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 Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Sun, 21 December 2003 10:30  |
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Hi,
In reference to Twelve Gates, Ron suggested recording expansion of territories during the game, and I thought that might be a good idea. But along the same line:
Since it is likely major battles will be at the Guild worlds, I was wondering about allowing the Guild to view the battles...
Normally, the host race would not be able to view the battles in his space unless some player screws up and sets the host race to enemy/neutral... however, assuming all players have set the Guild to friend, would default orders "attack anyone,disengage,disengage" ensure the host gets to view the battle, and not get involved in the fight?
Also, assuming the host can view the battles, is it possible to record the battle using some utility so that it could be kept for posterity?
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Sun, 21 December 2003 12:00  |
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| Micha | 
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Messages: 2342
Registered: November 2002
Location: Belgium GMT +1 | |
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| donjon wrote on Sun, 21 December 2003 16:30 |
Hi,
In reference to Twelve Gates, Ron suggested recording expansion of territories during the game, and I thought that might be a good idea. But along the same line:
Since it is likely major battles will be at the Guild worlds, I was wondering about allowing the Guild to view the battles...
Normally, the host race would not be able to view the battles in his space unless some player screws up and sets the host race to enemy/neutral... however, assuming all players have set the Guild to friend, would default orders "attack anyone,disengage,disengage" ensure the host gets to view the battle, and not get involved in the fight?
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First of all having the guild present will screw up battle positions, simming battles is already hard enough, don't make it more complicated.
I ran a quick testbed (3-way battle). It looks like with this kind of battle orders the positions are not what you would expect from a 3-way battle ... Have seen this before with unarmed starbases, but battles with armed starbases involved also look weird, will have to look into that further, no time right now, ...
I ran a test with the orders you suggested:
P = none/disengage
S = none/disengage
T = disengage
W = everyone
The Guild gets involved in the battle.
The unarmed starbase gets as secondary=any (strange since I thought I remembered from previous tests that a starbase always used any/any).
The armed starbase gets the expected any/any. However the starbase doesn't shoot at the other players ...
However you'll get a battle recording every time somebody orbits your planet. The battle is short, one round only and no shots are fired. Those 2-way battles also have strange starting positions sometimes ...
But I would like to suggest you thoroughly test this before making a final decission.
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Also, assuming the host can view the battles, is it possible to record the battle using some utility so that it could be kept for posterity?
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Don't know of any utility that can do that ...
mch
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Sun, 21 December 2003 13:17 |
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| LEit wrote on Sun, 21 December 2003 12:13 |
If you have the passwords, just open up the player files of one of the people involved (victor is easy to tell, they'll still be there).
Anything else will impact the battle in one way or another.
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yep, gotcha, thanks... too weird with the guild appearing... I agree... now, onto the next hurdle... chuckle... recording the battle... I'll see what I can hack up.
regards,
donjon
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Sun, 21 December 2003 17:18 |
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| Micha |
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Messages: 2342
Registered: November 2002
Location: Belgium GMT +1 | |
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| donjon wrote on Sun, 21 December 2003 19:17 |
yep, gotcha, thanks... too weird with the guild appearing... I agree... now, onto the next hurdle... chuckle... recording the battle... I'll see what I can hack up.
regards,
donjon
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Hum, I believe there is some kind of screen dump program that can record movies, that might be useful, (I'll try if I can dig something up) or else you could take a snapshot (printscreen or an extern program) of every phase of the battle and put that into an animated gif, flash, whatever, ... but that will be VERY timeconsuming work, unless you can process it automaticly, ... which might not be too hard ... I think snapshots are automaticly numbered so you just have to insert them, it can just be a LOT of files ...
mch
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Sun, 21 December 2003 19:05 |
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hmmm,
was thinking maybe I could pull some info out of the move file, and then work out a procedure how to animate on an html background. (perhaps thats hacking too hard?)
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Sun, 21 December 2003 19:24 |
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| Micha |
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Messages: 2342
Registered: November 2002
Location: Belgium GMT +1 | |
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| donjon wrote on Sun, 21 December 2003 16:30 |
Hi,
In reference to Twelve Gates, Ron suggested recording expansion of territories during the game, and I thought that might be a good idea. But along the same line:
Since it is likely major battles will be at the Guild worlds, I was wondering about allowing the Guild to view the battles...
Normally, the host race would not be able to view the battles in his space unless some player screws up and sets the host race to enemy/neutral... however, assuming all players have set the Guild to friend, would default orders "attack anyone,disengage,disengage" ensure the host gets to view the battle, and not get involved in the fight?
Also, assuming the host can view the battles, is it possible to record the battle using some utility so that it could be kept for posterity?
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The recording is not really an Academic question, moving this thread to the Bar.
mch,
moderator at night
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Mon, 22 December 2003 03:42 |
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Well.. A do able, but not an esspecially good tool for this kind of thing is "Hyper Cam" http://www.hyperionics.com/hc/
I ran a few tests with it, I got a fair AVI sequence out of it by running the replay at speed 2 and setting the capture frame rate to 4 fps. To be honest, this program is BARELY satasfactory for recording Stars Battles.
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If you wanna do a step by step advance this program can make your work easier by saving the screen cames to HD for you: http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/capture.htm
Though the delays between frame capturing it does, make it rather poor for any high motion animation applications. Such as a torpedo shot.
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Okay, Since both of those are really rather boarderline useful. I went looking around. And found another program that's REALLY very nice. Puts both those to shame.
http://www.shareup.com/Capture_Solution-download-6523.html
Only real draw back is the 30 day trial period. But this program will let you record the battles rather nicely, if you record at 10fps and set the battle speed down to "2", so the lower FPS (and therefore lower CPU usage and HD usage) can take full effect. It also comes with a recompressor so AFTER you record if you need to, or want to alter the compression scheme it's got a built in thing to do that for you! You can also use it in other applications, such as high end games, and other miscilanious uses.
Basically of the 3 I'd say go with Capture Solutions. But you can try the other 2 if you like. (I personally didn't like Hyper Cam at all, too buggy and messy. Complained more than it obeyed.)
Hope that Helps!
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Mon, 22 December 2003 04:15 |
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Well.. If you wanted animated gifs I'd suggest using the 2nd program I listed (Correction: Capture Solutions can do stills to, but I haven't tried them out.) Though if you want an AVI, which is easier plus you can get sound, then you know what I recommend. If you want you can kick the FPS up a little. 15's about as much as you'll ever need. Plus it'll let you painlessly shrink the video size! But yeah slow it down, and use a low FPS and it comes out looking more or less like a 3 or 4 speed recording!
[Updated on: Mon, 22 December 2003 04:33]
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Mon, 22 December 2003 08:22 |
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| Micha |
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Messages: 2342
Registered: November 2002
Location: Belgium GMT +1 | |
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| donjon wrote on Mon, 22 December 2003 01:05 |
hmmm,
was thinking maybe I could pull some info out of the move file, and then work out a procedure how to animate on an html background. (perhaps thats hacking too hard?)
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I indeed thougth you wanted to use info out off Stars! itself, that's why I first said I wouldn't know of such an utility. Then later I realized you could use a window recording program, hence my second reply.
I had a look around, tested two of them, wanted to post the results but than my PC crashed and since it was 2am I didn't feel like rebooting etc.
The one that came closest to what I would like was Bulent's Screen Recorder v1.5a, it is free and only a 0.5 Mb download. You can also easily tell that it only has to record the battle viewer window and not the rest of the windows on the background.
The file sizes you get for the recording are of course all dependent on the compression and quality, that would be the same for all programs you would choose to use. Sound is not needed and without it the files can get smaller again (probably not by much).
What I did notice is that in some battles the missile/torpedo impacts are no longer visible, the ships that got hit and killed just disappear, Capture Solutions (suggested by Captain Maim) has that too. Sometimes they are there sometimes they're not, even with same frame rates etc ... 
Also I always view battles at speed 5, I don't care about the seeeing the missiles move over the board, this also makes the files smaller. You can always slow down when viewing the clip ...
You can find an example here. It's 0.4 Mb and I think this one was DivX encoded ... As you can see it misses some phases (but you can see all missiles hit in this one), guess that means I haven't found the perfect fps yet ...
I think if you really want it to be perfect you'll have to capture every screen and make an animated gif ...
mch
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Mon, 22 December 2003 17:29 |
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Is it possible to pull the battle data out of an M file??? I'd think it would be encrypted like everything else.
Watching that replay I had the urge to wanna see the ship designs for all those ships. But of course that's impossible.
Also I'd say it skips beats in that replay because it's at speed 5. I usually play mine at speed 4 but for the best results speed 2 I think works. You get much less "disappearing" results. Sheesh dont' you guys listen to me? It's not just FPS it's also replay speed!
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| Re: Battle Orders/Battle Recorder |
Mon, 22 December 2003 18:13 |
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It should. If say you have it at full speed, it's displaying each move as 1 frame, every I dunno 1/2 of a second. If you slow it down so every move takes 1 or 2 seconds.. That means that instead of having to use a high FPS to catch every 1/2second frame you can use a low FPS and catch several frames from the same move. I've got a 100kb file demonstrating this. Unfortunately I don't have any place to put it. But as near as I can tell there's no problem with the frames skipping, you can see what ship fired at who and even the shot impacts. If anyone wants to see they'll have to email me for it.
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Same here, an impulse that's hard to keep down. 