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by celdon25 3454 days ago
My guess is that the main technical problem preventing this in SC2 is related to the game's replay-saving system. If you have only partial data, your client can't include the data from the opponent's perspective, which makes the replays suck. Theoretically you could generate the replay server-side but it would be resource-intensive without a costly technical overhaul.
1 comments

Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't design for this. Typically replays (in any game) are a log of initial state and then player input commands, rather than complicated state streams. Input commands are simply replayed in the simulation. It seems possible to keep the master log of input commands and then simply replay the simulation on a client during replay. With this design you could filter inappropriate information from each client during gameplay but have full replay information.

I'm sure there are good reasons why the design in SC2 is as it is, but this was surprising! Thanks for the info.