PJMaybe Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 I have been wondering if there is any way of showing a replay of the battle I have just played? When a battle is over I would really like to be able to watch a replay of the whole thing but with all units visible so I can see how it panned out 'as it happened' from a spectator's point of view, enjoying the action and close ups of the units instead of having to concentrate on winning. It's no different really to the 1min of action for each turn on the turn based game but without the breaks for issuing orders. If I can't do this already, would it be so difficult to add? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunnergoz Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 My WEGO game saves vary from 3MB to 30MB per 1 minute turn, depending upon the map and number of units. So assuming the worst, a 1 hour game save with my largest files would take up about 1.8 Gigs of HD space. I'm not even sure how they could save and replay such a thing if you consider that it is not simply a video but a full 3-D replay of every soldier, tank, tree and bullet. Good luck on this one. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PJMaybe Posted June 23, 2011 Author Share Posted June 23, 2011 Hmm... see what you mean. But Company of Heroes have a cinematic replay + save option. Is it a lot different from how it would work on that game? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ClarkWGriswold Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 I think pretty much everyone would like to have such a feature. It would make re-watching a battle so much easier and more fun, and would make AARs/VAARs a lot simpler to put together. Alas, I doubt we'll ever see such a feature. :-( 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wego McPbem Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 Yeah, this would be amazing but it's understandable why it's not in. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisND Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 Hmm... see what you mean. But Company of Heroes have a cinematic replay + save option. Is it a lot different from how it would work on that game? I'm pretty sure there's a lot less data flying around in CoH than in a CM battle... a lot less. That said, I'm sure that it's doable and they haven't done it yet because they believe there have been more important things to complete up to this point. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poesel Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 My guess is that its more a RAM issue than HD. Who cares about a few Gig nowadays? But I would very gladly settle for two additional buttons that would load the next/previous minute from within the 3D map. The real kicker would be to get the WHOLE view (including opponent). But for that your opponent would have to free his files from the password. I really doubt we'll see that. Also the fun of having AARs from both sides would be lost! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjkerner Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 I always wondered how they were able to make that available in IL2 Sturmovik...numbers of calculations, etc., were enormous. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cid250 Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 Disk space size is not a problem anymore... I have a Network Attached Storage of eight 3Gb HDs, that's 18 TeraBytes on Raid 6 linked to my computer as another hard disk via iSCSI protocol. Today 18 Tb is a bit expensive... but in 3 or 4 years, it will be in every home at the same price than a single 1Tb HD of today. What's exactly the problem with the size of a full replay of two hours between batallion size units?. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gen Von Television Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 This might be an interesting option for further study and reflection: in the Flight Sim IL-2 Sturmovik you have the possibility to record air battles with whole squadrons in the air, shell cases flying off from the wings' slots, bombs dropping, etc. Replaying it's even possible from any plane or point of view, external or inside the cockpit... and the recording file is amazingly small, being an hex file containing reference data for the actual models I believe... a brilliant solution that would be most welcomed in a simulation like CM... In CMX1 at least I have the possibility to rename the last autosave file after the end of the battle, so to load it afterward and contemplate the situation moving around on the battlefield at the end of the fighting, but I still cannot see if or where CMX2 is storing the last WEGO file when the Done or victory screen will appear... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunnergoz Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 All this is well and good but IMHO if they as a small independent developer have to allocate precious time and money on programming, I sure would prefer they spend it on gameplay-critical issues like Tac AI and interface improvements. OTOH, if one of you gents who is eager for such improvements has inherited a few $,$$$,$$$ and cares to donate - er, invest - it in BFC, I'm sure they'd be happy to discuss some arrangement with you. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gen Von Television Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 I agree, but then again Oleg Maddox when designed IL2 wasn't a microsoft IBM either, and still was able to implement many well thought and wide sided features in his simulator, a very many years back too... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PJMaybe Posted June 25, 2011 Author Share Posted June 25, 2011 I'm no programmer so I may be (and accept that I very much likely will be) well off the mark here but I would have thought it would be quite an easy addition to the game as each minute-by-minute is already being calculated and implemented (I play mostly turn based). What happens to that replay when you go into the next order phase? Why can't it just be saved somewhere? The only real change I would like to see in addition to that is that the hidden units and events are all on display. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vergeltungswaffe Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 I agree, but then again Oleg Maddox when designed IL2 wasn't a microsoft IBM either, and still was able to implement many well thought and wide sided features in his simulator, a very many years back too... IL2 did indeed have many wonderful features, and remains the best WWII combat flight sim today, but it had plenty of fairly serious bugs that were never squashed in these many years. Then, after all the years of SOW development, when the bug ridden pre-alpha that COD is came out, Oleg walked away. Glad BFC didn't do that when SF had problems at release. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steiner14 Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 A full battle replay for WEGO should be achieveable, by a replay-player-frontend that sits on top of the CM-engine. Multicore CPUs could even allow to load a second instance of the CM-engine in the background and preload the next minute of gameplay, while the frontend-player replays one minute and at the end of the minute switches to the other process. But because WEGO players are not the only group of CM-players anymore, i guess they are not interested in a solution that would be very nice for WEGO-players while leaving realtime players behind. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gen Von Television Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 I brought up IL2 only to point out the amazing feat of saving a whole battle in a very light file: the battle may have lasted one hour with dozens of aircraft and thousands bullets, and still you can easily replay it inside the sim, even choosing between the many different points of view; the latest versions of IL2 are quite mature and accomplished piece of codes without any relevant bug; as for COD that's another story. Far from me to criticize or diminish BFC has done in all these years (I'm a fan since Atomic products), but I hope they can take these as feed backs from a faithful customer and appreciative user of their works! As for RT players that would be more complicated, I understand: I'm not sure I would like to play this detailed and realistic game RT in the foreseeable future: for that I would rather play Call of Duty (sheesh); I enjoy playing it on the turn based system, on the net or PBEM with friends, or just against AI, and mainly historical scenery. Maybe in this community there may be some ingenuous coder that can create such kind of tool, or eventually the clever guys at BFC may decide it's time for an implementation following the many (maybe too many, I agree) advices coming from this forum. Thanks for reading. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fry30 Posted January 21, 2012 Share Posted January 21, 2012 I have such a hard time believing that it can't be done. I purchased this game after seeing all the beautiful and obviously time consuming videos people made on youtube. I thought it was a matter of hittting rewind and play. And not really complaining.. but how come my save game files for WEGO PBEM keep increasing in data size? Would it really add that much more [memory, etc.] to be able to link to my other saved games? I have alll minutes back to 0:00 [of a recent pbem game], but to go through all of that would take forever [loading screens, etc.]. Has someone made a program for this?? Has this been addressed on another thread? I really think this should be fixed with the Common Wealth Module... but the sheer fact that they are charging $35 dollars for the expansion tells me probably not. Would really like to hear a BF member's take on this! It drives me nuts to not be able to pull up some game mode where i can assemble and watch all of the turns (or replays) : D 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steiner14 Posted January 21, 2012 Share Posted January 21, 2012 IMO that we have no battle replay yet is a consequence, that BFC doesn't offer any help for 3rd party developers. If BFC would offer interfaces, that allow to read information from and input certain data into the game, i guess we already would have map making utilities, tools for operational playing and also a player frontend, at least allowing to load the next saved turn in the background, while the current turn being watched. They want to do everything on their own but have not enough manpower to do so. For example i have read, that the map-maker is being improved. No wonder that a the CW-module took that long to see the light. Instead of investing precious development time on things that others could also do, they could have implemented an interface that allows to design the maps outside and use the internal map-maker to fine tune. With such an interface i think we even already could have semi-automatic map creation from real world map-data. Imagine what that would mean for multiplayer campaigns... Or the operational-layer: from a technical point of view, it can't be too difficult to export unit data/stats in a standardized format from the last saved file from a battle and read such data for picking units. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poesel Posted January 21, 2012 Share Posted January 21, 2012 A seldom occurence but Steiner, I wholeheartedly agree with you! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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