Let's Play Angband video series

[pav]

Pete, wouldnt it be way easier to just animate screengrabs? As Tome do? As in Videos tab here on oook?

[Pete Mack]

Yes, that's a bit easier, but surely recording full screenshots gets expensive very quickly?

Logging the output (rather than the input) would work too, though compressing (or recording) the graphics stream is probably more work than recording the keystroke stream.

Recording the input stream really isn't much work, and it doesn't use a lot of disk space. Even with an inefficient log format, recording a complete game should take under a megabyte--right now it's logging 7 bytes per character, including run, rest, or dig.*


The side effects of redo logging are:

• Vulnerability to save-file abuse. (You can recover a game to any point, not just to the most recent copied save.)
• Version dependence--any UI or AI change will break the movie.
• Reproduction of intermittent bugs becomes a lot easier: just replay the log to the point where the game goes unstable, then start debugging.

* A log record is 2 bytes of for the delay in milliseconds, 4 bytes for the event type in case it's a non-keyboard UI event (very inefficient!), and 1 byte for the character. That's about 14 bytes for each move, as moves are recorded a command and a direction, like ';8' for step south.

[buzzkill]

The side effects of redo logging are:[LIST][*]Vulnerability to save-file abuse. (You can recover a game to any point, not just to the most recent copied save.)

This could be useful (maybe evil, maybe just fun) for creating competition characters. You know, playing it through, having a peek into the future, knowing that something exciting is just around the corner, then dialing it back a little.

and a possibly stupid question... if this is mostly just a input/keystroke logger, how do you insure identical dungeon creation?

[PowerDiver]

and a possibly stupid question... if this is mostly just a input/keystroke logger, how do you insure identical dungeon creation?

The RNG seed is stored in the savefile, so everything is deterministic. There are too many dependencies on the savefile to store the start point any other way.

[pav]

Of course I ment saving ASCII respresentation of the screen, not a full graphics slideshow. Basically, I suggested stealing ToME's movie recorder for Vanilla.

[Pete Mack]

Of course I ment saving ASCII respresentation of the screen, not a full graphics slideshow. Basically, I suggested stealing ToME's movie recorder for Vanilla.

Yeah, I understood that, but even an 80x24x2 ascii + color character adds up quickly. On the newsgroup, a recent poster noted that Crawl and Nethack servers already use ttyrec, which allows anyone to play the movie without having an install. It's a nice universal solution.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.angband/browse_frm/thread/8a0f15ad3e77ffea/ec0889bf5e26a35f#ec0889bf5e26a35f

[pav]

but even an 80x24x2 ascii + color character adds up quickly

Not really, if you only save changes. Oh and gzip helps, too.