This is exactly how rejoining an in-progress Heroes of the Storm(another Blizzard title that was built on top of the Starcraft II engine) match worked. You woul

This is exactly how rejoining an in-progress Heroes of the Storm(another Blizzard title that was built on top of the Starcraft II engine) match worked. You would 'fast-forward' through and it could often take 5+ minutes on a slower machine. The ideal system would be similar to what we have with video algorithms. Every so often we draw out the full data needed for the existing state, then from then on-wards is just diffs until the next key frame is reached.