It's aliiive! Angband replay logger works

[PowerDiver]

* No hooks for screen resizing, so make sure to set your screen size to the size as the original game. (In other words, use 24x80.)

I don't know if I can go back to 24x80. Would it be possible to make the & command prompt for dimensions and then resize so one could play 150x50 ?

[Pete Mack]

The log already "supports" resizing, as the very first log record is an EVT_RESIZE (x,y), so use whatever size you want. The only thing left is to hook up z-term.c and main-xxx.c to allow a program-driven resize event, but that only affects replay, not recording.

[Pete Mack]

Oh, yeah, there's one more known bug.

By default, the "record movie" command will chose the same file name every time, so it will overwrite previous sessions. During debugging, this was very much by design. In production, not so much.

[grapejoose]

Doesn't work for windows? boooo, I'll never get to see a super diver at work!! :b

[Pete Mack]

It's a trivial fix; Windows compatible logger.c file is attached. Note that I haven't tried compiling it, much less running it, on windows, so you are on your own there.

[david3x3x3]

Has anyone made interesting recordings with this patch yet?

[Pete Mack]

Has anyone made interesting recordings with this patch yet?

OK, this post inspired me, a bit.

I just created a really basic movie -- a sort of companion guide for a newsgroup post I wrote a while back: diving exercise for newbies. It's a dive in 115K turns to stat gain depth. (Actually, only dl 1450', but I'd just recalled to town to sell a lot of stuff.

It has some very careless play, because
a. I was playing exceedingly fast.
b. I was trying to make a point -- you can take pretty extreme risks, so long as you put a strict limit on your turncount. (Unfortunately, some of the risks were just plain mistakes...)
c. I'm seriously out of practice.

Unfortunately, there's no way to post it to the forum...

If you genuinely want a copy, drop me a note, and I'll send it via email.

EDIT:
Here's the character dump.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=9345

[Pete Mack]

Dayum. I tried replaying this movie--it went to cl 9, dl 10, 38K turns (time ticks), and then it went haywire. Back to the drawing board. I have no idea what could cause it to work for so many turns, then die

[PowerDiver]

Dayum. I tried replaying this movie--it went to cl 9, dl 10, 38K turns (time ticks), and then it went haywire. Back to the drawing board. I have no idea what could cause it to work for so many turns, then die

Would it be possible to do something fancy so that you run your movie maker and your movie player side by side? I.e. play the movie as you make it. I'm not up on reading files as you write them, but I'm sure there must be a way.

Then you would get immediate feedback soon after things crashed.

[Pete Mack]

OK, I fiddled around a bit, and cleaned up the input model a bit. I've now been able to replay the entire log, all 3800 player turns.

There's still something wrong with the playback controls, but that doesn't affect basic playback.


EDIT:
And it was instructional. Watching my own play let me spot several bad habits I need to change.

[PowerDiver]

Any chance you can redo this for a more recent version? Or get it into the dev code?

[Magnate]

Any chance you can redo this for a more recent version? Or get it into the dev code?

It would be superb if we could incorporate it into trunk. Pete, what does it depend on?

[Lord Tom]

Interesting. With some minor tweaks, this project could allow running Angband in a "re-recording" mode, similar to what is done (as a hobby of mine) with emulators on old console games at tasvideos.org. The general idea is to make a movie of "perfect" gameplay by emulating the game frame-by-frame and then using savestates to redo any mistakes, manipulate luck, and otherwise optimize things.

Obviously, Angband is inherently frame-by-frame. But savestates could be used to manipulate item generation, critical hits/enemy behavior to a great extent. I've often imagined what a "perfect" run of Angband would entail -- though there's no one answer, I picture a super-fast ironman dive where seemingly every monster killed drops just what is needed; in the endgame no healing is needed because Morgoth casts only (unsuccessful) brain smashing spells or melees to little avail.

Not sure what the replay value of such an effort would be, but I think it'd be cool.

Great work!

[fizzix]

Interesting. With some minor tweaks, this project could allow running Angband in a "re-recording" mode, similar to what is done (as a hobby of mine) with emulators on old console games at tasvideos.org. The general idea is to make a movie of "perfect" gameplay by emulating the game frame-by-frame and then using savestates to redo any mistakes, manipulate luck, and otherwise optimize things.

Obviously, Angband is inherently frame-by-frame. But savestates could be used to manipulate item generation, critical hits/enemy behavior to a great extent. I've often imagined what a "perfect" run of Angband would entail -- though there's no one answer, I picture a super-fast ironman dive where seemingly every monster killed drops just what is needed; in the endgame no healing is needed because Morgoth casts only (unsuccessful) brain smashing spells or melees to little avail.

Not sure what the replay value of such an effort would be, but I think it'd be cool.

Great work!

I think the tool assisted speedrun of Angband would be incredibly boring. Most other video games do not have as much of a luck or random element. The ones that do tend to be extremely uninteresting because they're so far removed from reality.

I.E. There's nothing in the code that prevents you from going down into the dungeon, dropping near a bunch of kobolds or hobbits and having each of them drop potions of !EXP, !AUG, or high level artifacts. However the rarity of that happening is astronomical in a real game. If you're manipulating luck you can do anything.

[Magnate]

I think the tool assisted speedrun of Angband would be incredibly boring. Most other video games do not have as much of a luck or random element. The ones that do tend to be extremely uninteresting because they're so far removed from reality.

I.E. There's nothing in the code that prevents you from going down into the dungeon, dropping near a bunch of kobolds or hobbits and having each of them drop potions of !EXP, !AUG, or high level artifacts. However the rarity of that happening is astronomical in a real game. If you're manipulating luck you can do anything.

But what would be quite good with this functionality would be to record real games, without manipulating anything. You could post them alongside chardumps and see how people played, and what sort of luck they had.