Improved replay viewer

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Hi,
Ive started to watch a lot of my replays and saved games and I miss two things in the layout;

  • A rewind button
  • A timeline which allows you to jump back and forth in the game (like on youtube videoes, netflix etc).

It is incredibly frustrating to have to fast forward to a particular moment, just to miss it and have to start from the beginning again. Thoughts?

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Yep… the replay viewer is pretty frustrating to use.

From what I’ve heard, if I remember correctly, some limitations are due to how the game is literally replaying itself from start to finish when viewing a replay… with all the commands performed, etc. And this adds layers of complexity when trying to improve the viewer. (That’s how the replay viewer was, apparently, originally created back in ~year 2000.)

With more modern PCs, it seems like computers nowadays would be powerful enough to allow for rewinds and YouTube-like scrubs and jumps, and bookmark jumps forward and back. So I hope devs can pursue some viewer advances in these respects.

I recently learned you can bookmark while you’re playing (for me and my hotkey setup, it’s the “F9” key) any time you want, to allow the viewer to jump to those points if you want to skip ahead.

  • Not sure if you knew about that already? It helps, definitely, but the only problem is that you have to remember to hit F9 periodically while playing, which isn’t always on the forefront of one’s mind.)

I think it’d be nice for devs to, at the very least for now, add an auto-bookmark capability, where you can specify in Options to have the game auto-bookmark for you at an interval you specify… say, once every 1, 2, 5, 10, or 20 minutes, for example… so you don’t have to worry about making them.

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