Posted: 4/2/2010 7:07 AM
(Edited: 4/2/2010 8:12 AM)
Post subject: What about tasing PC games?
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wicked
Joined: 1/22/2008
Posts: 319
Location: Brasil
i found a software that can record pc games, and also show how many fps the game is running, (its called beepa fraps) so i thought could be a good idea.
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Posted: 4/2/2010 7:17 AM
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Flygon
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
It's quite a fair bit more complex than that, long story short, you can't just record record the game using screen capture program. In fact, it is rather impossible to TAS PC games at the moment from what I've gathered, though, some work has been done related to VMs... er, I'm not the person that should be answering this, honestly. My memory is pretty fuzzy on what exactly has happened.
Posted: 4/2/2010 11:51 AM
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henke37
Editor
Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 899
Location: Sweden
Long story short: we need frameadvance and rerecording. Simple screen capture applications does not even ensure that we wont miss drawn frames.
Posted: 4/2/2010 12:52 PM
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xPi
Joined: 8/1/2008
Posts: 58
fraps tries to capture in real-time and is designed to miss frames if the computer can't keep up under the pressure of both the game itself and the capturing tool. there is .kkapture but all it does is slow down the subject software (or speed up if your computer is super awesome) and then capture every frame to a video file there is an experimental build of dosbox that records movies but didn't have save states, dunno if that will ever support win9x/winxp games. I am looking forward to another tool people on this forum are working on which will do everything we need.
Posted: 4/2/2010 7:08 PM
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RT-55J
Player (150)
Joined: 11/27/2004
Posts: 688
Location: WA State, USA
Here's a Windows TASing application currently in development.
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Posted: 4/3/2010 1:22 PM
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Noob_Irdoh
Joined: 6/4/2009
Posts: 570
Location: 33°07'41"S, 160°42'04"W
I said this and I say it again. Fraps is hideous. They should call it Craps. Camtasia Studio is where cool kids play. But the FAQ say no to screen capture.
Posted: 4/4/2010 6:41 AM
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creaothceann
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Joined: 4/7/2005
Posts: 1874
Location: Germany
Noob Irdoh wrote:
Fraps is hideous. They should call it Craps. Camtasia Studio is where cool kids play.
Fraps is for games, and does a great job for what it's supposed to do. Camtasia is for the desktop, but CamStudio does the same, has a good codec that can be used elsewhere, and is free.
Posted: 4/4/2010 6:00 PM
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HHS
Active player (286)
Joined: 10/8/2006
Posts: 356
I tried TASing Monkey Island 2 once, since it supports movie recording and playback. The movie synced fine until a certain point I think. When you take the elevator in the marsh, it waits for the music to reach a certain position, so that's a problem. I think that adding TAS capabilities to an emulator such as Bochs is the only way to reliably TAS PC games in a general way.
Posted: 4/4/2010 6:18 PM
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scrimpeh
Editor, Skilled player (1441)
Joined: 3/31/2010
Posts: 2113
TAS of 2017 First edition TAS of 2017 PSX TAS of 2017
Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't PC TASing be as simple as recording and playing back the mere keyboard and perhaps mouse input?
Posted: 4/4/2010 7:28 PM
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sgrunt
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Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
scrimpeh wrote:
Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't PC TASing be as simple as recording and playing back the mere keyboard and perhaps mouse input?
We also need assurance that the system will behave deterministically, i.e. that its response to said keyboard and mouse input is predictable and repeatable so that when the playback occurs we see the same thing as when it was recorded. In practice this means we need an emulator/VM for the computer, as there are just too many unpredictable factors otherwise.
Posted: 4/4/2010 7:35 PM
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Dromiceius
Joined: 10/3/2005
Posts: 1332
What about demo formats in OSS games? If you have a game like Quake 3 Arena that has built-in support for recording and replaying input, then you'd think the only other fundamental requirements are savestate support and a means of controlling the framerate very precisely. Are there caveats I'm not thinking of?
Posted: 4/4/2010 8:03 PM
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scrimpeh
Editor, Skilled player (1441)
Joined: 3/31/2010
Posts: 2113
TAS of 2017 First edition TAS of 2017 PSX TAS of 2017
Dromiceius wrote:
What about demo formats in OSS games? If you have a game like Quake 3 Arena that has built-in support for recording and replaying input, then you'd think the only other fundamental requirements are savestate support and a means of controlling the framerate very precisely. Are there caveats I'm not thinking of?
In another thread (I think it's even linked on this one), the Source engine was used as an example. It has rerecording (demos), slowdown (host_timescale) and savestate support (don't know exactly how though), but it can't use rerecording and savestates at the same time. I don't know how well this translates to Q3A, but seeing how both engines have the same roots, this may be the case here too. /Also, yeah, should've thought of stuff like RNG.
Posted: 4/4/2010 8:04 PM
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henke37
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Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 899
Location: Sweden
I see no reason not to accept game custom movie formats, providing that the movie actually is tool assisted. More or less no such game has savestates in addition to movie recording.
Posted: 4/6/2010 1:02 AM
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Dromiceius
Joined: 10/3/2005
Posts: 1332
henke37 wrote:
I see no reason not to accept game custom movie formats, providing that the movie actually is tool assisted. More or less no such game has savestates in addition to movie recording.
It would certainly seem that way. That April Fools thing was apparently to draw attention to the need for freshness here— what would be more unique to this site than something where we can not only do a TAS of something that is essentially a classic DOS game, yet have the ability to generate our own levels? I kind of have to facepalm at my asking the question earlier. The fact that emulators can do rerecording and work cross-platform is proof enough that a non-emulator program could work just as well once the randomness is made deterministic, anyway. I guess threading might also pose some unique challenges, but anyway...
Posted: 4/6/2010 4:16 AM
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arflech
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