New feature: while spectating/watching replay add view from spectating player

[reyandme]

This means show game as player see it (almost), mainly this means showing player cursor.

So with it unexperinced player can better understand what pro player do.

To make it possible we will need

• during the game for every player:
  1. save player cursor positions as GIC
  2. save viewport position as GIC
  3. save window/resolution size as GIC
• when watching replay
  1. inscribe player's view area into our view area, outside of player's area draw some background image (same like now in menu, for example), then transform cursor coordinates/viewport position.
  2. show cursor movements, as recorded
  3. if we move cursor - then stop 'replay' mode, let us use mouse. when no movements for 3-5 secs, continue show cursor, move viewport etc.
  4. allow to show menus (F1-F4) on replay. But ofc block any changes, further clicks there.

First I'll try to make this feature for replay only. For spectators in MP game we will probably need to interpolate players cursor position for smooth movement, because GIC commands are sent every tick = 0.1 sec.

This feature is not easy to implement right now, lots of things have to be done/tried etc. And its very low priority. But anyway its always fun to watch how other players do, and also study game too. I always feel that it would be nice to see, when watching replays.

[Kromster80]

Sounds good to me

[lewinjh]

I like this idea, sort of like a 1st person spectator mode. There's probably no need to save the resolution/window size if you save the viewport as a Rect of map positions. The problem would be different aspect ratios... so maybe fit it in one dimension then show a background image e.g. if the player viewing the replay has a wider screen than the recorded player.

Potential issues:

• .RPL file will become a lot bigger (probably doesn't matter)
• Multiplayer games will generate a lot more network packets (at 3x speed and 8 players that's an extra 240 packets per second for each client, and 1920 packets per second for the server). Need to test if it causes issues (especially for players with slow connections) and look at ways of combining packets where possible without adding any delays.
• Watching a player's actions in spectator or multiplayer replay won't work well because of the delay. You will see them click on a solider in a place where the solider was several ticks ago. It will probably look ok when the delay is low.