Old replays no longer worthless
There’s a new utility in town. It’s called the Supreme Commander Old Replays Player (SORP). And surprisingly enough, it does exactly what it says it does: it lets you play old replays. No longer will old replays sit around on your hard drive, rotting away like so much rancid digital refuse tossed carelessly out a window from a quickly moving update vehicle on Ye Olde Information Superhighway. Now they can be put to use like Gods intended.
SORP is actually pretty simple. The download includes all of the guts of previous versions of Supreme Commander, so when you run SORP and select an older version to run, all it’s doing is copying over the old versions of the guts of the Supreme Commander engine. Think of it like having separate directories on your hard drive for each version of Supreme Commander, except that SORP is a lot more space-efficient because it doesn’t store all of those extra copies of the things that haven’t changed. Frankly, there’s really no reason GPG couldn’t have made this utility (and done it better too). It’s not hard at all to swap out the parts of the Supreme Commander engine that have changed in a modular fashion.
I would suggest using SORP to go back and look at some of the spectacular replays we’ve reviewed here at SupComTalk. And don’t miss the epic five player at sea replay way back from March. It’s an oldie but goodie. Think one Mavor is a big deal? How about five Mavors? This is definitely one old replay you don’t want to miss!
July 5th, 2007 at 3:35 am
I wouldn’t exactly call 1.7 GB space efficient, but it’s nice that SOMEONE out there is doing something about all our previously-dead replays.
July 5th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Works pretty well here.
Used it to capture some footage from older replays for my new SupCom vid.
July 5th, 2007 at 9:23 am
I wonder when/if copyright issues will arise over this excellent replay utility. GPG should definitely make this happen automatically and transparently when loading replays.
July 5th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Copyright issues? SORP doesn’t include nearly enough of the full game to let you run it standalone. GPG would be shooting themselves in the foot if they sued over it . It can only be used as a third-party utility for Supreme Commander, and GPG is all about the community.
July 5th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Maybe I shouldn’t have deleted all my old replays…huh? Heh, who am I kidding, MY replays were not worth watching. :-)
July 5th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
I do wish GPG would make the older replays in the Replay Vault available for download. Last I spoke with SoS about them he said they were archived somewhere, not deleted.
July 6th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Not very new, but better late than never ;)