Spring RTS Engine

Probably a very hard to realise idea:
some kind of play/pause/fast forward/fast backward bar, which includes a seeker of the replay.. In that way the replay becomes much more interactive, and in case you didnt see something, you can go back a bit, and play it again.
At least in my opinion :)

Rewind is currently super-extra-impossible.

you can go fast forward though, by typing /skip x, where x is the number of seconds from game start you want.

Is it seconds or frames? I thought it was frames (in which case, 30 gameframes to a second). If seconds... well that makes things a sight easier

/skip n - skip to n.th game second
/skip +n - skip next n game seconds
/skip f n - skip to n.th game frame

Pxtl wrote:Rewind is currently super-extra-impossible.

Yeah, that would require dumping of the entire game state at regular intervals. Could work on a system with plenty of RAM, but not worth it imo.

maybe just have spring restart with the replay and then make it skip

zerver wrote:

Pxtl wrote:Rewind is currently super-extra-impossible.

Yeah, that would require dumping of the entire game state at regular intervals. Could work on a system with plenty of RAM, but not worth it imo.

Im not sure how spring saves replays, but if it would be just a sequence of commands, the engine can log the commands, which is only a few Kb.
It would need quite a bit of extra coding (backtracing is not easy at all), but I suppose that wouldn't add up at all to the size of those dumps that you need to make in your approach :)

Replays are (just) a sequence of commands now.

Since you know this stuff:
When you play a replay, does every unit move exactly as in the game the replay comes from, or are there small differences?
Since that would make things a lot easier..

/me mumbles something about me needing to add c++ to the known programming languages array

Exactly as in the game. Any small difference would quickly snowball the thing into an entirely different game.

That's also why keyframes are hard, they really need to store everything required to restart the simulation at that point.

Um, wouldn't lua work?

We could store a fairly complete game-state via Lua, yeah. At least as complete as it probably needs to be, imo.

Argh wrote:We could store a fairly complete game-state via Lua, yeah. At least as complete as it probably needs to be, imo.

Someone attempted that with supreme commander for multiplayer

I wasn't thinking about MP, tbh. Save-games only really matter for SP, imo.

good point there!
idd: code that would be written for an application like this could easily be reused to restore a previously saved session. It only needs to be adapted to the spring save file, and done :)

Just a small idea (and al ittle off-topic): is it possible to restore save games with a h***ck of a lot of automatic give commands, and then restoring the commands each unit got? Or would that just confuse the AI and cause it to crash?