Movie Replay

[womble]

One possibility to make it work, in addition to the idea of offering chunks of the game, would to load the next turn in the background while the current turn is being viewed.

Just a thought but I suspect the work involved and the priority will mean this idea will not come to pass. Still a cool idea though.

I thought about that approach. The problems that occurred to me were that it's still 2 pretty massive files to hold in memory/combine into one, and the question of what happens when you want to skip backwards 5, 10 minutes, or back to the beginning... Presuming you'd have unloaded the turn before, or the turn-before-last (which would leave 3 whole-game-files to be held and processed) you'd get the usual "loading" delay while the relevant turn was loaded. It'd be a start though.

 

A better approach might be to have the game record all the orders and all the random factors, and the outcomes of those random events, and have it apply them according to the timeline upon which it recorded them. This would be a lot more work for the programming team, though, as all that stuff would need to be extracted as the game was generated, and a replay engine would need to be built that was part "Real Time" and part "WeGo"; the fact that you can't replay even the last minute of a RT game is suggestive of the challenge that making a player that could handle the whole of a potentially 4 hour Brigade strength battle on 16sqkm of forest presents.

 

And that's the thing that gets me about some of the people calling for this (or several other, in fact) features: the arrogance to assume they know what "should already have been done" without even stopping to consider what the challenges and opportunity costs would have been to meet their expectations. It's all very well asserting that it's something that you'd like to see; I can't disagree; it'd be cool as to have, but the attitude that "because I want it should have been done already" that comes across from some people is hugely irritating. "There's no such thing as a stupid question" stops being true when you're about 11.

[delliejonut]

You guys are awesome. Sometimes people who don't code (like myself) don't realize how much work it is. My roommate programs/web designs for a living, and he vents to me about the ignorance of non programmers. At his job there's a lot of "this isn't done, why isn't it perfect yet/ OMG I don't know how to use this you broke it/ you sent me an email what's that" type stuff. So in honor of the brave programmers everywhere who must deal with the masses-

 

I salute you