A button to skip catch up in a game

Lots of times I want to catch up to a game that's going on for lets say 1 hour, but even with the catch up speed it takes atleast 10 minutes or even more. If you crash mid game in a long 1 hour big team game you would want to rejoin back very fast to not miss anything.

I suggest adding some skip catch up button? So that you don't have to wait to catch up.

I'm not good with coding so I'm not really sure if this is a complicated thing or not.

As best I understand it, your computer has to playback the entire game to date to understand what the current game state is, so the catch up cannot be eliminated entirely. Your computer doesn't have to show you the game while it is being played back, so some time savings are probably possible. You can get at least some of the way to this manually; type "/luaui disable" or some such, and zoom in to a corner of the map so you aren't looking at the entire battlefield.

(Possibly the above is out of date, at least theoretically; there have been advances in save/load technology over the last few years that I have not kept track of. However, you would have to get the save file from somewhere, and unless the save/load technology is very polished trying this in a large game sounds like a recipe for desyncs.)

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quote: How about saveing some kind of keyframe every 10 min and go from there?

Technically not impossible, but very technical to make possible.

quote: Recent save/load advances

So engine features, nothing that has to be custom-sewn through each unit?

You could setup an optional create-'keyframe'-event during a pause. Which would pick a person 'at random' to make it and upload it. Thus allowing a reconnect to happen much quicker. For specs you could have other spectators making it. This would also allow a more smooth replay experience by showing off plays and bugs and stuff without having to endure the entire stream of inputs.

Zooming into a quiet corner or the map does increase catch-up speed - for me about 25% faster.

Is catchup speed entirely dependant upon internet download speeds, or also upload speeds ? ( My upload speed is 0.3M bits.. )

LUA UI is a big resource hog. A button that removed everything that is not needed to catch-up would be great.

Do "/luaui disable" as Aquanim suggests, and see how it goes.

I am tempted to try that if I find myself on my old PC and falling behind the server, even without a disconnect first. ;)