Spring RTS Engine

I really like replays. Not only are they fun to watch, they're also a good way to learn the weaks spots of yourself and your enemy. But the thing is, I keep switching from side to side with the ".team x" command to see the amount of metal / energy produced by the different teams, and to keep track of the various Lines of Sight. I find this a real pain in the ass.

I'd like to propose something of an replay-GUI, which would have to have at least the following features:

• On-screen metal / energy bars for every player in the game. They'd probably need to be resized with a bit respect to the current income-bars if you have an 8 player game ...
• Buttons to switch from the Spectator mode to any one of the teams and back.
• The standard play-pause-forward-etc buttons you find on any decent mediaplayer, just because the first few minutes usually are quite boring.

I don't know if the latter is possible, because I don't have a clue how the SY programmed the replay format. But the first two shouldn't be a problem. And while we're at it, the following would also be nice:

• Ability to add commments (e.g. "here player x makes a crucial mistake") to specific times.
• Bookmarks to speficic times and places (e.g. "jump to the epic battle immediately").

That's all I can think of right now. It would probably make watching replays a whole lot more fun (if not a whole lot easier). Any further suggestions?

wow that would rock also i'd really like to have a button which shows the cursors of the players so that you can see what they are doing in detail! :) a replay GUI would be better than (dare i say it) mature cheddar cheese...mmmm...cheese

# The standard play-pause-forward-etc buttons you find on any decent mediaplayer, just because the first few minutes usually are quite boring.

You can us + and - to set the speed you like.
I would like a "goto" command like in TAdemo Recorder. (because I can't set the game to +10 all the time, or my explode)

* Ability to add commments (e.g. "here player x makes a crucial mistake") to specific times.
* Bookmarks to speficic times and places (e.g. "jump to the epic battle immediately").

That is a really good idea.

Auto-skip pause. Especially the pause at the start when waiting for other players. Haven't tested with latest version, but last time I replayed a game where I had been waiting for 15mins to someone to join by IP, there were 15mins of idleness at the beginning of the replay.

Replays havent really received any work at all, they are just possible as a byproduct of how the network format works. But sure it would be good if someone would improve that part (personally I have other stuff i prioritize more)

From what I can figure a replay is nothing more than the whole networkbuffer written to a file. As Spring replays this file, it simply executes the commands that are in that network buffer. Am I right?

Now, if you want to forward the replay to, say, from 1 to 30 minutes, Spring would have to execute all commands given in those 29 minutes to get to the new situation. That would mean a lot of (wastefull) calculation, and would take a long time (I'm only guessing here, correct me if I'm wrong).

This is a lot like the MPG file format: it only stores the changes in the situation in order to get a compact file size. In MPG the forwarding-issue is aptly solved by introducing keyframes: every 10 seconds or so the whole image is stored, not only the changes from the old to the new.

So if we were to have an effective replay-GUI, the Spring replays would probably also need to have some keyframes in them. These keyframes are then simply a saved set of the situation (all units, buildings, projectiles, resources, etc): in short, a savegame.

This is just an idea, and I'm not a C++ programmer. Would anybody be so kind as to see how feasible this idea is? Imho it would certainly kick ass ...