News: Beta testing a new Civ5 Replay facility

Using the same parser technology we have for extracting results, I have put together a new facility to display a replay for any submission.

It's currently a standalone web page at http://gotm.civfanatics.net/Civ5/c5gotmreplay.php and works best in a fully compliant HTML5 web browser - Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari .... It kinda works in Internet Explorer, but it's a bit clunky.

If it works for you, I can link it directly to the Results pages in place of the existing Events display links.

I can't promise to implement enhancement suggestions in the short term, as we have very imperfect information about the structure of the save files currently, and may not be able to extract additional data. However, please let me know what you think of it, and what you think would make it more useful.

You should invert the colors of city-states.

How's that?

50% better.

It would be 100% better if you inverted the rest of the city-states.

Do I get 10 out of 10 yet?

The ones that were appearing not inverted had actually been inverted an even number of times, as that color set was used by an even number of minor civs.

Look good!

Awesome!

My suggestion would be to either wash out the colors for City States or maybe have them lose some transparency? They're pretty distracting now.

I assume you mean gain some transparency, ie lose some opacity? For the city centers, or for the territories? I don't really want to fiddle with the actual RGB values, as those come straight from the Firaxis tables.

The territories display at 50% currently for all civs. It's interesting that IE seems to interpret the opacity levels as lower than the other browsers. I'll try some tests later, but I suspect if I fade them much, they'll disappear in IE.

City centers display at 100% opacity currently. Again, this applies to all civs. There's minimal special treatment for minor civs in my display code, but I could reduce opacity for them if it's important. Note that the territory colour would then bleed through.

Yes, you are right, I meant have more transparency. And now that you've mentioned it I took a look in IE as well and it looks great there. Here's some shot comparisons:

Firefox:

IE:



So I'll just use IE, no biggie.

Great job!

Have you thought about doing a replay tool where we can see all the submitted games in comparison. Obviously map would be hard because we'd all be settling roughly the same area, but maybe some graphs of how key things change for each player over time like science, num of cities, etc

You can, of course, compare two or more player replays by opening two browser windows and putting them next to each other. The individual windows containing the map and event list can be dragged within the browser window so that you can do some comparison.

When I put the replay tool together, I did want to provide graphs. However, at the time I didn't have access to the histographic data that we had for Civ3 and Civ4. In the last few months I have extended the parser to make this data available, so graphs of quite a few parameters are certainly feasible now.

I can point to one example of the sort of data I think you are asking for. We display progress graphs showing all the teams in a Civ4 Succession Game of the Month (SGOTM), with a few parameters selectable during the game and more parameters shown once the game is over. This link is to a completed game, and you can select the current game in progress on that page.

However, the SGOTM graphs are only tracking a few teams, typically 8 to 10. Even then, the lines get quite confused, colour keying is a challenge, and I had to provide a way to select a subset of the teams, and/or to focus on short ranges of turns in order to make the graphs clear. With typically 40 to 80 entries for each Civ5 TSG, I think the graphs would be unusable.

When I get time, I do plan to add graphs to the existing single-player replay display, and I may see if it's possible to allow you to select a few (maybe up to 3 or 4) players to display on the same graph.

Thanks for response. I'm at work at the moment so will check that link later.

I guess I was thinking it would be useful to compare your science per turn against someone else to see where you could improve on that front, for example.
I struggle to complete two games a month so don't do it for my benefit!