feature request: annotation and game state saving

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by Boron:
yeah a really cool idea if possible .

i enjoyed that option much in starcraft and warcraft 3 .
really great battle replay options there . nothing ihmo was left there what you could wish for .


so if this doesn't take too much effort it would be a nice feature to add . not only battle replays but too the option to the the world map each turn either from the sight of a special nation or as divine all knowing watcher .


given it was implemented in starcraft only very late in one of the Last patches after the game was at least 1 year out this should be not too hard .

i think illwinter surely should make programming their fulltime job and give up their other jobs .
if dominion 3 becomes a hit then ( hopefully it will ) they will earn much more money too than they can ever with their current jobs .


a statement from illwinter to their future plans would be really nice if they really plan to give up their other jobs .
so far i know one of you 3 guys is a teacher .
if i had the programming abilities / creativeness of any of you 3 guys i personally surely would try to make that my fulltime job


i intended everything above written as a compliment.
i just always said you 3 guys because i didn't want to be impolite because i only remember the names of 2 of you unfortunately

Thanks! We are two, Johan Karlsson and me, but my brother Johan Osterman comes up with many good ideas as do a couple of other close friends.

Unfortunately we cannot yet work fulltime on Illwinter projects. But working as a teacher is a very rewarding job, so I don't complain (you might on the other hand ).

A battle replay feature would need all turnfiles from every players every turn. The turnfiles mostly contain unit info, and battles are setup with all unit info of the combattants. A battle replay feature that showed all battles in the world use a lot of memory. If the replay was strategical only it would be much easier to do. Something like a province ownership development replay.

[Boron]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:

quote:

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Originally posted by Boron:
yeah a really cool idea if possible .

i enjoyed that option much in starcraft and warcraft 3 .
really great battle replay options there . nothing ihmo was left there what you could wish for .


so if this doesn't take too much effort it would be a nice feature to add . not only battle replays but too the option to the the world map each turn either from the sight of a special nation or as divine all knowing watcher .


given it was implemented in starcraft only very late in one of the Last patches after the game was at least 1 year out this should be not too hard .

i think illwinter surely should make programming their fulltime job and give up their other jobs .
if dominion 3 becomes a hit then ( hopefully it will ) they will earn much more money too than they can ever with their current jobs .


a statement from illwinter to their future plans would be really nice if they really plan to give up their other jobs .
so far i know one of you 3 guys is a teacher .
if i had the programming abilities / creativeness of any of you 3 guys i personally surely would try to make that my fulltime job


i intended everything above written as a compliment.
i just always said you 3 guys because i didn't want to be impolite because i only remember the names of 2 of you unfortunately

Thanks! We are two, Johan Karlsson and me, but my brother Johan Osterman comes up with many good ideas as do a couple of other close friends.

Unfortunately we cannot yet work fulltime on Illwinter projects. But working as a teacher is a very rewarding job, so I don't complain (you might on the other hand ).

A battle replay feature would need all turnfiles from every players every turn. The turnfiles mostly contain unit info, and battles are setup with all unit info of the combattants. A battle replay feature that showed all battles in the world use a lot of memory. If the replay was strategical only it would be much easier to do. Something like a province ownership development replay.

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yeah a province ownership replay (what you called strategic replay) i would wish first priority . i think thats just cool for sp . if you watch your empire slowly spread through faerun and getting bigger and bigger .

with battle replays : i think for modern computers with at least 512 mb ddr ram , good graphic cards ... that should be no problem for sp .
if a full battle replay is not possible perhaps you could add the following feature :

after every battle where the player was involved he may chose to save it . if he choses that he can always watch the battles again .
unfortunately that would need a change to user interface too : adding a show battle replay icon in the starting menu , perhaps under map editor .
if you click on this you just chose the game and then the replays you saved in that to look at the battle replays .


the problem is i think these ideas take much time to develop .
but if you ever have played starcraft yourself :
blizzard offered then later battle replays from starcraft world champion tournaments etc.
so you could even watch the finals between the worlds best starcraft players .

so in dominions you could watch if you like to :
-your own games
-games from the experts (norfleet , stormbinder ...)
that would help newbies really much and be better than any guide because they see what the experts do . then they can think about it and try to findout why they did this .
this way you can quickly advance from the newbie to the mediocre player level .
furthermore everybody has its own playstyle . so it would be very interesting to watch somebody else your favourite nations and look how far their playstyle differs with yours


if my ideas take too much time or you are already developing dominions 3 then please say that and i fully understand that

but if you think at least parts of the battle replay features are doable quite quick we could start a poll and see how much liking the battle replay feature would share .
if the result is positive then you can perhaps program this into dominions 2 for the next patch

p.s. and what do you think with the small change to allow the 2.12 vq for ermor in 2.13 again ?

[alexti]

One can watch battle replays for the whole game even with the current Version of Dom2. Just save your trn files (for example, by copying nation.trn into nation1.trn, nation2.trn etc each turn) and afterwards copying desired file back into nation.trn). This can be simply automated outside of Dom2. The real problem is how to select the battles to watch. By the end of the game you will have hundreds of battles, most of them being totally boring.