Match replays

[Helmic]

As carefully controlled as the game is, would it be possible to include an option to save a replay at the end of a match?  Aside from allowing for some sweet videos of matches like tournaments, it'd allow for people to look back and see what they did wrong a la Starcraft or allow for people to include replays when reporting players.  Done correctly the replays themselves shouldn't use much space on the user's hard drive at all, the hard part would just be implementation and making a replay viewer.

[RaptorSystems]

If you think about it there already is a replay viewer of sorts, spectator mode.

However, I'm not going to be so bold as to assume what would be the hardest part to develop.

[Helmic]

If you think about it there already is a replay viewer of sorts, spectator mode.

However, I'm not going to be so bold as to assume what would be the hardest part to develop.

...what are you talking about?

[Phoebe]

If you think about it there already is a replay viewer of sorts, spectator mode.

However, I'm not going to be so bold as to assume what would be the hardest part to develop.

I find it quite difficult to spectate a match I'm playing myself...

[Helmic]

If you think about it there already is a replay viewer of sorts, spectator mode.

However, I'm not going to be so bold as to assume what would be the hardest part to develop.

I find it quite difficult to spectate a match I'm playing myself...

Or one that you weren't a part of, unless you really like not having camera control.

The idea is that you can actually go through a match and see where you or someone else messe up, figure out why your ship wasn't dealing any damage or how the hell your enemy managed to sneak up behind you or how Cogs engineers jump around their ships in different situations.

[dragonmere]

A replay option would be sublime, but I'd settle for a log of the top left windowpane, the 'damage report'. Maybe with time-stamps. That, theoretically, would require very little work for the coding team.

[Helmic]

A replay option would be sublime, but I'd settle for a log of the top left windowpane, the 'damage report'. Maybe with time-stamps. That, theoretically, would require very little work for the coding team.

I don't know whether attack logs would prove all that useful to players, though, given how easy they are to misread.  Seriously, just try playing on any game that bans people for attacking others unprovoked or without certain conditions (like Space Station 13).  You will be banned within the week.  An admin will inevitably look at the attack logs, see that you attacked someone without getting hit back, and ban you without realizing the only reason you weren't hit was because the guy you killed was trying to force open an airlock separating you from deadly neurotoxins.

The information is just too incomplete to make any real use of it.  So much of GoI is positioning and where two ships are relative to each other can make a "Random Asshole destroyed Hull Armor" either virtually meaningless or a real gamechanger.

[N-Sunderland]

I've also noticed that the damage logs can be inaccurate. Sometimes I snipe an engine out on an enemy ship while none of my teammates are firing, and it'll say "Teammate X destroyed Chung's Choice Standard" or whatever.

[Moo]

Could that possibly be that your team mate had previously started a fire in that component, which finished it off after your snipe? Just a guess really.

[N-Sunderland]

Nope. This happens a lot, and it's definitely occured when  they weren't any fires.

[Urz]

This is the number one feature I want to see in Guns of Icarus.

[Veta]

This is definitely a feature I want in the game too.

[Keon]

Games pretty much need to be designed with this in mind if they want to save replays. You can't just say you are going to store the state of the game for every single frame. For example, in starcraft, a replay would say "These 10 marines are ordered to move here at this time."

That's just my memory.

[Kharthynogus]

Yeah, game replays are usually just a log of the actions taken and the events that occur. It makes for an extremely small file.

As a result, the game engine itself has to be used in order to view it.

[Calico Jack]

Streaming software that records to disk is freely available - it's fairly painless to set up.