Repeated downloads of assets before replays

[Milos Obilic]

Hiya,

Each time I select a match for replay, the FAF system re-downloads the same assets (such as ForgedAlliance.exe) again and again. Is this normal? It's wasted time. It doesn't look like there's a check whether a re-download is needed. Or is this some setting somewhere where I can change it?

[ZLO_RD]

it should not download same thing every time. If replays are from different game versions then it will download stuff each time you watch a replay that has different version from previosly watched replay...

[vongratz]

Older replays ever led to that.

[Milos Obilic]

I see, that makes sense. Thank you.

[R_Charger]

Can the files not be kept and swapped around or used for the appropriate replay rather than having to redownload them every time if you change from one FAF version to another? Or would this just cause massive file bloat? (one could cap it so you could only have say 5 versions downloaded at a time).

[vongratz]

Can the files not be kept and swapped around or used for the appropriate replay rather than having to redownload them every time if you change from one FAF version to another? Or would this just cause massive file bloat? (one could cap it so you could only have say 5 versions downloaded at a time).

Fatally the Murphy's law would act and mess all.

[armacham01]

Can the files not be kept and swapped around or used for the appropriate replay rather than having to redownload them every time if you change from one FAF version to another? Or would this just cause massive file bloat? (one could cap it so you could only have say 5 versions downloaded at a time).

It would be best if the client did this. There are not actually THAT many different versions of vanilla FAF. The FAF patch notes site (https://content.faforever.com/patchnotes/index.html) indicates there are only 11 versions since 2015. (There are too many Beta versions to count).

When you try to open an old replay (with an outdated version) the client should offer you the option to permanently download that patch so you don't have to re-download it ever AND so you don't have to re-download the current patch when you want to play. This would allow players to decide for themselves if they want to take up hard drive space with that (if it's not much space, maybe it should just be part of FAF to always get all 11 patches)

FURTHER, when you try to open an old replay, the client should give you three options: (1) play the replay with your currently-selected modlist even though they might be broken (2) play the replay with all UI mods disabled (3) play the replay only with "recommended" UI mods (which would be the appropriate versions of Supreme Score Board and perhaps a mod like Better Reclaim View, if there was a working version from that era). I'd prefer not to have to disable my UI mods every time i want to watch an old replay.

This would make it very convenient to watch old replays. EVENTUALLY perhaps we will set up a system of curated replays, including very old ones, such as "all Legend of the Stars 2016 games." Or just "Games from 2016 that people thought were much more interesting than the average game" and it would be nice if we could watch those replays easily without messing with our mods or downloading/redownloading files.

It would be good if we could have a sense of history regarding the best games from the past. And also I'd like to watch some of my old ladder matches for the sake of nostalgia without so much hassle.

[R_Charger]

What difference does it make what ui mods you have enabled? Never matters for me