Hey guys! Recently I was thinking about the idea of getting an input viewer in Dolphin. It may work as a plugin inside the emulator or as an external app. My idea is to replace the game screen to the GC controller responding to the inputs of a recorded movie (.dtm file) when the plugin is activated. That way it'd be possible to record the game normally once, then record it again with the plugin activated, and then get the videos together with a video editor. We wouldn't have to worry about the lags and framerate drops in this case, as both videos would already be done with a/v sync. If it was done with an external app though, we'd have to worry about the lags (maybe we could sync it with the timecodes.txt file that Dolphin generates, but I'm not sure).
It shouldn't be hard to make this plugin / external app: we'd just have to replace the game screen by a black tile (if it's a plugin) and render a controller pic with all the buttons in separate files, and they move / change colors depending on the inputs that are read.
Here it is an example of what it should look like (this video was made by mkdasher in Mupen 64 emulator, he used an external app to render the controller inputs and video edited all the lags):
Link to video
My main issue about making this myself is that I don't have any programming experience with emulators or external apps that could read recording files. I would appreciate if some programmer could help me with that! :)
Another possibility is making a GameCube/Wii homebrew program that displays the pressed buttons. That would make it possible to use Dolphin's A/V recording and movie file input without any extra work, if I'm not mistaken.
Link to video
This TAS has input viewer, but dunno how they did :/
(not original video tho, can't find original one.)
Current:
Rayman 3 maybe? idk xD
Paused:
N64 Rayman 2 (with Funnyhair)
GBA SMA 4 : E Reader (With TehSeven)
TASVideos is like a quicksand, you get in, but you cannot quit the sand
You probably mean something like that. It is the built in lsnes movie editor.
Single frame input viewers are pretty pointless, they don't give any advantage, you can't do non-linear TASing with them well. The lsnes movie editor works with normal savestates, not rewind (saving each frame like FCEUXs TAS Editor or BizHawks TAS Studio). I'm not sure if rewind would work out for GC/Wii.
It should be possible to code a movie editor with savestates for Dolphin.
Why do you want to do that? It's not that hard to put a new window somewhere.
My idea isn't something to help while TASing (Dolphin already has a TAS Input that works very well). My idea is an input viewer for renders of TASes, pretty much what is seen at 19:06 in the video that got4n posted or in the example video I posted before.
TAS input and movie editor are two completely different things. :)
So you want an input display on screen? Encode the run, then overlay it with the input display and let buttons light up and move analog stick by also reading the dtm file.
I don't like seeing the sloppy input. Holding A instead of pressing it on the exact frame for instance. Or alternating between two dialog skip buttons for 30 frames to skip 1 box. We need perfection!
If you're talking about the "Rayman" guy that's me lol, it was just configuration, but I'm not a programmer :/
Current:
Rayman 3 maybe? idk xD
Paused:
N64 Rayman 2 (with Funnyhair)
GBA SMA 4 : E Reader (With TehSeven)
TASVideos is like a quicksand, you get in, but you cannot quit the sand