Improvement proposal II - Movement in replay

[Artur]

IMHO the second most severe shortcoming in the SP engine is the lack of replay about enemy spotting during it's movement if no fireing was done in PBEM games and also in solitaire play in WinSPMBT.
Let me give a small example on this. You have a sniper in a keyholed position overlooking to a main road where enemy units are passing by. You set the range to 0 in order to observe and stay hidden. During the opponent's (or AI) turn all enemy vehicles had passed by but your scout has not seen anything even if a whole division passed by in front of it. In Combat Mission, Campaign Series and even in SPWaW the spotting of enemy movements during AI play is solved, and I guess it can be solved in WinSPMBT/WinSPWW2 too. (Unfortunately this solution does not work in SPWaW PBEM games which is very annoying as well.)

While I do not know the game code by introducing similar "events" like the unit fireing it seems easily or at least not hardly doable to me. (I may be wrong of course.)

I propose to make an event from the movement spotting as well not only the fireing event diring AI play and also for PBEM replay too. Regarding PBEM it would generate bigger save files, but if this feature can be turned on/off in the settings players could choose whether to use it or not. (I am sure they will as it improves recon and generally the game play a LOT.)

Hiding, observing and staying alive with the scouts would be more achievable by that since you do not have to deploy in the direct path of the advancing enemy units but rather position in good keyholed positions and observe without being spotted. Example scenario attached.

Artur.

[Captain_Cruft]

This has never bothered me that much but I agree it would be good. A lot of work though I suspect.

[Mobhack]

A lot of work, and a complete recoding of the entire replay code, which records events available to BOTH players (fire events basically).

I could write up a new packet type for a spotting event and maybe lost-LOS in a few hours, and add it to the replay, BUT then both of you would get to see every spotting/lost LOS event for the both of you. and there would potentiaally be loads more spotting/lost LOS events to add to the replay than firing, so your data file size would max very quickly, a would replay times. Adding UI changes for it would be more problemantical since both sides in a PBEM game may have a different POV (see the problems already inbuilt to the engine if someone turns fast artilery OFF inside a PBEM ).

This would be a bit like the SP3 give away "*" that appeared on your unit's info to "telepathically" tell you an enemy unit could actually see you (or just had LOS to you, I forget), and which blew away such concepts as "ambushes" in that game engine. But on steroids!

A complete from the ground up rewrite of the replay code is one of the things that is simply not going to happen. Only worthwhile if I wrote a completely new game engine from scratch.

Cheers
Andy

[JohnHale]

"Only worthwhile if I wrote a completely new game engine from scratch."

It's a Bank Holiday today: you're free this afternoon. What's your problem??

Cheers,


John ;-))

[Double_Deuce]

I just hope that all the time Andy and Don are spending replying/typing on the forums here are NOT cutting into the time it'll be until I have WinSPWW2 DL in my hands and the CD ordered.

[DRG]

There are only so many hours in the day so you already know the answer to that....

Don