to offline. We could support saves even while we still have a server connection, and the reverse is for sure true. A base save IS possible, but it's more like a debug tool. It will recreate the game back to where it was, but without any state information, so everything has to reprocess, orders get recreated, etc. Saving, and then enumerating all state conditions on load are a chunk of work. These are both in the works, but they are only tangentially related to each other.
On the term of reloading games from replays ("savegames") I had a revelation about an implication of that kind of replay-savegame yesterday: Make it that the chronocam view at the end of the game allows the players to move the time around, watching the replay and then at some point just click "continue game from here". That would be SOOOOO awesome helpful to fix up build orders. Basically I could play out my experimental build until it fails, quit (delete my commander to get into chronocam), go back in time and change my build to make it work after analyzing the replay without having to replay the correct part. At the end I get a replay of the perfect execution of the build I can then practice to reach first try. Yey. AWESOME So a "continue game from here" button in the chronocam view at the end of a finished game would be appreciated ^.^
Really, being able to do that from any chronocam in the replay channel would be nice. Then the next step would be making it so the replay and position is chosen, and then a lobby is created to load players into the replay point, so you can do more than just against ai. Then, I would be more than fine with working on persistent orders. I just say this, because even a broken experimental feature, is appreciated over waiting until all functions of said feature are done. Food for thought.