How can I replay entire scenarios without downloading any 3rd party stuff

[Jak170]

I play RT more than WEGO and a couple times, I play a really interesting game that I want to save and watch again later. Is there some function in SF that allows me to watch the entire battle as a "movie" ingame or like the replay phase in WEGO?

If your kinda confused about what i'm talking about, Command & Conquer 3 tiberium wars has this function. After the stats of the battle are listed out, you can choose to save the gameplay. Then, going to the main menu, you can select the game and watch it in the program from any view point you want (enemy's sight only, your sight only, "God" view). It also has fast forward but sadly, no rewind functions.

This could be a really nice function for CMSF. Maybe there is this option but I've just missed it?

[MeatEtr]

IIRC this can of worms goes way back to the CMBO days. But it never happen for the CMx1 games and I think they said it is on the "to do" list for CMSF. It will probably never happen though. I think they said something like it was way too time consuming and that theres better things to work on. I agree but it would be great to have a full replay option.

[Moon]

No, such a function does not exist unfortunately. It's been around as an idea and on the wishlist of many people for a long time (going back to the very first CM game) but implementing it is unfortunately very hard to do.

[Yair Iny]

Hey Jak, Your example of C&C 3 actually serves very well to explain why it is not technically feasible in CMSF. The reason, i'd imagine, that you cannot rewind in C&C is that the game tracks every command you give and every random number generated and streams them into a recording along with their timestamp. It then "replays" the game using those commands in a similar fashion as if you were playing it, except that every previously random decision, has the outcome recorded as well. Thus you get the exact same results as you did when actually playing and can also see things with and without the various levels and sides of fog-of-war. This is why you cannot rewind, since the game engine contains no code for e.g. "unhitting a unit and healing the hitpoints that were damaged", etc.

Given that CMSF performs many of orders of magnitude more calculations, i would guess that the same information stream for CMSF would require far too much throughput to be feasible on the same PC that is running the CMSF game itself. Hence the lack of feasibility. Steve mentioned somewhere that this can be done in theory with contemporary hardware by using another PC for recording, but of course the communication channel and recording program would have to be implemented as well.

Hope this clears it up a bit. Maybe as hardware prices drop and hardware becomes more capable it will be feasible in the future, but i'd imagine, BF would prefer to use this new found power to increase fidelity rather than to allow recordings...

Cheers

[Jak170]

Alright. I guess that makes sense. Thanks for clearing it up for me cuz I heard the after action contest and I thought that they could do that.

If this could somehow miraculously appear in V 1.2, I think I would marry this game YAY

[kerko]

How about some simplified review function which would float unit icons on map editor -like view? All units visible and unit icon would flash if unit takes damage and maybe some simple lines drawn to target when unit fires? Wiped units would turn dark or something. That shouldn't produce ungodly amounts of data or shouldn't be performance hit. But I might be wrong here.

[Jak170]

But the point of me wishing this movie recorded existed is to watch the sheer awesomeness of this game from any viewpoint I want, at any time. Reducing the units to circles wouldn't cut it for me but it might for certain people who just want to learn tactics.

[Field Marshal Blücher]

I would like this feature as a scenario designer, to see how an AI plan works out. But it's probably not going to happen, so I won't hold my breath.

[thewood]

There needs to be an observer mode that at least lets you watch an AI plan. It wasn't needed in CM1 because you couldn't directly influence AI behavior anyway. But when you have to put, sometimes, complicated plans together in multiple groups, lacking it really hobbles AI planning quality. It forces me to try and keep all AI scenarios very simple, not because the AI couldn't handle it, but because I couldn't debug it.