Rolling Thunder Forums

A little something I discovered last night while poking around the multiplayer lobby, you can watch matches in play.

In the lobby, click the Community button (second from left), then click the Live sub-tab (Right hand side).  You'll get a large list of all games available to be viewed.  It can be sorted by columns, so for watching your RT buddies I'd recommend clicking the League column to sort by league and then scrolling down until you see the RT league games in progress.  Then just click on the match in the list, and if it's in progress, click the 'watch' button at the bottom right.

Excellent. Something nice to know.

So I gave this a try last night, spectating on Adept vs Idan.

It's a little quirky.  Basically, Cyanide have shown their usual approach to coding and taken the 'playback saved match' chunk of code, bolted it to the netcode and tied it to a button in the multiplayer lobby.

The end result is you can't start watching a match until both players are already looking at the pitch, and when you start it'll be from the very beginning.  This means that even if you click the watch button ASAP, you'll be behind the action by however long it takes your PC to load the teams and stadium.  For me this worked out as being lagged behind by about forty seconds.

I did manage to catch up though.  At the end of the first drive, while the players were watching those swooping cinematics of cheerleaders and the dugouts I hit the ESC key to skip 'em and found myself almost caught up.  I spent the rest match no more than five seconds behind the action, enough to enjoy the match without being irritatingly far behind the chat on Mumble.

Something I just overheard on lobby chat but haven't yet tested myself.  The + and - keys can control the speed of the replay when watching a match.  So if you are lagging behind the players you can speed it up until you catch up to them.