12-12-2003 07:20									#1
	New Way To Record Full Civ Games Easily Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

(This message topic has been started as a Thread under Civ3:General - no hyperlink to it yet)
For recording civ games, You could use a windows recorder program, which records mouse movements and clicks and keyboard presses.
I don't know what programs do this right now.. I have seen some a long time ago though.
You would need to use exactly the same game and windows type as the gameplayer, and playback the recording on your civ game to see how he played it.

The recorder would have to have Keep Random events option off, so every turn would look the same to Spectators. They wouldn't be able to do anything else on windows, as this would break the recording (continuity would stop and the civ3 game would get confused)

I could write a program to record civ games. It would be useful to automatically start recording game mouse movements when you load your civ game, but this might require recoding civ3 - which u need to be a Firaxian to do.

Someone just HAS to try this.

1. What questions do you have?
2. What program would be best to use for this?
.. ideally a free or near-enough product.
3. Would there be small ,or serious, problems - with this
demo recording system?



i'll explain more if people don't understand anything, or if i found out anything.

	12-12-2003 08:05									#2
	Increase the size of your Attachments

IIRC, Windows 3.x came with a recorder like that.

	12-12-2003 13:18									#3
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

This is a great idea for making tourney games more interactive. I think the RoN replay worked by playing back mouseclicks, although I doubt thats much help. Lag might be a bit of a problem, as you would not have it in the playback. Also how would you get the (now) computer opponent to do the same as the human did?

Good luck anyway.

	12-12-2003 17:53									#4
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

I haven't found a program that is able to do it. I've tried something similar while analysing data of experiments for my master thesis and I found the following problems:

Computer Speed: Depending on which computer you record/play back the recording, it is faster or slower thereby getting off increasingly until it doesn't work anymore.

Size/Resources: What I tried to do was relatively simple and yet it was a large file and the computer slowed down considerably while recording. I don't think you can do it with a several days long Civ game.

May be there are better programs out there, but that's what I found out and I tried for a while.

	12-12-2003 22:47									#5
	Increase the size of your Attachments

Yes, this method would be hard to use for multiplayer games, you could do it by loading in the save, and seeing what the player did on 1 turn , then you'd have to reload the next save.

It should work ok for Single player VS AI players, It could be fun watching your game of 4 months over again, to see where you went wrong or any great strategies.

I suppose to stop both computers recordings going out of sync, if one computer loads save games faster for example , the recording player would have to pause the Recording until the AI game turn had finished its moves.. this would prove difficult if a civ asked to speak to you though. The only non-coding way would be to have the recorder wait 10 minutes before starting his turn..
It seems you'd need a recording program to slow down if the playback computer used a slower computer, maybe using some kind of timer recording.

I'm sure theres some programs that can read the windows messages from programs to know wether the program is busy or able to receive key input etc.

It seemed a better idea at 4am last night

If the playback works on the same computer that recorded it, then this might be useful.