PBEM: Watching the replay in a better way?

The sequel of the legendary wargame with a complete graphics and interface overhaul, major new gameplay and design features such as full naval combat modelling, improved supply handling, numerous increases to scenario parameters to better support large scenarios, and integrated PBEM++.
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Shadrach
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PBEM: Watching the replay in a better way?

Post by Shadrach »

Is there a way to watch the PBEM replay like one would watch the AI play during PO games? Zoomed in and watching the moves?

I tried to zoom into the map, but it was just stuck in big map view, and I had to guess what was happening watching little colored dots.

Not a very good way to figure out what happened...
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RE: PBEM: Watching the replay in a better way?

Post by larryfulkerson »

I'm not all that hep up about the replay process and I'm wondering if you
are able to zoom in/out BEFORE you start the replay?
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RE: PBEM: Watching the replay in a better way?

Post by Lobster »

The file size 'could' be huge. Imagine FitE. All of those moves made into a movie so you could see them at a larger scale. Just thinking about it without any number crunching or facts but I'd imagine you might be talking about gigabytes of movie for a scenario of that size.
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RE: PBEM: Watching the replay in a better way?

Post by Shadrach »

ORIGINAL: Lobster
The file size 'could' be huge. Imagine FitE. All of those moves made into a movie so you could see them at a larger scale. Just thinking about it without any number crunching or facts but I'd imagine you might be talking about gigabytes of movie for a scenario of that size.

I don't really get this. After all, the replay is not a movie, otherwise like you said, it would be huge. It's a series of saved moves and battle results, unit A moves to hex X, attacks unit B. The game just displays the map and shows the moves. I don't see how that would stop the game from showing it at a more zoomed-in level.

How large in terms of bytes is a turn-replay of FitE? The scenario I'm talking about is not huge, and the file size of the PBL file is just slightly larger than the SCE file - around 1MB which is peanuts these days.
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RE: PBEM: Watching the replay in a better way?

Post by larryfulkerson »

All of those moves made into a movie
It's my understanding that those individual moves are just a
4-byte full word of code that designates what happened during the move.
There's no contingency on the graphics process at all. It's just
one event after another coded as 4-byte full words. I remember one
of my first moves in FITE took up 11,000+ events and that's less than
45,000 bytes or 45 KB.
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