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I've been quietly adding Brood War support to a site I built for SC2, and the BW side is now functional enough to share — but it is genuinely very beta. There will be bugs. Things will break. The reason I'm posting now rather than after another month of polish is to get feedback.
Three things to look at:
1. Watch replays in your browser or on-the-go on mobile
Drop a .rep file on the page and it parses and plays back in-browser. Minimap with unit positions, both players' build orders side-by-side, scrubbable timeline. No plugin, no client install, no BWAPI setup. Watch high level games whenever you want.
2. Always fresh high level replays
The site continuously pulls fresh replays above a 2250 MMR threshold and indexes them. You can filter the feed by matchup, player, date, and map, and click into any of them straight into the viewer.
3. Build orders parsed and clustered into archetypes
Every replay in the db gets its build order extracted, and then the openings are run through a clustering pipeline that groups similar sequences into archetypes per matchup (think "2 hatch muta", "1 base goon timing", "FE into carriers", etc. — but discovered from the data, not hand-labelled). You can browse the archetypes for each matchup, see how prevalent each one is, and drill into the exemplar games behind each cluster.
Bugs and feedback
It's beta. Expect at minimum:
- Replays that parse weirdly or fail outright
- Archetype clusters that look obviously wrong, over-split, or under-split
- Unit positions on the minimap that aren't quite right
- Edge cases around UMS maps, mods, or unusual replay versions
If you hit any of these, please reply here or use the in-site bug report. The more concrete the better — a specific replay file plus "I expected X, got Y" is gold.
About SC2...
The site started as an SC2 tool — decision trees per matchup, replay viewer, AI coach, build database — and the BW side is built on the same infrastructure. If you also play SC2 it's all in there too, and that side is further along.
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Seems cool.
Also, sad that everyone is using generic marketing gpt texts now to promote their stuff. Loses a lot of personal flair.
Welcome the age of grey everything.
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2. Always fresh high level replays
The site continuously pulls fresh replays above a 2000 MMR threshold and indexes them.
2000 seems rather low when speaking of high level. 2000 is still B rank. I've been above 2000 before, and I wouldn't recommend any of my games from then as high level.
Maybe go for S rank, 2250+, top 1%
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I remember a project like this before remastered and that was using production tabs and many other futures but it die when remastered was announced. They were also trying to upgrade the bw graphics and they were looking amazing too haha.
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On May 14 2026 18:42 LML wrote:Show nested quote +2. Always fresh high level replays
The site continuously pulls fresh replays above a 2000 MMR threshold and indexes them. 2000 seems rather low when speaking of high level. 2000 is still B rank. I've been above 2000 before, and I wouldn't recommend any of my games from then as high level. Maybe go for S rank, 2250+, top 1%
Good point, thanks for the feedback. Have updated the threshold so from now it'll collect 2250+ games to prevent cluttering the DB with jank. You can already sort by MMR, so if you just want 2500 or 2600+ games or a particular matchup use the filters!
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Fantastic work! Thank you
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Netherlands5593 Posts
Thank you for also helping out us grandpas
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51599 Posts
good to see you still around the scene deth
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Could it render per-player mouse actions (selection, move, attack-move, patrol, etc.) as an overlay?
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On May 15 2026 06:05 tankgirl wrote:
Could it render per-player mouse actions (selection, move, attack-move, patrol, etc.) as an overlay?
Sure, I'll have to do a pass on the visibility and Im not sure whether it's that valuable, but I've added that feature to the replay canvas today. Can turn it on and off for 1 player or both players by clicking the player bubbles at the bottom next to the replay controls
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Very cool! How does it work? Broodwar replays only capture the player command streams iirc. Did you write your own Broodwar simulator to play out the game state? BWAPI doesn't support SC:Remastered, and from what I am aware of, SC:Remastered doesn't have an open-sourced headless / API interface
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Hell yeah brother wow this is amazing work, thank you.
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After logging in I got this error message: Failed to load: Admin access required.
I cant see any BW replay.
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On May 15 2026 13:27 p4fn2w wrote:
Very cool! How does it work? Broodwar replays only capture the player command streams iirc. Did you write your own Broodwar simulator to play out the game state? BWAPI doesn't support SC:Remastered, and from what I am aware of, SC:Remastered doesn't have an open-sourced headless / API interface
Previous efforts by the community to create headless BW 1.16.1 interfaces were helpful, but a certain amount of creativity was required to determine how to make it work for SC:R.
On May 16 2026 02:04 earob84 wrote:
After logging in I got this error message: Failed to load: Admin access required.
I cant see any BW replay.
Thanks for the bug report, I think this was a regression from a patch I rolled out yesterday. Believe it should be sorted out now but please let me know if you still hit that issue and I'll take another look.
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On May 16 2026 06:03 dethsc wrote:Show nested quote +On May 15 2026 13:27 p4fn2w wrote:
Very cool! How does it work? Broodwar replays only capture the player command streams iirc. Did you write your own Broodwar simulator to play out the game state? BWAPI doesn't support SC:Remastered, and from what I am aware of, SC:Remastered doesn't have an open-sourced headless / API interface Previous efforts by the community to create headless BW 1.16.1 interfaces were helpful, but a certain amount of creativity was required to determine how to make it work for SC:R. Show nested quote +On May 16 2026 02:04 earob84 wrote:
After logging in I got this error message: Failed to load: Admin access required.
I cant see any BW replay. Thanks for the bug report, I think this was a regression from a patch I rolled out yesterday. Believe it should be sorted out now but please let me know if you still hit that issue and I'll take another look.
It was broken for me earlier too, but it works now, thanks! I think this is a very cool site for learning and I'll be using it regularly.
I have some future feature requests:
1. In Replay (BW) -> Cached Replays, would it be possible to also filter by server? I'm interested in learning replays from Korean server specifically.
2. Would it be possible to filter the public cached replays by opening build? If I click on Learn (BW) -> PvZ, for example, I see opening builds like "Forge Fast Expand" and "Gateway Expand into Stargate". These builds all have replays associated with them, so I would assume the replays are already tagged. Would it be possible to just expose the opening build tags of the replay, and add that as a filter attribute?
3. When I browse the public Cached Replays, I only see the player names, MMR, APM, and map info. When I click on a replay, it loads the entire BW simulation which can take a few minutes. Is it possible to add some sort of quick "preview" card so I can tell if this replay is interesting to me or not before loading the entire BW simulation? For example, I would like to study builds and their effectiveness, so if there can be a way to preview something like the first 10 buildings built, and which side wins, it would help save me a lot of time!
4. Learn (BW) has really cool stats for different builds (winrate, avg length, # branches, etc). I was wondering if we can somehow filter the games so we can see these stats as it applies to our specific filters. For e.g. if I want to see the highest winrate PvZ opening on Fighting Spirit, which may be different than for Jane Doe.
5. Is there a way to become a paid member for BW yet? I'm happy to support the site!
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On May 16 2026 14:12 p4fn2w wrote:Show nested quote +On May 16 2026 06:03 dethsc wrote:On May 15 2026 13:27 p4fn2w wrote:
Very cool! How does it work? Broodwar replays only capture the player command streams iirc. Did you write your own Broodwar simulator to play out the game state? BWAPI doesn't support SC:Remastered, and from what I am aware of, SC:Remastered doesn't have an open-sourced headless / API interface Previous efforts by the community to create headless BW 1.16.1 interfaces were helpful, but a certain amount of creativity was required to determine how to make it work for SC:R. On May 16 2026 02:04 earob84 wrote:
After logging in I got this error message: Failed to load: Admin access required.
I cant see any BW replay. Thanks for the bug report, I think this was a regression from a patch I rolled out yesterday. Believe it should be sorted out now but please let me know if you still hit that issue and I'll take another look. It was broken for me earlier too, but it works now, thanks! I think this is a very cool site for learning and I'll be using it regularly. I have some future feature requests: 1. In Replay (BW) -> Cached Replays, would it be possible to also filter by server? I'm interested in learning replays from Korean server specifically. 2. Would it be possible to filter the public cached replays by opening build? If I click on Learn (BW) -> PvZ, for example, I see opening builds like "Forge Fast Expand" and "Gateway Expand into Stargate". These builds all have replays associated with them, so I would assume the replays are already tagged. Would it be possible to just expose the opening build tags of the replay, and add that as a filter attribute? 3. When I browse the public Cached Replays, I only see the player names, MMR, APM, and map info. When I click on a replay, it loads the entire BW simulation which can take a few minutes. Is it possible to add some sort of quick "preview" card so I can tell if this replay is interesting to me or not before loading the entire BW simulation? For example, I would like to study builds and their effectiveness, so if there can be a way to preview something like the first 10 buildings built, and which side wins, it would help save me a lot of time! 4. Learn (BW) has really cool stats for different builds (winrate, avg length, # branches, etc). I was wondering if we can somehow filter the games so we can see these stats as it applies to our specific filters. For e.g. if I want to see the highest winrate PvZ opening on Fighting Spirit, which may be different than for Jane Doe. 5. Is there a way to become a paid member for BW yet? I'm happy to support the site!
1. Great idea, will add
2. 3. & 4. My head is in COMPLETELY the same space as you, I have already done the code required to make all this happen for more efficient filtering and jumping into games. I really want to get to the point where you only have 3 second load on games too. I'm looking to spin up additional server capacity/VM's dedicated to simulating games to make all this filtering and fast load possible in the next few days - check back by the end of next week and you'll be pleased!
5. Not yet but looking to add some support / donate function in the next couple weeks, thanks 
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United Kingdom1715 Posts
Very cool, thank you for your hard work
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Can you implement team game support? Also the games tend to bug out a lot apparently with team game replays
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I'll look at team game support in July once the rest of the site is feature complete!
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This is amazing, fantastic work, guessing it took a lot of hours, appreciate you sharing it with the community, very helpful! :D
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/WrS3K9n.jpeg)
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