Please give us the option to come back or go forward faster in replays. In longer games it takes a lot of time to reach a late game scenario. Thank you.
8 Likes
Not only replay, but also “Spectator / Observer” mode. Cant believe we do not have a way to watch both views as we could on EE and TT as observer. Only way is “revealed”, but its bad for streaming.
4 Likes
I agree spectator mode definitely needs some improvements as well.
5 Likes
Also I’d like to add, I wish there not only forward but rewind as well, or at least allow us to click/jump to different timeline in the same replay.
3 Likes
That would be really complicated to implement and it would likely take ages to load.
You know how replays work? They are not just like videos.
I do not know how it works in the technical standpoint but every relevant RTS out there have these features on replay and advanced obs mode. AoE3 uses the exact same game engine as AoM and they have all those features. So if there is developer’s intention to implement and community feedback, they will do it.
You’re right that replay is complicated, but CaptureAge worked on the spectator mode in this game, and the CaptureAge application for aoe2 supports (as a premium feature) jumping around by clicking on the timeline. Maybe something about the aom engine makes this much harder here, but I believe the basic design of recs (being a list of actions) is the same.
It should at least in principle be possible.
Being able to fast forward properly (up to at least 8x) is an absolute must. Reviewing one’s own games, teaching someone else by going through their recs, and many other use cases become far too painful to be viable options when we’re stuck at just 1.5x or maybe 2x like we are now.
Being able to skip around to arbitrary points in the timeline is IMO more of a nice-to-have. A very nice-to-have, but should be lower in priority than fast forwarding. It’s somewhat useful for reviewing gameplay, but most of use to casters.
1 Like
Having the possibility to rewind would be fantastic too. In case one want to see more than once an important part of the game or go fast forward and end up slightly in front of the desired part.
When going back, it’s probably better (and more technically viable) to just have a timeline you can click on, rather than “rewinding” in the way you might rewind a DVD or video tape.
The way the replay system is modeled, I don’t think it’s technically feasible to implement any form of seeking or rewinding.
The way it works is that the game pretty much replays every event sequentially and doesn’t know exactly what the state of the game was at any specific point in time. So, if you seek to a specific time, it has to quickly update the state of the game based on everything that has happened from the point you are, to the desired point in time and if you’re ahead, it has to replay from the beginning because I don’t think the events are reversable.
If they want to implement any such features (which are desirable I don’t dispute that), they have to completely redesign the replay system.
As for fast-forwarding, it’s something they should not have a problem with implementing because I guess the only reason it’s currently capped at 1.5 speed, is probably due to the limits of the available tech at the time of the original.
1 Like
So I had a look over comments made by the CaptureAge team in online Q&As. They’re quite tight-lipped about how they accomplish it, but it does seem as though you might be unable to use seeking to skip forward (I’ve never used it myself).
But you can definitely seek backwards through a recording in the premium version of the aoe2 CaptureAge. I think it basically does this by saving the game state periodically so it can easily go back to any clicked time, but as I said they’re tight-lipped about how it works so I’m only speculating here.
This is not true, AoE3 doesn’t have such features and almost no other RTS game has them either. AoE4 also doesn’t have them. It would be extremely difficult to implement.
I don’t know how Capture Age does it and I don’t know how fast it is.
It is generally hard to do. You could make a lot of snapshots of every state but that would fill up the memory pretty quickly I assume.
But maybe that’ what Capture Age does for AoE2DE.
Since I don’t have the premium version I can’t try how responsive it is.
AoMR uses a different engine so they would have to implement such a system again. Also AoMR likely has more informations and states about units stored like the position being more precise, buildings don’t align with the grid like in AoE2.
So yeah it might be “possible” but hard to implement and very computationally expensive.
In some ways those things apply to video files too. You can’t just play a video backwards. With strong enough hardware it’s possible yes, but it’s a lot more expensive. Video files always store what changed in one frame compared to the previous one, so going backwards you have to have all the previous frames loaded to know what to show.
And you gotta do all of that at 24 frames per second.
1 Like
It is possible through modding. If modders can do, why devs cannot? Even SC1, a 28 year old game have the possibility to go to specific timelines of the replay. SC2 as well.
It is just a matter of community feedback and developer intention to make it happen.
To be clear I’m talking about playing the game backwards or instantly jumping to any time point. That is not possible through modding, the engine is simply incapable of reversing the game state, it wasn’t designed with such ability in ~2000 when it was being created.
This would take a huge effort to resolve, and we can see evidence of that in the CaptureAge project. For AoE2, it required a whole new company dedicated to solve this issue (I see on their website they have 30-40 people) and they charge a monthly payment subscription for the ability to rewind.
Close, but not quite. Most video formats use a mixture of i-frames and p-frames, where an i-frame is encoded basically like an image, and a p-frame describes the change relative to the previous frame. I couldn’t find any solid data on how frequent i-frames are, but it did look like anywhere from about 3 times per second to once every 2 seconds is generally the range. And I suspect that would be how CaptureAge would do it, too. Save the state once every few seconds, and then if the user tries to jump back, just jump back to the saved state immediately before where they tried to click to begin playing from there. (Or, if it’s desirable for users to have very precise control of where playback begins…though I can’t see why it would be…calculate the state of play at the precise point they clicked to based on the most recent save state + all the calculated actions from then and then begin playing from there.)
Just like in Warcraft 3 you can speed up replay to 8x
And AoE2 and AoE4, too. Pretty common basic feature and very disappointing that this is missing it.
It’s also possible to increase speed to 8x in Starcraft 2. And can also rewind the replay. Rewind is another great feature to have.