battle replays

[feddy]

Maybe I'm alone here, but when I get into a fight of any consequence in the BG games, I find myself pausing and unpausing like a thing possessed. A milestone battle like Ascension can take me an hour or two to play, even though it might only be a fifteen minute fight for my characters, because I'm sitting there with the game paused most of the time, reassessing my strategy and issuing new orders. I wouldn't want to play the game any other way, but at the same time, I always wished I could see the battle unfold in real time.

 

Then I got Dawn of War, which has exactly this feature. Play the game, pausing as often as you like to issue commands to your troops, and at the end you can save a replay of the battle. When you watch the replay, there are no pauses, you just watch the action unfold. I suppose it saves your commands ("build HQ; move ork to grid x,y; attack enemy z") along with the AI's, and puts timestamps on them, creating a script to be acted out again later.

 

I'm not goofy enough to suppose that what works on one game engine should automatically hold true for a completely different one, but seeing what impressive feats the folks here have performed with infinity engine scripting gave me faint hope that a BG replay feature of some sort might be feasible. Please slap some sense into me now, before I get all starry-eyed thinking about it.

[jcompton]

I seriously doubt it. But in windowed/3D disabled mode, at least, you should be able to do a ScreenCam-type capture. I have found that those programs tend to slow system performance to a crawl, however...

[Borsook]

I seriously doubt it. But in windowed/3D disabled mode, at least, you should be able to do a ScreenCam-type capture. I have found that those programs tend to slow system performance to a crawl, however...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There are some that grab full screen (when using Directx). If a PC is "modern" the slow down in BG should not be too noticable.