Creative Assembly GREATLY DISAPPOINTING NEWS!!! BATTLE RECORDER is ....@@@ [Archive]

General

01-08-2002, 20:07

MAD WAR COMPOSER... here goes http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/frown.gif

Well, when I replayed the game, it started out as normal for the first 6 minutes. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

6 minutes had passed and the first skirmish combat began, and suddenly 3 group of my ally's units were routed off by approaching enemy's cav. I recalled that my ally did win with his cavalary and took 1 group of the opponent's foot-soliders or two. I was beginning to think I am a paranoid.

Later on, my ally was attacked by the enemy, which the historical fact is that my ally progressed steadily and had his cav moved to the flank of the enemy. I kept saying WTH is wrong with me? As I think the recorder can't be wrong.

Then when I came to fighting my enemy's units, woowoow... 3 groups of my units were routed and eventually ran to the edge of the map. Historically, I had conquered my enemy after my ally had conquered his. Now I suspect there's a problem with the recorder.
Coz..

Isn't this too Weird?
The replay shows that there is a stalemate in the battle at my side and my partner was defeated severely at his side.

Now I suspect that the battle recorder may contain serious BUGS. However, the possible altrenative is that some player is using cheats for the game, as I haven't found problem in two games, 1 custom and 1 with another player 1v1. Hmm...., what do you think?

longjohn2

01-09-2002, 02:58

The most likely cause is that your troopstats file for online play is different to what is used for offline. They must be exactly the same for the replay to work. I'm not entirely sure where all the different stats come from in the latest patch. Target can probably shed some more light on that.

Second most likely cause is that the reorder is faulty, or hasn't been kept up to date as the game's been patched.

It's unlikely that your opponent was cheating. It isn't really possible to cheat in Shogun in such a way that affects how the battle plays out, as the battle is played out simultaneously on both players' machines, and only the order's given are sent accross the network.

Krasturak

01-09-2002, 03:06

Perhaps the recorder keeps only a record of the orders given, and not the random results within the battles.

This could lead to such strange different outcomes.

Duunno.

tootee

01-09-2002, 14:31

so far the battle recorder is working fine for me..

Vanya

01-09-2002, 22:00

GAH! I saw the news on the main page here about this! Cool!

But... I am confused... I couldn't follow exactly what it is they are trying to say... is there a 'shogun.exe' in a C:\...\Target' folder?!? WTF!?! Please explain this more clearly...

Thanks

01-09-2002, 22:16

http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/mad.gif you should be a pc wiz...and don't know this? http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/mad.gif

Any shortcut to Shogun links to shogun.exe
You can see this in the field "Target" in your shortcut properties.

Tera

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Sjakihata

01-09-2002, 22:40

My shortcut was already called: "C:\Games\Shogun - Total War\ShogunM.exe" -Now what is it exactly I have to write? And same when I want to see the "movie" ?

Thanks...

and tera, plz. dun get mad http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

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"-Know your self, know your enemy and your victory will be painless.
-Know the weather, know the terrain and your victory will be complete."
-Sun Tzu(Wu), The Art of War.

01-09-2002, 22:47

Im not mad to noone http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif
Then just add EP for installing recorder. Your last battle will be saved in /DumpLog

Create a copy of the shortcut and instead of EP write mEP
Run it, and you should see the recording.

Ter

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01-09-2002, 22:48

Quote Originally posted by Terazawa Tokugawa:
Im not mad at noone http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif Just jokin http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif
Then just add EP for installing recorder. Your last battle will be saved in /DumpLog

Create a copy of the shortcut and instead of EP write mEP
Run it, and you should see the recording.

Ter

[/QUOTE]

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Sjakihata

01-09-2002, 23:00

ohh... Thanks.. I figured I had to add EP/mEP after these: " Now it is worjing finr!!!

I have just tested it, me charged w. lots of h cav. enemy had like 5 nd and 4 archers.

one archer were gen. and when my cav attacked only the gen army counter attacked!

Now I thought that head on general attacks was fixed!

Gothmog

01-09-2002, 23:11

Quote Originally posted by Krasturak:
Perhaps the recorder keeps only a record of the orders given, and not the random results within the battles.

This could lead to such strange different outcomes.

Duunno.[/QUOTE]

Sorry to burst you guys' bubble, but battle recorder can be a liar liar.

I replayed a recent 1 hour long, 22 MB big battle record, guess what?

At first, it was fine. The story unfold the way it was before.

Things began to look goofy once the enemy's reinforcement arrived.

*I found my units and AI's units standing back to back, doing nothing.

*I found my BN charging half way across the map, toward a unit of muskets, got blown down to one man by the 3 units of Hojo muskets nearby. While in fact, this unit was attacking a lone musket unit and slaughtered them, and survived the battle with 11 men left.

*I didn't get to see my last desperate attemp to envolop and defeat a large group of muskets, YS and No-dachi. This time, there was NO LARGE GROUP of muskets, YS and No-dachi. They were scattering all over.

*I began to see the reinforcement that I never got.

*I found several intact enemy units remaining when the battle record was over.
*****************************************
And this is campaign battle, thus no chance for inconsistant troopstats file.

*****************************
I tend to think Krasturak's speculation is right. Basically the recorder only record the orders that you gave.

And this will give you very very inconsistent result.

First, as General described, in multiplayer, when the troop quality of both sides are very close thus the casulty is high and both sides have a chance to win, the randomness might alter the result of the entire battle.

Secondly, in my case, the randomness of reinforcement might cause the troops to appear at diffrent locations, thus COMPLETELY screw up the battle result.

*******************
All in all, battle recorder is a nice toy, but that's where the excitement ends. Don't count on it to tell the truth.

[This message has been edited by Gothmog (edited 01-09-2002).]

01-09-2002, 23:23

Ow Feck. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/frown.gif
Target can you confirm this please?

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General

01-10-2002, 00:07

Everytime, it offers a different end story to me, going against the outcome of the war. Every time I won online, I lost in the replay, and everytime I lost miserably, I won big.
Now I'm getting used to this recorder as it's just more interesting to watch the comeback of a fight.

Anyway, some players told me they were not experiencing problems so far with their MI version, and I am using the WE.

Gothmog

01-10-2002, 00:35

I am using WE as well, but I highly doubt that the MI will be any diffrent.

Because if so, then the battle record of MI will be SIGNICANTLY larger, to a point that one single combat might take well over hundreds of MB. To record the precise order that the players gave to each unit is hard enough; to precisely record each individual soldier's movement will be near impossible.
*************************

As I said before, it really depend on how greatly the randomness can alter the result.

For instance, if you envelop a unit of musket from three different angles with 3 HC, you bet that everytime the muskets will be decimated.

On the other hand, suppose you charge the opponent's H2 YS head on with your own H2 YS on level ground. Then you bet that half of the time, you win; another half of the time, he wins.

[This message has been edited by Gothmog (edited 01-09-2002).]

LETRIC

01-10-2002, 00:55

I can't change the target command. I have WE and when I add ER to the end of the command a message pops up saying its not valid. What do I do? I'm so stoopid, maybe i've got it all wrong.

LETRIC

01-10-2002, 00:57

ALso after downloading patch I have version 1.02 showing when I begin, but see no new maps after I downloaded new map pack V 1.16 Y not? I see no discernable differences>

longjohn2

01-10-2002, 02:52

Ok it sounds like the battle recorder doesn't work with reinforcements, which is a pity, but understandable as I believe it was written to help debug multiplayer.

Krasturak, you're right that the recorder only keeps a record of orders issued, but wrong about random numbers causing it to go astray. Computers don't generate truly random numbers, they just produce sequences of numbers that look random, but if you start from the same point in the sequence, you always get the same sequence of random numbers. The recorder stores the start of the random number sequence used for the battle, and can thus reproduce it exactly. However, if any little thing is different (such as the program version, or troopstats file) then the course of events will diverge. Orders will continue to be given, but will no longer make sense.

General. Try recording a single player custom battle, and see if that works. If it does, then I'm pretty sure the problem is having different troopstats for single player and online.

Sorry about the problems, but please understand that this was written as an internal debugging tool, and was not intended to be used by the general public.

Gothmog

01-10-2002, 03:07

Hi, longjohn2:

Just curious. Do you happen to work for CA or EA?

Your explaination sounds so professionl, informative and confident.

01-10-2002, 03:19

Quote Originally posted by Gothmog:
Hi, longjohn2:

Just curious. Do you happen to work for CA or EA?

Your explaination sounds so professionl, informative and confident.[/QUOTE]

He does.

Thanks for the explanation...
I will try it myself out and see if all works smoothly...we all here mainly want it for MP...

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longjohn2

01-10-2002, 04:27

Yes I'm a programmer at CA.
I wrote most of the soldier and unit behaviour stuff, and the battle a.i.

MagyarKhans Cham

01-10-2002, 06:59

thx Long John my Great Khan, Khan of Khans and "Ocean Ruler" is delighted to see u around. He just want to encourage u to make a fullworthy recorder for tw2. ur close to it and with some extra effort my 2nd main man Target has something to hype around.

General

01-10-2002, 10:50

I'm not sure if this makes my online and offline stats different, but probably sure it is the same.
I installed the game, and then I download the latest version. I installed the map pack and started playing. I didn't alter anything in the troopstats.
So I think the troopstats online and offline is the same. I can even see 48 mongols cav offline in a custom. I have 1 normal custom game replay and 2 normal online game replay, though 1 of them seems to be just similar. I suspect that, though may turn out to be ridiculous, factors about this problem include lag, several mistranslated code in the record (such as that troops rally by different factor, troops honor is boosted from the start, honor gained in the game is not recorded, or whatever it may be) and also the cause with increasing and decreasing the flow of time from time to time.

long john, as you are a programmer, can you tell us if cheating is possible in MP, such as morale cheat and koku cheat and forseeing weather/enemy's troops or deployment/other miscellaneous?

Puzz3D

01-10-2002, 12:23

I recorded a custom battle of 1 monk vs 1 monk on a flat test map, and the playback is exactly the same as the original battle. So, it does work since the precise sequence of random events is recreated as longjohn2 pointed out. For online play, I wonder if the recording has to be made by the host machine for proper playback because the joiners are not being given the host's random seed number. I would imagine that all the battle calculations are being done on the host. I know Kraellin has a recording of a 2v2 online battle where he was not the host. Did that battle playback ok Krae?

MizuYuuki ~~~
Clan Takiyama ~~~

tootee

01-10-2002, 12:52

I replay a few games of which I was not host, and they, all 1v1, looked okay. Using MI. Just curious, is the inconsistency appearing only in WE recorder?

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tootee the goldfish
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Kraellin

01-10-2002, 14:13

i have no idea what others are doing to get those screwy results, but mine are working perfectly. yes, yuuki, that game on tosa's new map played back perfectly...all 53 minute's worth. and longjohn2, it has nothing to do with reinforcements that i can tell. that recording i just mentioned was using reinforcements, so i dont think it's that.

i suspect what may be going on is that a few folks are setting things up incorrectly, or like longjohn suggests, have altered stats someewhere. or perhaps it's even a WE as opposed to MI thing. i'm running WE, ver 1.02 and it works just fine for me. i have 3 desktop icons set up; one for normal play, one for record play, and one for playback. they all 3 work fine. or maybe it has to do with localised versions...dunno, but mine is working flawlessly. i also have camera limit turned off, playing with 60 men, fatigue on, morale on and have had it work in every custom and online game i've played so far.

ok, now here's an interesting something i just noticed. the checksum file is growing. after recording my last game, i checked the checksum file and it was around 9 megs. after playing back a part of it once, and then the full file, the checksum files is now 34.5 megs! this could get ugly. apparently, every recording and every playback doesnt just overwrite that file, it appends it! but, since longjohn informs us we dont need it for playbacks and since a new one will be made if we wipe the current one, this shldnt be a problem...unless you forget to wipe this periodically. gonna have to watch this one. thus, some of you may also be getting corrupted recordings if you dont have enough disk space to handle the growing file.

frankly, i love this thing. i would also request that this be included as a normal feature in future games. it would also be nice to have a feature within it to record online text speech and be able to turn this on or off in the playback. but this thing is very nice. i can look at all player positions, move around anywhere on the map, watch what i did wrong and what i did right and moreover, what everyone else did right or wrong...watch the birdie, folks...or maybe it shld be, 'smile, you're on shogun camera!' the only complaint i have so far is that i cant alter the outcome of the battle, and that, in particular, i cant alter the recording on other folk's computers ;)

K.

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The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.

Erado San

01-10-2002, 15:26

Krae, you may have hit the nail there.

If someone hosts a battle with fatigue and morale on, and one of the people joining plays it back afterwards with fatigue and morale off, the outcome would be very different if the playback does all the calculations again.

Kraellin

01-10-2002, 21:25

erado,

makes sense to me. it might even be having limited camera on or off. this would be easy to verify. join a host game where the settings are different from yours. in that game you would record using the host's settings and in playback the game would most likely use your current settings.

someone of you guys that are having problems could try this, play on a host machine that uses different game settings than yours, play the recording back once and see if it recorded correctly, and if not, then change your game settings to match what the host had and try it again. if it now works then that's prolly what's going on.

that could be it, erado, but then folks shld be able to play a custom game and play it back with no alterations, since all yer using is your own settings. if, like longjohn2 said, it's dependent also on no modded stats, then the only thing that would make it screw up in custom games or historical or campaign would be altered stat files.

so, if it is modded stats that are causing alterations, this could also be verified by someone that's having difficulty.

K.

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The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.

BomilkarDate

01-10-2002, 21:45

Letric

Try this (if you get an error trying to change the shortcut)

Now there is:
"C: program files/.../...shogun.exe"
You have to change it to
"C: program files/.../...shogunM.exe" ER
or
"C: program files/.../...shogunM.exe" mEP
(It's shogunW.exe if you are using the warlord edition.)
the ER or mEP is behind the "
I had the same error I think

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Strength and honour

Bomilkar Date

longjohn2

01-11-2002, 03:12

Nice Theory Erado San. In theory all the settings needed to recreate the battle should be stored, but if one of them was not recorded it probably wouldn't show up in the use made of it at CA.

General, if you're still having problems, then I don't know what else it can be. Maybe Erado San's idea is correct.

As far as cheating goes, it isn't possible to cheat in any way that affects the outcome of the game, as the game is calculated simultaniously on all players' computers. You could theoretically modify your own copy of the program to show things that should be hidden, You could also modify it to allow you to spend more koku at the start, but this'd show up in the log file. However, modifying your program in this way would be a lot of effort, and I'd be really surprised if anyone has. It also wouldn't affect the battle recorder as this records what happened on your own machine.

Puzz3D

01-11-2002, 04:15

longjohn2,

Well that's quite interesting that all machines in a game are making the same battle calculations. That would account for the out-of-sync and subsequent drop of any machine that calculated a result different from the host. So, it would seem that only commands and checksums have to go back and forth over the network connection and not the status of every man which would greatly increase the network traffic.

MizuYuuki ~~~
Clan Takiyama ~~~

Erado San

01-11-2002, 05:04

LongJohn,

As this was never intended for release, I can imagine not every parameter was included. As it's a debugging tool, I can't believe you guys changed settings like fatigue and morale during debugging and recording and playing back one battle. So it probably wouldn't show up.

From what you say I can't see how battles would play back differently as they were recorded, unless some of the changes made after the playback and recording routine was created interfere with its proper functioning.

I guess we'll just have to consider ourselves lucky that we have this now and overlook it when it doesn't always work right.

Having said that, you guys are probably using routines like this for MTW as well, and judging from the reception this one has gotten you should consider including a proper recorder in MTW.

And... err... dare I ask what other gimmicks are available that we don't know of? We might like some of them as well...

Tangent

01-11-2002, 15:22

I too hope to see the recorder as a standard feature in MTW. I do have a couple of suggestions.

1)The most obvious suggestion is to put the record replay feature into the interface so that players are not forced to exit and restart the main program in order to record and replay.

2) Provide an interface to allow players to name and save the files at alternate locations, especially including alternate machines on a network. I am experiencing an unacceptable performance degradation in online play when I try to record the game to my primary PC's hard drive; I think it is the disc accessing that is slowing network play. It would be wonderful to pass on the disk access work to another computer.

tootee

01-11-2002, 19:43

Quote Originally posted by Erado San:

And... err... dare I ask what other gimmicks are available that we don't know of? We might like some of them as well...[/QUOTE]

"shogunM.exe"

GA - make available the Geisha army
Ph - make available the phantom army
MPP - make available pausing in MP

Puzz3D

01-11-2002, 21:56

I turned off morale and fatigue, and replayed my saved WM vs WM custom battle. The result was exactly the same as before. However, when I reduced the attack value of the WM and replayed the battle, the result was different, and the battle ended before a winner was determined since the kill rate was now slower. Then I set the attack parameter back to it's original value and lowered morale on the WM to -16. The morale option was still unchecked in the options. The battle replayed differently, and one of the monk units ran away with less than 50% losses.

It acts like parameters that are set before you go to 3D battle mode, such as morale and fatigue, are saved in the replay.dat file and used in the replay no matter what the current options are set to. Parameters in the troopstat and projectiles are read and used at the time of the replay. It's unfortunate that you cannot see either the fatigue or morale state of the units during the replay.

MizuYuuki ~~~
Clan Takiyama ~~~

evilc

01-12-2002, 03:19

erm when i went to replay a battle MI loaded a sp campaign map up, i typed something wrong in the target?

qwertyuiop

01-12-2002, 03:33

Guys, please note it is a debug feature. It is not supported in any way by CA. Yes, it would be nice if everything worked out and we had are recorder but we don't.

You also need to understand that battle recorders are extremly hard to create efficiantly. Either you have a 1 TB file that matchs the game perfectly or you record orders and random seeds and run it through the engine again. What happens with the resonable solution is it goes slowy out of sync as small inconsitincies compound.

Maybe at best we have a FREE screen saver http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif

ELITEofGAZOZ

01-12-2002, 21:13

Ahh, now I understand...

the problem occurs in MI also.

Me and Jericho played vs. another team in Seibagahara. We won online, but the outcome in the replay was different. My opponent´s troops routed me, allthough that not happend in the battle?!?

Hmm, pity, that the recorder isn´t bugfree but to develope an ingame replay option for MTW with saveable replay files would be a

GREAT FEATURE !!!!!!!!!

ELITEofGAZOZ

01-12-2002, 21:16

Ahh now I understand....

The problem occurs in MI as well. Me and Jericho won online vs another team in Seibagahara but my opponent routed me in the replay, allthough that never occured ?!?!

Pity, that the replay is not bugfree, but an ingame replay option with saveable files for MTW would greatly appreciated !!!!

ELITEofGAZOZ

01-12-2002, 21:21

Uh oh again a different replay, that´s really a miracle. Better we don´t rely on the bit and bytes world too much???

longjohn2

01-12-2002, 23:16

Liongaz, do your multiplayer game replays always go out of sync, or is it just the occasional one. Given your report, and that from General, it seems that there is definitely some event in the game that is causing things to go out of sync, or some setting that isn't being properly recorded. Given that it seems to work for most people, we might be able to figure out what it is. This won't get it fixed, but at least you'll know what to avoid if you want to get a replay.

To however got dumped into the strat map when trying to do a replay, you typed 'M' when you should have typed 'm'.