The ‘Danger Zone’ update brings the long-anticipated rewind in replays! Read our DevBlog about the new feature and how it works in War Thunder.

Rewind in replays has been amongst the most requested features for players for a long time. This tool is useful not only for ordinary players who want to see details of a cool moment of the past battle. It is also needed by the content creators of our huge War Thunder community, masters of video and graphic editors.

Previously, we tried to solve the problem of navigation in game replays, but it was impossible to solve the issue quickly and easily due to the peculiarities of the game engine and replay recording algorithms. In one of our Q&A sessions, we even made an official statement that this feature is not planned for the game. But the constant requests from the community forced Gaijin programmers to come up with another solution for navigating through replays. Well, we did it! The replay rewind is coming with the Danger Zone update, and here's how it will work.

In the usual sense, free rewind is impossible in War Thunder, since a replay is a sequential parallel recording of each player's control commands and server events. If the replay recorded the state of the entire game world at every moment in time, the size of the replay file would be very large, and recording such a huge file would slow down even the most solid gaming PC builds. We have implemented navigation between the so-called "snapshots" - virtual images of the events of the game session, placed in the course of the replay. The player has the ability to jump forward or return to any snapshot on the playbar to start playing the replay.

Navigation through replay will only work for client replays with the release of the Danger Zone update. Recording each snapshot requires certain computing resources. In some intense action scenes, like the massive firefights between heavy ships with hundreds of simultaneously flying bullets, shells and fragments, on weaker PCs, short FPS drops may occur at the time of snapshot recording. Therefore, recording snapshots for navigation in replays will be enabled in the options menu, being disabled by default. If the recording option is not enabled, navigation through the game replay will work as before - forward only. However, if you run a replay marked with snapshots, the navigation will work. For the convenience of watching and editing the replay, you can set the frequency of snapshot recording - 10, 30, 60 or 120 seconds.

We hope that the new feature will be useful for you. Try the game replay rewind, tell us what you think about the new tool and make even more cool content! The update is almost ready - stay tuned!