Spring RTS Engine

There are two features which are lacking in the replayer right now:

1.) Ability to pause. You just can't do it right now, and it would be handy and simple enough to do.

2.) Ability to jump to frame [X]. The TA Demo Recorder for Total Annihilation had a frame-jumping command enabled, and it was really convenient for skipping boring parts or watching a particular part of the game repeatedly without having to go through the whole replay time and time again. It would be super-cool to have both of these functions back in Spring.

The replays are simply where the game has saved the network commands and has starting refeeding them into the engine isnt it?

Eitherway a rehaul of the pregame GUI for singleplayer is needed and I think that replays should have a bigger role, they dotn even have a good menu option right now.

request

pressing 1-9 in replay mode, quickly switches teams, equivalent to write .team 1, .team 2 etc.
(so you can check los and resources fast.)

alantai, have you looked at the replays section at the TASclient?.

One thing it is definatley missing is a time-slider. Just a bar down the bottom of the screen that you can click on and drag to jump to different parts of the replay. Changing teams would also be usefull. Pause is definatley needed, so you can line up some awsome screenshots.

Also, at the start of a game, post in the chat screen "Recording demo to %TASpring%\demos\Number-Map-Version.sdf". Will help people (certainly those that do not know replays exist) find the replays.

When I play spring it's testing TAI ro playign the old spawn AI, so I dont really notice lobby changes.

with the way the current format works, timesliders wouldnt be possible.

ALL the ai and physics have to be reevaluated during the replay, so jumping the 1h into a game would easily need 10 minutes of computation to reach that state. Thats the whole reason replays several hours long with 100s of units are only in the low Mbyte range.

A _real_ VCR mode would need preevalutated unit/particle/projectile positions, which would make the files at least an order of magnitude larger...

so all you would need is a progam that reads in a recording... converts it to a special Unit State/Time Frame format and lets you play it back that way...

I here SJ comming : "Someone have to create something to save/load game" :)

with the way the current format works, timesliders wouldnt be possible.

You can save "key" every 5 min, and then begin to compute from there....but I can be hard to develope, I agree.

Okay, one more request from the demo recorder: make a 'window' that displays everybody's names and their resource storage, input, and output simultaneously, so that you don't have to keep switching players in a replay

switching players is still usefull for los, radar, and some other tactical reasons.
(if you want an exact replay from one side.).

IMSabbel wrote:with the way the current format works, timesliders wouldnt be possible.

ALL the ai and physics have to be reevaluated during the replay, so jumping the 1h into a game would easily need 10 minutes of computation to reach that state. Thats the whole reason replays several hours long with 100s of units are only in the low Mbyte range.

A _real_ VCR mode would need preevalutated unit/particle/projectile positions, which would make the files at least an order of magnitude larger...

A pause function would be possible tho..

well, thats true, of course....

I also would like to see a "real" replay option (showing the screen as the players saw them, i.e. keeping track of camera positions, too)

What could happen, is for a replay, upon starting would still play the replay in 'real time', but also go ahead and calculate all the position data, and reember the data somewhere. Then, once a certain bit is calculated, you could jump forwards to that bit, or backwards to watch a bit over, and stuf like that. Still small file sizes, but also the ability to (once calculated) jump to any part of the replay, and replay a replay with out getting out of the game. This shouldnt be TO hard to implement I would think.

All of this speculation begs the question: How did the SY's implement these features in the original Demo Recorder?