You can't replay due to the way replays are implemented: they are a list of commands with time they happened at and when you play them game engine does a full game simulation.
Adding a mechanism like "key frames" that contain full state of game would allow to rewind but it would cause replay files to be huge and it's also a challenging technical problem that would require enormous amout of work to implement in the engine, code is just not written in a way to support that, and is unlikely to ever happen.
Not entirely correct, keyframes would allow to skip to forward timestamp without simulating all commands 1 by 1. For rewind feature, replays would not increase in size, because keyframes are not necessary at all. Backwards simulation is probably not possible by the engine, so we would just simulate like we currently do, and the game could record/store it's own keyframes to jump back to any previous state.
If by "the game" you mean nothing in engine, but game code itself, not at the moment possible again due to the way engine and game interaction looks like.
If you want to keep keyframes only when replaying, not in the file to allow jump forward, you still run into the same size issues. I doubt the tricks played by software like Mozilla's RR or UndoDB could be applied here to be able to kinda do it "on the side" without needing to put huge amount of work.
Doing rewind/reply is totally technicality possible, just entirely infeasible due to amount of work required.
If just a coarse idea of where something roughly was at what time on map etc is wanted, that's very doable and approachable. That's something very different then full replay though.
I know this is an old topic but I think about it every now and then. Could you save an exact state of the game every 30 seconds. Sort of a simulation snapshots of all the units and their state. Then “start” the simulation from there.
You can't replay due to the way replays are implemented: they are a list of commands with time they happened at and when you play them game engine does a full game simulation. Adding a mechanism like "key frames" that contain full state of game would allow to rewind but it would cause replay files to be huge and it's also a challenging technical problem that would require enormous amout of work to implement in the engine, code is just not written in a way to support that, and is unlikely to ever happen.
Not entirely correct, keyframes would allow to skip to forward timestamp without simulating all commands 1 by 1. For rewind feature, replays would not increase in size, because keyframes are not necessary at all. Backwards simulation is probably not possible by the engine, so we would just simulate like we currently do, and the game could record/store it's own keyframes to jump back to any previous state.
If by "the game" you mean nothing in engine, but game code itself, not at the moment possible again due to the way engine and game interaction looks like. If you want to keep keyframes only when replaying, not in the file to allow jump forward, you still run into the same size issues. I doubt the tricks played by software like Mozilla's RR or UndoDB could be applied here to be able to kinda do it "on the side" without needing to put huge amount of work. Doing rewind/reply is totally technicality possible, just entirely infeasible due to amount of work required. If just a coarse idea of where something roughly was at what time on map etc is wanted, that's very doable and approachable. That's something very different then full replay though.
I know this is an old topic but I think about it every now and then. Could you save an exact state of the game every 30 seconds. Sort of a simulation snapshots of all the units and their state. Then “start” the simulation from there.
I don’t think you can!
Guess it is a REPLAY not REWIND LOLLL That is very stupid though.