[Gandalf Parker]

You are right. Using the pre would be better than post.
That would be interesting. Using date-named zipz for storing each turn then you could avoid having to have a savedgames directory for each turn that you wanted viewable.

if the game was called Exhibition on port 12345 and every turn that processed saved the orders file (pre) as exhi+date.zip then a webapp could allow viewing the file and create a temporary savedgame dir with all the files as something like a game called exhi726354 on port 34344. The pre could look and remember which turn was being viewed then copy a dummy .2h into place creating a fast "stale turn" result, and the post would unzip the next save in the sequence. That way the person viewing the game could login to 34344 and look at that turn all they wanted including the original players changed commands for that turn and all battle views. Then hit "end", get the next turn with all the planned actions, look at it, hit "end", look at the next one, etc etc thru the whole game.

That might be worth setting up for myself (its great to be the server) just to be able to backcheck my own actions in some of my larger games.

A webapp could also make the entire zip for a particular turn available for download so that at any point in the game they could decide to turn it into a local game on their own machine to continue the game live from that point on. This would be fantastic to offer with one of the more creative AAR writers here. A person could read the AAR, view the game turns, and at any point take over a personal version of the game to play from that point on. I get that something like that would be publicized by Shrapnel.

Gandalf Parker