Re-viewing challenge attempts without recording them

Long ago, I used to play an e-mail game from 1990 called VGA Planets, which had battles similar to GSB (except for GSB’s much better graphics).

But with one big difference: The battles could be replayed for each of the players who participated in the battle.

This was done though creating a “VCR file” which contained the starting positions of all the ships, their orders, and the random seed of the simulator.

Now that I have made some challenges, I find myself wanting to view the attempts and defeats that other players have done of my challenges.

My suggestion is that this could be made available in a similar way to how the old VGA Planets did it:
You need to save the ships positions and starting orders and post them online (which is already possible), and also the random seed of the simulator and then make them available in a similar fashion as you can download a challenge itself.


To see an example download the sample VCR file from vgaplanets.htk.fi/html/download/v4.html:
vgaplanets.htk.fi/ftp/plan4/c1.vcr
To view them you need the program VCR.EXE (this one works because it doesn’t require DirectX 3):
www.vgaplanets.com/ftp/v4/vcr15mix.exe
And it in turn needs the sprites from the game:
vgaplanets.htk.fi/ftp/plan4/v4beta10.exe
(This is the Shareware Beta of version 4 for Windows).

i forget where the thread is (it was a long time ago), but while this sounds workable - it doesn’t… the simulations apparently diverge within seconds for some reason.

[edit]
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