Profile of Inverse

The community held an exponentially larger event in OCF. This is 3 months of shitty online tournaments. Sure, it's better than nothing, but it says to me "We like the cheap advertising this will get us", not "We want competitive CoH2 to succeed".

The prize pool is irrelevant. All they needed to do was invest in flying out the top 8 players at the end of the 3 months for an offline finals at their offices. That right there shows a serious committment and a serious effort to acknowledge the role of the community in the game's success.

When you're the developer of the game, you don't "test the waters"; what kind of confidence in the title does that convey, and what does it say when the community can fund a larger event than the developers themselves? You do something big or you don't do anything at all.

What is this?

Give it a try, this should be fixed now. You might have to clear your cache in order to get the updates (try CTRL+F5 to refresh the cache for the site).

What is this?

Looks like I'm just not handling that particular command yet. Should be an easy fix since it appears to be parsing everything properly.

very nice start.
is there a way to include tons of replays like http://coh2chart.com/ does and then analyze the hell out of them?

things like typical teching decisions and timing, commander combinations....stuff?

That's the ultimate goal, which is why I decided to go with a web-based tool instead of a desktop tool like the CoH1 analyzer. It's a little less convenient but it opens the door for some very interesting statistical analysis and aggregation. That's the second phase of the project that I'm working on right now.

Does anyone have the IP addresses of the battle servers? It would be fairly trivial to set this up externally if you could ping them. Wouldn't be perfect of course, but it would be something.

It's technically possible but extremely difficult to do and almost certainly not worth it. RTS engines are deterministic, which means the state of the engine at any point in the game depends entirely on the commands issued by every player up to that point in time. That's why replays are so small; they just encode commands, and the game essentially replays the match using those commands. Even Starcraft 2 doesn't have reconnecting in multiplayer matches. They have rewinding in replays, sure, but it's not truly granular rewind. Instead, they just save the state of the game at certain intervals and let you skip back in time to those states. You can't choose an exact second to rewind to in SC2 for instance, you can only jump back to a preconfigured save point. It's a clever workaround, and something Relic could probably implement in CoH2, but it wouldn't help with reconnecting.

When you don't have a server to store game state for you, a crash means you lose all information about the game up to that point. Starcraft 2 has a special reconnect from replay feature that essentially speeds through a replay and pauses at the point of disconnect and lets you resume from that point, but it's buggy and only used for tournaments because it's an impractical feature to add to automatch. CoH2 saves a temp replay as the game progresses, so it could potentially implement a similar feature, but it would likely be restricted to custom games.

In order to add a reconnect option to multiplayer, you would either have to pause the game for everyone immediately once a disconnect was detected, or somehow use the observer feature to fast-forward a reconnecting player up to the same point in the deterministic simulation as the rest of the players still in the game. The first solution is painfully annoying (who wants to wait in automatch for someone who might or might not come back?) and technically challenging (if there's even a one-command discrepancy between the state and the disconnected player's replay you'll sync error), while the second solution is technically challenging to an extreme (what do you do about CPU commands that occurred during the disconnect, how do you make sure all clients are synced, when do you give control back to the disconnected player, etc.).

In short, it's a problem RTS developers haven't been able to solve in 20 years, and that's not because they're all lazy.