When you have a replay you can only foward in "slowmotion" and "fastmotion". And this is hard when you want to make a movie when you don't know which moment you want to film. That can be easier if we can backward in the replay.
The reason is that LFS replays are not recorded videos. It merely applies the forces the drivers did and calculates them again. So it technically doesn't know where the car will be in a few frames time, so it needs to get through the calculations to get there. That means it can't skip backwards, because it can't calculate the physics in reverse.
Hopefully there'll be a way around this in the future.
I think it`s a good idea, to have forward and backward replay possibilities in Live For Speed, problem is, as mentioned before how the game / replay is codet and made at the moment.
I have been thinking about this, and I don't buy it....
The SPR/MPR files have a list of physics/forces instructions/inputs, why that file can't have it's instruction read at ANY point on the file is beyond me.
It just seems so simple to me, say the file is like this
<>^<>^>>><<< (steering and accel inputs)
surely the file is ALWAYS like that so why couldn't you jump to a single point in the file, or go back, forwards or whatever, the instructions will always remain the same
It's Ai "re-enacting" the replay - the way the car goes right depends on the yaw and forces before that moment, which aren't in the replay but are calculated by the Ai as they drive - you HAVE to start from the beginning as thats the ONLY time the force is 0
But why does it have to do it in realtime?, surely the system could read all the required inputs to make the jump to a certain point in time, and do all that in the background?.
Or is it me just trying to simplify things a little bit more than they really are?
You can do that, and one of the unofficial addons does this at such a lightning speed it's sort of like a rewind (as it can go forward so quick your straight through the replay), but it WILL take a fair amount of CPU to do it.
I find the lack of rewinding an lfs replay quite important, and I sure think it is well worth it to invest some time into finding a work-around (even if this means rewinding will work like ff from the start of the file).
Movies is an essential commercial tool for any sim, especially an online sim, and implementing a replay rewinding will surely boost even more the production of excellent movies.