Time controls don't work (in Pro) straight from the aftergame screen#144

Here’s roughly what I did. I don’t know if it’s a consistent repro but has happened a few times. I have only seen this happen when replaying straight after a game, not when loading from replay file.

1) Play a game (I played a ranked 4v4 random map)
2) Win
3) Statistics
4) Spectate with CA
5) Hit fast forward
6) Minimise the game
7) Come back later when it’s finished

Expected: When I press T, I should be able to jump anywhere on the timeline
Actual: The whole timeline is shaded with diagonal lines

Yes, I definitely have a pro subscription (entirely for this feature) and it shows as enabled on the account screen. Thanks for all your hard work on CA

Thanks @Graham Helliwell for the report!

Unfortunately, I was unable to reproduce this after a few attempts.

Could you subit us some logs?

Find your logfile by putting %APPDATA%\CaptureAge\logs into your File Explorer’s address bar (to the left of the Search box).
Only send log files to developers, as they may contain some personal information (which all falls under CA’s privacy policy - https://captureage.com/privacy).

OK I’ve sent through to support@captureage.com referencing this issue
In the log sent, you can see I replayed one session which had the issue, then had a few goes at reproing by just resigning after a short while in a skirmish. That did work in one case, but felt like maybe it was just too short for CA to initialise properly (~11s I think). So probably best to focus on the first one

Hey Graham, I can’t seem to find your email in our support@captureage.com inbox. However I would suggest you try un-intsalling and re-installing as we briefly did have a setting for this however I think it’s since been removed from the application. Please email us or feel free to dirtect message me on Discord: 126926790760464384 (discord ID) https://discord.gg/WPKakH8

I’ve just uninstalled and freshly reinstalled. I haven’t had time to play recently but I’ll let you know if the issue happens next time I play

Just got around to playing another game, and confirm this is still broken.

This time it was a 1v1 skirmish against the AI. I won, clicked spectate in CA, watched the first bit, then pressed T to pop up the time controls to jump back and found the hatched timeline meaning I can’t.

I’ll try to double check exactly which button I clicked to start capture age next time in case it is actually the one on the menu rather than the stats screen that does it.

I’ve tried a few 30 second games where I quit current game (or use cheat code to win), then try to spectate in CA, but they seem to work fine. Not sure whether I’m doing something subtly different (e.g. only breaks on longer games), or whether I’m just unlucky.

@Graham Helliwell Hello Graham! Thanks for the update. By the description of the issue, I think the issue might be that you’re opening CA when the game is already over, so it hasn’t cached the previous states of the match. I might be wrong here, and if so please let me know.

If that is indeed the case, the issue is that for time controls to work, CA needs to have processed the part of the game you want to go back to. In practice, this means that you’d either need to have CA open while playing so it can process the state of the entire game (this is only possible vs the AI with cheats on), or load the recorded game from the beginning with CA open.

The time control feature works by building a cache that you can navigate, but for that CA needs to have processed the part of the match you want to go back to first. It cannot open a match that has already finished and then go back, because it doesn’t know what happened before it was open, alas.

I was able to identify a bug related to time controls while processing the game in real time. I’ll report it and hopefully it is related to your issue in the case you’re playing through the whole game with CA and time controls still do not work. However, it’d still be super useful to have some more info on exactly how you ran into the issue if you encouter it next time. Thanks for the info again!

To clarify, the game has finished, but then I’m clicking “spectate with captureage” which loads the replay and plays from the start. So captureage should be initializing the cache at that point consistently (but sometimes isn’t).

Off topic: thanks for the tip on how to get captureage to play in real time by allowing cheats, that could be incredibly helpful for ai practice sessions

I’ll keep an eye out for anything that influences whether the timeline works or not. Is the cache written to disk? And is there any condition in the code around whether it starts caching? (E. G. Only if pro, only if game is not ongoing according to some API or has cheats enabled). Just wondering if there’s a race condition where the code assumes the game is still going in the moments after it finishes.

@Graham Helliwell thanks for the clarification! Yes, in that situation it should definitely allow you to scrub back.

The internal logic is alas not something we can go at much length here, but if it helps, you can tell right away if it is caching by the timeline becoming white. For example, if you launch CA manually when a game has ended, it will display the dark-dashed timeline that indicates there is no game data before the present point.

If you begin watching a game from the start, the whole timeline will be white. Finally, if you launch CA in the middle of a match, only the portion of the game after the point you launched CA will display as white.

Hopefully this at least makes it easier to tell whether it’s working while we try to find a solution for a future version.

While I’m unable to replicate the exact issue you described still, I did find something else that might be related and I’m working towards reproducibility.

Please do share any extra details you find out if and when you do. Thanks for your reports.

Hit this again today so can confirm this is still an issue, but don’t have any more useful info on the cause I’m afraid.

@Graham Helliwell how frequently would you say this occurs during your CADE usage?

Just a thought that since I don’t play that often, and review replays less than that, it’s possible that it is exacerbated by captureage being caused to start (and potentially update) when I click spectate.
It doesn’t seem to be universal though since a friend who was in the same game as me, also clicked spectate from the stats screen this time, also had to update captureage, but the timeline worked for them, and they haven’t ever seen this issue.
2024-02-12, 1.9.0: Can confirm still an issue