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I trust other people more than myself to make Starcraft II a great game so screw the gameplay discussions from me.
But one thing that I was thinking about is how much polish you could add to the replays and observer modes. Let's make a list and send it to Blizzard?
Some ideas:
* More stats that only the observer can see.
Nr of kills are cute for the players but while watching a replay I'd be thrilled if I could bring up lists over the units with most kills and see other fun stats, like how much damage a unit has dealt or taken, how much minerals a probe have mined and how long a unit has been on the battlefield. I love to keep track of marines with high numbers of kills, perhaps even add in some visual markers (for example, the probe that has mined the most gets a little star selection for each player etc).
More random, cute and useless stats please!
* Free camera for replays! It migth start to lag if the observer goes crazy with camera angles but damn do I want to be able to zoom down over the shoulder of a Terran marine when the zerg horde comes down on him (you could do this in Ground Control btw and it was really neat).
* Ability to get the ammount of psi and minerals for all players on a scoreboard or similar in a replay or as an observer. Possibly also include APM.
* Ability to see mouseclicks and actions in replays.
* Included BWchart mass of stats and graphs and shit after game is finished.
A feature to collect all those stats for a player over his entire play time would be awsome as well. (Etc: Has built 63412 marines total or something).
* Top ten units when the game has finished based on how many points they helped bring in! 
Anyone else can think of more cute things?
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5226 Posts
Wouldnt that make the replay files be larger than it is now? Like maybe even a meg or so each replay.
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It would definatley make the replays bigger for sure, but the idea of,
* Free camera for replays! It migth start to lag if the observer goes crazy with camera angles but damn do I want to be able to zoom down over the shoulder of a Terran marine when the zerg horde comes down on him (you could do this in Ground Control btw and it was really neat).
sounds really good.
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camera angless? This isn't myth. I do think some of the stat stuff would be neato though.
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Instead of a scoreboard of supply and resources, it could be as simple as clicking on a player's unit or building to see his current supplies.
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5226 Posts
so basically intergrate ob mode from bwl into sc2?
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Osaka27181 Posts
i dont think replay size is really too much of an issue anyways in the era of broadband and 200gb harddrives
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On May 20 2007 15:36 Manifesto7 wrote:
i dont think replay size is really too much of an issue anyways in the era of broadband and 200gb harddrives
Amen. I just bought one yesterday ;D Feels good to move from 40 GB to 200.
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great thinking! this is important not just for us gamers, but for broadcasters as well.
the ability to zoom out further in obs/replay mode would be great too, but restrict gameplay to a certain maximum distance like wc3.
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5226 Posts
Anyone played Startrek Armada?
The camera work on that was pretty awesome.
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That would be pretty sweet to have a free camera angle...
I've always wondered what it was like to be at ground level during one of those intense battles...latency of course would be an issue.
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I don't see haw any of those idea would necessary change replay size. That is not information that has to be written in replay file, it just has to have every command and then sc2 process it. Does sc2 calculate apm or not is irrevelant to size of replay[...].
*reverse play in replay.
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On May 20 2007 15:36 Manifesto7 wrote:
i dont think replay size is really too much of an issue anyways in the era of broadband and 200gb harddrives
Because of shitty monopolistic telephone company I have to change 512kb down to 256kb I go fucking lower and lower whit time, that piss me off so much.
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The camer stuff might be already implemented... just watch the WWI presentation - he paused the game and rotatet the camera right? As long as this isn't possible in normal games I'm a very happy boy.
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On May 20 2007 16:11 Polis wrote:
I don't see haw any of those idea would necessary change replay size. That is not information that has to be written in replay file, it just has to have every command and then sc2 process it. Does sc2 calculate apm or not is irrevelant to size of replay[...].
What I would really like to see is reverse play in replay.
Reverse play in replay would be technically impossible due to the way replays work. Replays work by saving all the commands done by the players and then it replays the game using those. This is also the reason why you could show all kinds of fancy stats and camera angles in a replay without affecting replay size at all.
However since all the stored information is just commands you can't effectively reverse it. In order to reverse it you would have to store all game state data in some kind of file and that file would become freaking huge.
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
I will be sad if communal replay watching ceases to exist, much like in war3
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Since most of you are not familiar with GGC and WaaaghTV I'll give a few examples:
On-screen display (in chat section):
<<xxx trains yyy>>
<<xxx researches yyy>>
Where xxx is the name of the player (like he would say it but only obs/refs can see it) and yyy is unit type (appears only first time certain unit is being trained) or the name of the upgrade.
It makes obsing so much easier, you don't have to watch everything and you're kept up to date with everything (there's also an option to disable this).
Dunno if it was in SC (wasn't obsing much there) but when you click on a players unit/building it shows his current resources and pop.
Simple stuff like that, no need for some super detailed info since it could make obsing a bit hard, maybe the chart being more advanced.
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All the silly stats would ofcourse be optional stuff that you can turn on/off
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On May 20 2007 16:18 Zironic wrote:
However since all the stored information is just commands you can't effectively reverse it. In order to reverse it you would have to store all game state data in some kind of file and that file would become freaking huge.
That is so many information? It would have to be unit location/unit death/building death/cancel building/bullet location everything that can mess whit patchfiding/action of unit building it could be added to temporary replay that is deleted after you watched game. Maybe it is more then I think through or programming would be big task, maybe it would take to much cpu power but that is doubtful as it is not that many actions.
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It would have to be all that information, FOR EVERY FRAME, with 60 FPS that means even if the information just takes one kb per frame it would still eat up 3.6MB per minute, and I think the information would take more then one kb per frame.
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EPT
