Here's what BTS could implement if an entire-battle replay is impractical

[Ice]

I'm convinced there is a less resource-hogging alternative to the much-requested full-battle replay, i.e. a basic, top-down, 2-D graphical plot of the entire battle, with all friendly and enemy units, movements and weapon usage tracked and identified against a simplified terrain grid. Other information could be presented as well, such as turn number, clock, scores and a running total of casualties and fatalities. There would be no need to deal with sound effects, a moving camera POV or just about anything else that makes the entire-battle "movie" impractical. Simple vehicle and unit icons could be used, with no need to depict detail. Flight sims have the feature I'm describing; it's very helpful and the lack of 3-D hardly diminishes its value as a record of tactical prowess (or lack thereof).

It's not a "movie", but it would be a whole lot better than nothing. And it could be saveable, along with the AARs. I regret not being able to save my game-generated AARs, as I am unlikely to remember my last score in a particular battle when I want to play it again.

What do you think?

BTS?

[This message has been edited by Ice (edited 09-06-2000).]

[Get Some]

Would an entire battle replay really use up to much memory??? I figured the systems today could handle it. I've got a PIII 500 128 Mb Ram with a GeForce 256 V card and it seems to handle anything I throw at. I'm surprised there is no way to see the entire battle, that would be really entertaining to see all the turn segments run seamlessly from start to finish, especially the battles I've won!!! Maybe they will consider this for CM 2.

[IntelWeenie]

I think a full-length movie might actually be easier to implement since much of it is already built into CM. (I'm thinking of PBEM turns/movies). Only thing lacking is a way to tie all the turns together into a single playback.

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Canada: Where men were men, unless they were horses.

-Dudley Do-right

[This message has been edited by IntelWeenie (edited 09-07-2000).]

[Ice]

Seems to me that a seventy-minute movie (in the case of the longer battles) with full sound effects, moving camera and animations is too much to expect a PC to handle. And it would be even more demanding if you could switch off FOW to watch the enemy's actions. It's not just about memory, it's also about storage. A three-minute ROGUE SPEAR mission replay is about 1.5MB, I seem to recall...

It would be more practical to ask BTS to implement a 2-d alternative, or there will be nothing at all, even in CM2.

[IntelWeenie]

When(ever) CM2 comes out, I think storage will be a moot point, even if you're looking at 100-150Mb playbacks. Most 'average' PCs today have 12-20Gb hard drives! (CD-R and CD-RW drives will probably be a lot more common, too) So unless you save every battle, you'd still likely have plenty of room.

Creating a 2D playback would mean having to code it from scratch since CM is not 2D.

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Canada: Where men were men, unless they were horses.

-Dudley Do-right

[Guest Chris B]

I can only - again - point to how Myth movies/and saves are done.

The entire game engine is deterministic, so that the same input will ALWAYS result in the same end result.

So take the input (how much input can there be, 40 different orders/minute?) add a random number seed and generate the movie. Saves and movies comes to 20 K or so, and consists of the starting map, the input (at time so and so player A ordered so and so to go there and there) The backside is that the movies cannot be rewinded as the engine never saves a previous state, but only calculates changes to existing state. Another flip is that the original map is used for initial data, i.e. if you do not have it you cannot view the movie.

This could be done for CM also, but is hard to introduce at this state. I'd really hate 1 MB+ replays, as they are hard to share.

[Ice]

Chris B: I think you have just explained precisely why the system you describe could not to implemented in CM. The game is dynamic; in other words, you can save a game, play a turn, go back to the saved game and play the same turn again with a different result! This means that CM replays must be exactly that, replays rather than (literally) re-plays, i.e. a re-calculation of a set of inputs without dynamic outcomes. It's a clever way to fudge a 'replay'-like function but it would not work in CM.

[Stefan Fredriksson]

I have no idea what I'm talking about, but here goes: imagine there would be a way to save replay when, for instance, saving the pbem to send to your opponent. I mean, save the replay as a separate file somewhere on the disk.

Then have a little program (included perhaps) that simply links together the separate replays into one single "movie".

Oops, just saw the other topic about this.

[This message has been edited by Stefan Fredriksson (edited 09-08-2000).]

[Grendel]

No, I think you miss his point, Ice. The Myth is by no means a static game either, but as any programmer can tell you, "random" events are not all that random. Every method of random number generation starts with a seed value. Yes, a CM turn will turn out differently each time you run it, but only because the seed value is different. BTS would need to weigh in on this, but I'm 90% sure if you had the same seed value, the turn would always compute to the same result. Fuzzy logic might play with this assumption, but I doubt it. AFAIK, given the same inputs, fuzzy logic will give you the same output, it just weighs all the inputs logically. And if there IS a random component, that's a product of the seed value as well.

That said, all you need to do is included the game seed value, or the turn seed value, in the replay file. The CM engine could be modified to take orders from a file instead of a human, and replay the turns.

The downside to this is that you would have to recalculate each turn as you viewed it. This isn't a huge problem for anyone with a decently powered machine; I find I wait more for the AI than the turn generation on larger scenarios, but it's still a problem. So how about this for an option: Have two replay types, a small, tradeable, "orders" file, that works like a Myth film. You can trade this with friends, upload, whatever. You have to run this file through a convertor that processes all the turns at once and makes it into a viewable CM movie file. This would keep the file size of shared files low, increase the overhead on viewing the film, but still get all the features, as opposed to what Ice originally put forth as an idea.

And regarding the top down view, I don't think that's useful at all... This game is entirely 3D, and losing the ability to see terrain changes takes so much away from the game. And honestly, have you ever watched a turn from the max overhead zoom out? It's really quite boring, and alot of battles are won not on overall strategy, but infantry tactics, or tank tactics, which may transfer well in flight sims, but I don't think it would make a favorable transfer in CM.

- Grendel

[Ice]

Point well taken, Grendel. I only suggested a 2-d version of a full battle replay if BTS were absolutely convinced that a 3-d version couldn't be implemented.

[Maj. Bosco]

On a size of file note PBEM turns seem to be about 1.5 megs in a 2K point QB on a large map. If a game goes all 30 turns that's 45 megs. It's big but since you buy storage in gigs these days it's not prohibitive.

It also seems to stand to reason that you can save a turn in such a way that it turns out the same every time, otherwise PBEM games would be impossible wouldn't they? After that first turn played out if there wasn't some way to save a consistent replay then the players would be playing with different situations.

[Maastrictian]

I think the point here is that BTS feels they have better things to do. Examples include TCP/IP support, patching bugs (not that there are many), doing something about hull down (if they feel something needs to be done), working on the long 88 etc. The point is that there are substantive changes that need to be made and that eventually BTS should get on to CM2. Eye candy is not a priority, understandibly, and that is all a full game movie would be. I would also sugest a search on this topic.

--Chris

[Ice]

A full game movie is not eye candy. It's a tactical tool like an AAR.

[Maj. Bosco]

It's easy to lose sight of overall stratagy in a tactical game like this. A full replay would help to examine and modify stratagy. It'd also be nice for PBEMs where it can be as much as day or three between turns. I'll go do the search now to see why I'm wrong

[Maj. Bosco]

Allright, I did the search and here's what I found: A lot of players want the feature. I didn't come across a post by BTS explaining why it can't be done (point me there if you know of one) and I did run across a couple of posts on how it might be done.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Well, I am a programmer and I work with a bunch of different software that can export and merge all sorts of different files. I specificaly work with databases but there have been times I have exported or imported from a flat text files, which is the format for the PBEM movies.

I don't see why the text files cannot be merged into one continuous text file. Granted I don't know the specific layout of the text file but it does seem possible.

As for size problems texts files compress quite nicely.

Jeff<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I can't find the exact quote right now but I read in a few places that BTS said that the full game replay was "On the list". This means that though it wasn't in the initial release, it would be patched in.

As for the movie eating into storage just make it a togglable option. Seriously though, unless the movie starts getting near 100's of megs it's not an issue. How big is CM? I'm not at my home computer right now but I remember the .exe as being about a meg and a half. Then there were the .bmp's and .wav's but even with those it still probably isn't a tenth of the size of vastly inferior games like Shogun or Ground Control.

Sorry if you've already responded to this BTS but I'd appreciate it if you could explain the difficulty associated with the movie. It does seem to be a widely desired feature that, IMO, would add a lot to an already stellar game.

[This message has been edited by Maj. Bosco (edited 09-13-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Maj. Bosco (edited 09-13-2000).]