Rewind for Replay Watching?

No, you can't rewind and the feature is very unlikely to be added. The replay is basically a recording of issued commands, and the engine actually needs to essentially re-play the game - a rewind feature would be quite a lot of messy work.

Couldn't a subroutine load all the commands and other data into memory then play them backward? it seems like it would be pretty straightforward a task. Maybe a representative from the Sins team would comment on this?

They did Rewind in replays has been suggested since beta, and we've always been told it would be too much work.

I think its a good idea though from the OP I must say, especially considering so much is happening , or even if they could make it so that a log got created which listed the build order and times on various planets. That is knowhere near as good an idea as the OP but it would be handy to have rewind functionality for learning and to hone in on players timing of events based on split second decisions.

I realise they probably have enough on their plat right now but is good idea!

Impossible. The Replay function can not be made to rewind the game. In any RTS game. It doesn't work that way. Implementing it is not possible, because the replay is a procedural evolution of the game through recorded moves. If you wanted a rewinding replay, you'd need to basically write a whole new replay function from scratch that is a milisecond-by-milisecond query of all states, ship positions, facings, orders and results. Which is a stupid idea in itself, as a replay file of a game would be humongous. I'm talking hundreds of megabytes.

Thats what I was just going to say , could create a video of it. You know something just as Ive said that and read what regicide has said I can see the difficulty now, video would be pointless, how we look at ship stats etc in a recorded video lol dow silly me .

Im just thinking though , current states and prior states get stored in a file, all calls made get stored, .........hmmmm okay thinking out aloud , I aint going any further lol yeah I bet that would be difficult. Only thing I can think is store what was built when and by who in a simple text file , then you can referance things done in the replay with the text file. So if you wanted an exact build order its there, or even have an option in game to have everything thats built displayed on the screen then dissapear after so long , so when watching a replay you can see who built what and when. I know theres the thing in the bottom left but it isnt applicable for trying to do what Im saying

I wouldnt say its impossible though just a complete and UTTER knightmare to do. IM thinking something like all windows api calls related to the player using the replay get run in reverse?(with all kinds of events going on+interrupts+ issues of concurrent apps okay it seems infeasible to me! I can see how this is going to be major hassle but its because I rate the people who make games as gurus!) and then started again at current state which is stored where you left of before rewind. I actually do some programming but I am no game programmer well have done basic as hell 3d in DX but am newbie. Taking into consideration things like callback functions etc would probably mean it would be a total mess and Im probably way of how they would set it up if they did do it, but is the only way I can think of which would be able to run already executed procedures again but in reverse so it shows like a rewind. Once again Im probably waaaay of, I was banking on the fact people that make games of commercial standard are going to know 1000 times more than your average joe and find some optimum way.