Replay Viewer

[Chris_]

IIRC it doesn't go to Spring by default in vanilla, since it runs 2 turns per year. As it says Spring, which indicates that RTW was originally going to be 4 turns. Although, its been a while since I played vanilla.

(Funny when you realise how little you remember about pre-EB)

[Che Roriniho]

IIRC it doesn't go to Spring by default in vanilla, since it runs 2 turns per year. As it says Spring, which indicates that RTW was originally going to be 4 turns. Although, its been a while since I played vanilla.

(Funny when you realise how little you remember about pre-EB)

Oh, I see! That's really cool. I know what you mean about pre-EB though. Did Vanilla even have regional recruitment? IIRC you could only do that with mercenaries (oh, the GREEN! I always went with Brutii, so the mercenaries actually went with the rest of my troops...)

[Gaias]

IIRC it doesn't go to Spring by default in vanilla, since it runs 2 turns per year. As it says Spring, which indicates that RTW was originally going to be 4 turns. Although, its been a while since I played vanilla.

(Funny when you realise how little you remember about pre-EB)

See, this is where I get confused alot when you guys start talking about a game that was before EB. The game, from what I understand of people talking about it, was vaguely similar to EB but without all the good stuff. I think I remember the name of it was 'Rome:Total War', but don't quote me on that as I am only recalling it...

[Chris_]

Later on today i'm going to do a summary of progress made on deciphering the save game. I'm at work at the minute, but at lunch time i'll have more time.

Update : I lied, I figured something else out and was doing that instead of writing what i'd already done

[Chris_]

Just an update. Cities are basically done, all I need to find is tax level, but that shouldnt be too hard. Ports are also pretty much done, and I had an idea. I was wondering if the team had considered representing smaller towns with the port villages you get. I could move these villages independently of the docks themselves, so you could stick a shedload of ports somewhere inaccesible, and move the villages around the map.

Example ( I had to move Arretium and Roma's port villages at the minute )

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[V.T. Marvin]

That is nice - the map looks more lively with those villages around!

Just a question - why the fleet in Arretium docks has grey flag? Is it still actually Roman?

[Chris_]

I toggle banners for the screenshot - that fleet's banner must have been fading out as I took it. So it's nothing special.

[Chris_]

I should have something people can test soon (maybe sometime during the weekend). At the minute it's more of a savegame viewer, as I cant really start writing back to the file until I figure out everything in the savegame.

[Che Roriniho]

Just an update. Cities are basically done, all I need to find is tax level, but that shouldnt be too hard. Ports are also pretty much done, and I had an idea. I was wondering if the team had considered representing smaller towns with the port villages you get. I could move these villages independently of the docks themselves, so you could stick a shedload of ports somewhere inaccesible, and move the villages around the map.

Example ( I had to move Arretium and Roma's port villages at the minute )

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I want your babies. This could (to an extent) stop the constant moaning about certain towns being left out, as they're their, you just can't capture them!

[Tellos Athenaios]

Does you replay viewer parse the descr_factions_sm.txt file? Because if people have recoloured their factions (which apparently appears quite frequently with the Ptolies for better contrast -- a bit more orange-ish for instance; or with factions which end up separated from their original core provinces...) you Replay Viewer would 'miss' such changes.

Also, a short question: how is the tool invoked, currently? IIRC you had a tool which made a snapshot triggered on a user-action such as PrintScrn - the easiest thing would then be to do the following in your 'monitoring script' (Unix style; from what I vaguely recall so bear with me):

pid=fork();
switch(pid) {
case PARENT : wait_pid(..); break;
case CHILD : exec("replay_snapshot [args]"); break;
}

I suppose? (Executing your snapshot tool as a child process of the monitoring tool with applicable commandline arguments.) Then just name the generated map as snapshot_XXX.png or sth. (XXX being some kind of unique identifier, the most obvious being a date/time stamp.)

[Chris_]

Well the replay viewer kind of got merged into the savegame editor. At the minute it doesnt do recording of games, as I took it out to make the merge easier. The current build of the savegame editor is a windows forms app, which I was prototyping with. At the minute I'm converting it to a normal Win32 app.

Since it gets the information from the .sav file, at the minute you have to point it to one, which it then gets data from. At the minute it gets city/province and faction data, and generates a map you can save. I'm going to add a feature where you can tell it to to record a savegame - you specify the name. When the save file changes, it should pick that up and parse the save. Or, if that doesn't work very well, I can always go back to using a keyboard shortcut.

I plan to make an ebreplay format, which will contain playback data for the progression of the map. This should be much smaller than save files ( since they aren't compressed at all ). When opened in the editor, you would also be able to save map images.

I might split the replay viewer and the savegame editor, since the replay editor features are basically done, where the savegame editor is some way off.

At the minute it doesnt parse descr_sm_factions, but I can do that.