Spring RTS Engine

The other day a couple of us were spectating on a game and one of the players lost his connection... so the other guy spectating jumped into the seat of the guy who'd lost his connection (doing ".team 1" after the host had done ".cheat"). And I got to thinking, when you're watching a replay, wouldn't it be good if you could do the same thing??

The idea is, it would be really nice to practice your start up build order against a decent player. Obviously they wouldn't be able to react to your attacks, all their moves would be according to what happened in the original game, but it would be good practice on handling rushes I think.

It would also be good to do half way through a game to practice different ways of taking out the defenses a porcer has put up.

The only thing is, is this easy to implement? I'm figuring it will either be a) really easy or b) practically impossible....

SJ?

Munch

I've thought about this feature as well. It would be really cool. Another positive aspect would be people could practice their micro. Loading up a game in which you lost, but maybe playing it different until you find a strategy that would have worked (defending against the attack which destroyed your base I mean, not winning the game altogether).

Demo Recorder did that...

Might this also be a nice temporary ai solution?

can't someone just write a script recorder for someone's actions and play them back?

I think it would be easy for two different people to take over a game (or more if there were more players), but not for one person to take over a game, and then fight what the other player did.
Simply because the recorder is replaying stuff (if it runs as the demo recorder did), it isnt giving orders to units. So if I kill a samson in a recording, ten seconds later, when that samson started shooting in the real game, it will (if I understand correctly) appear again and start shooting at the target. Except that the recording probably updates every second or so.