PBEM: Watching the replay in a better way?

[Shadrach]

Is there a way to watch the PBEM replay like one would watch the AI play during PO games? Zoomed in and watching the moves?

I tried to zoom into the map, but it was just stuck in big map view, and I had to guess what was happening watching little colored dots.

Not a very good way to figure out what happened...

[larryfulkerson]

I'm not all that hep up about the replay process and I'm wondering if you
are able to zoom in/out BEFORE you start the replay?

[Lobster]

The file size 'could' be huge. Imagine FitE. All of those moves made into a movie so you could see them at a larger scale. Just thinking about it without any number crunching or facts but I'd imagine you might be talking about gigabytes of movie for a scenario of that size.

[Shadrach]

ORIGINAL: Lobster
The file size 'could' be huge. Imagine FitE. All of those moves made into a movie so you could see them at a larger scale. Just thinking about it without any number crunching or facts but I'd imagine you might be talking about gigabytes of movie for a scenario of that size.

I don't really get this. After all, the replay is not a movie, otherwise like you said, it would be huge. It's a series of saved moves and battle results, unit A moves to hex X, attacks unit B. The game just displays the map and shows the moves. I don't see how that would stop the game from showing it at a more zoomed-in level.

How large in terms of bytes is a turn-replay of FitE? The scenario I'm talking about is not huge, and the file size of the PBL file is just slightly larger than the SCE file - around 1MB which is peanuts these days.

[larryfulkerson]

All of those moves made into a movie

It's my understanding that those individual moves are just a
4-byte full word of code that designates what happened during the move.
There's no contingency on the graphics process at all. It's just
one event after another coded as 4-byte full words. I remember one
of my first moves in FITE took up 11,000+ events and that's less than
45,000 bytes or 45 KB.