Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1587
Registered: 06-13-2015
IP: Logged

Sometimes a room has some thousands of moves involved in its most efficient solution, and a very perplexed player just wants to know how one particular step in the middle goes. He downloads a demo, skips forward trying to find that step, but the room is so incomprehensible that he can't even tell he's passed it by.

Sometimes there is a clever trick that occurs at a very specific time and the architect viewing the demo needs to examine what's happening very closely. It happens so very late in the demo, and the architect wants to see if a change he has made affects the trick, and really wishes he could quickly go back and forth between meddling with the change and viewing that one part of the demo.

As a general convenience feature for everybody--confused players and perplexed architects alike--it would be really nice to have a little box in the demo screen to select what turn to start a demo at. Obviously it shouldn't be possible to start a demo past its final turn or at a negative turn number or whatever. I have no idea how hard this would be to implement, but it certainly seems like the demo screen physically has room for a little box like this.

Skell edit: retroactively marked as a duplicate of http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=44930

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[Last edited by skell at 11-04-2020 03:01 PM]

Pekka
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 302
Registered: 09-19-2007
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An alternative would be to allow the demo viewer to skip 10 turns when pressing shift and 100 turns when pressing ctrl, in addition to the key for stepping forward or backward. Some other values in place of 10 & 100 might work better, which people who know the distribution of typical demo move lengths can decide.

Obvious this is not an exclusive alternative to Xindaris' suggestion. I'm just pointing it out as something probably fairly straightforward to implement in addition to it.

uncopy2002
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 431
Registered: 07-28-2014
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Alternatively, demo playback needs to stop being so trigger-happy at exiting. Every other button except Numpad 2,4,5,6,7,8 boots the player out of the demo playback. It's like every key is too close to R except almost every key is R, and if you press a key not bound to anything, Beethro dies horribly.

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[Last edited by uncopy2002 at 03-14-2017 12:50 AM]