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Warepire
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Editor
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Warp wrote:
WTF: Windows TASing Framework.
This!
Editor, Emulator Coder, Expert player (2158)
Joined: 5/22/2007
Posts: 1134
Location: Glitchvania
Warepire wrote:
Warp wrote:
WTF: Windows TASing Framework.
This!
...is not a proper name for branding, as it is the abbreviation of a popular vulgar phrase.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
*whoosh*
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
ALAKTORN
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Former player
Joined: 10/19/2009
Posts: 2527
Location: Italy
Derakon wrote:
*whoosh*
I like this name!
Player (194)
Joined: 10/23/2010
Posts: 49
Location: Australia
Oh wow, those are great news (ugh, university kept me off). Would Rayman 1 work? I'd guess Marble Blast Gold, C&C and others aren't, but it's a start. Gotta dig through my games, see which may be possible. I wonder if Nach will start TASing if RA2 becomes TASable... heh.
Patashu
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Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4045
Does Castle of the Winds work?
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
MESHUGGAH
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Joined: 11/14/2009
Posts: 1353
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Warp wrote:
WTF: Windows TASing Framework.
I swear I won't post another name idea, but this also recalls my first ideas around making a PC game emulator --> WTF: Within The Frames, mostly because of those irritating threads.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Joined: 6/7/2008
Posts: 124
Location: Portugal
Well, let's see if the old imagination is up and running... How about... "Perfect Win"? It reflects how TASes try to complete games perfectly, and Win, as in short for Windows (worst fitting abbreviation ever, if I may). Can also reflect perfect victories of sort... "Wreaker" (W[indows game b]reaker)? "WindART" (Windows Attractive Run Tool)? Well, whichever name we choose, I'd like to make a vectorial logo for it. If anyone wants to check out how my logos usually end up (i.e. if I suck at it), here's the logo I made for PK Rhythm:
I'm Espyo from the SRB2 Forums. Current project: A Pikmin fan engine, Pikifen
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Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.
WINjin
Joined: 5/2/2009
Posts: 656
klmz wrote:
Warepire wrote:
Warp wrote:
WTF: Windows TASing Framework.
This!
...is not a proper name for branding, as it is the abbreviation of a popular vulgar phrase.
after the Neo Geo Pocket emulator named Rather Another Pokemon Emulator, no other branding seems innapropriate to me.
My first language is not English, so please excuse myself if I write something wrong. I'll do my best do write as cleary as I can, so cope with me here =) (ノಥ益ಥ)ノ
Editor, Emulator Coder, Expert player (2158)
Joined: 5/22/2007
Posts: 1134
Location: Glitchvania
OmegaWatcher wrote:
klmz wrote:
Warepire wrote:
Warp wrote:
WTF: Windows TASing Framework.
This!
...is not a proper name for branding, as it is the abbreviation of a popular vulgar phrase.
after the Neo Geo Pocket emulator named Rather Another Pokemon Emulator, no other branding seems innapropriate to me.
The fact that the ~3-year-old emulator is extremely obscure (only two results with Google for me) counters your opinion.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
Joined: 5/2/2009
Posts: 656
klmz wrote:
OmegaWatcher wrote:
klmz wrote:
Warepire wrote:
Warp wrote:
WTF: Windows TASing Framework.
This!
...is not a proper name for branding, as it is the abbreviation of a popular vulgar phrase.
after the Neo Geo Pocket emulator named Rather Another Pokemon Emulator, no other branding seems innapropriate to me.
The fact that the ~3-year-old emulator is extremely obscure (only two results with Google for me) counters your opinion.
3 year-old? more like 11 years old.
My first language is not English, so please excuse myself if I write something wrong. I'll do my best do write as cleary as I can, so cope with me here =) (ノಥ益ಥ)ノ
Post subject: Demo Release
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1310)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
OK, I'm finally making this public, and I decided to call it Hourglass after all. There's still a lot more work to do, but think of this as a demo for anyone that wants to get a head start on Windows TASing. http://code.google.com/p/hourglass-win32/ A build is available for download there, as is the current source code. If anyone wants to contribute, let me know and I'll give you commit privileges. I think I said I would wait longer before posting this, but actually I see no reason to do that, since it's not like progress can't continue on it. For anyone who wants to try actually TASing something with this now/soon: Let me know if you run into problems. PM me about it, preferably. Same for feature requests, although I'd suggest posting those directly to the googlecode issues page instead. Keep in mind this is in the early stages and that it's an especially unusual environment for making TASes because it's not an emulator. Also keep in mind that things are likely to change, including the movie format. All of the games on that list should be possible to create TASes of in the program's current state, but not all of them are supported equally well. There are several gotchas to work around. For example, games that use multiple threads have stability problems (the game crashes sometimes after loading a savestate), and as a workaround for this, there are several options for forcing the program to be more single-threaded, such as disabling DirectSound or disabling thread creation. So making a serious TAS would involve disabling that stuff and TASing the game with the sound off, then re-enabling it to check sync and record an AVI with audio. Also, there's a Frames per Second field you'll have to fill in before starting recording, which depends on the game. In general, if you get this number wrong, the game will either run too slowly, or it will run at the correct speed but with unnecessary "lag frames". I haven't made any sort of database yet of what these should be, but for now: Cave Story and IWBTG are 50 FPS, Hero Core is 40 FPS, Iji is 30 FPS, and almost everything else (including La-Mulana) should be set to 60 FPS. The game most likely to work with all existing features is Cave Story. It's simply the game that got tested the most and it's probably the most fault-tolerant game of all the ones I've tried running through this. The target OS for Hourglass is Windows XP. It has been tested somewhat on Windows Vista and Windows 7 64-bit, but it's most likely to work as intended on XP. Theoretically it should also be able to work in Windows 2000 and Wine, but it almost certainly doesn't work in those yet. By the way, here are some tool-assisted non-speedrun videos (they're not that special and I'm probably playing them all wrong, but I did use some savestates and some frame advance) that I made just now to convince myself a TAS could be made of these games all the way through to an AVI: Perfect Cherry Blossom, Tumiki Fighters, Legend of Princess. And if you missed it earlier, there was also this for Hero Core.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you so much!
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Tompa
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This is like... simply awesome!!!
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Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.
Somebody put this in the TASVideos news. Modern PC Gsames are now TASable!
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Geoffrey The Fly (Nifflas MMF game) works and syncs if set to 47 fps (Yes, 47. That's the fps the game reported when it was initially set to 60 and 50.) and the "Disable DirectSound Creation" setting is enabled. I know this may not matter much since Geoffrey The Fly is an insanely short game and is an autoscroller, but this syncing does give hope for other Nifflas and/or Multimedia Fusion games. Elasto Mania syncs for me with a 60 fps setting, full screen allowed, and hardware acceleration disabled. Elasto Mania TASing is now reality!!! :D
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Well, "modern PC games" is quite a bit sensationalist for what we have, as that is naturally associated with AAA titles and the like. >_>
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
upthorn
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Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
I did some testing today, and those games which I was able to make run on both my old 32-bit WinXP laptop and my new 64-bit Win7 laptop synced on both machines.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Maybe there should there be another forum for TASing discussion about (probably mainly Windows) PC games? Since it doesn't exactly fit in with "DOS Games" or "PCE Games", unless everyone's fine with keeping such discussions in "Other Games".
upthorn wrote:
I did some testing today, and those games which I was able to make run on both my old 32-bit WinXP laptop and my new 64-bit Win7 laptop synced on both machines.
That's good. I'm a little surprised we got this to work at all, because the 64-bit OS basically adds an extra emulation layer on top of Hourglass and totally changes the system DLLs, and apparently it still manages to sync. (Thanks for all the help with testing stuff, by the way.)
Lex wrote:
Geoffrey The Fly (Nifflas MMF game) works and syncs if set to 47 fps (Yes, 47. That's the fps the game reported when it was initially set to 60 and 50.)
Note that it's best to round up if it's not exactly a whole number. 50 would be reasonable here. I've seen a few games with weird framerates like 37.6 or 47.3 but as far as I can tell that is the correct speed for those games to be running at.
Lex wrote:
Elasto Mania syncs for me with a 60 fps setting, full screen allowed, and hardware acceleration disabled. Elasto Mania TASing is now reality!!! :D
There's some more to be done to make AVI capture work for that game, as well as make it so you can run it without needing to enable fullscreen mode. (Actually I think non-fullscreen works too if you switch your display depth to 8-bit in your advanced display settings.) But yeah, it's mostly there. One thing I forgot to warn about earlier: Due to this issue, if you're TASing a game that automatically creates a save file, and if the save file contents actually affect sync (in some games it doesn't matter), then you'll have to manually delete the save file before starting playback or recording.
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Does it work if the game uses variable frame rates, and/or when some modal dialogs pop up?
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
ALAKTORN
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Posts: 2527
Location: Italy
I made a TAS of a level in Rotate Gear, but it desynchs instantly apparently, not sure why edit: the game does save replays so I recorded that if anyone is interested lol http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCgPUBCl_Uc
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
nitsuja wrote:
Lex wrote:
Geoffrey The Fly (Nifflas MMF game) works and syncs if set to 47 fps (Yes, 47. That's the fps the game reported when it was initially set to 60 and 50.)
Note that it's best to round up if it's not exactly a whole number. 50 would be reasonable here. I've seen a few games with weird framerates like 37.6 or 47.3 but as far as I can tell that is the correct speed for those games to be running at.
I tried 50 fps, and it desyncs. I actually tried 50 before trying 47. Playback synchronizes when recorded and played back at 47 fps, but doesn't with 50 fps. ALAKTORN, the desync may be due to the same as the above. Try fiddling with the fps setting before recording. If you find the right setting, post it.
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Posts: 2687
klmz wrote:
Does it work if the game uses variable frame rates, and/or when some modal dialogs pop up?
Yes. IWBTG and La-Mulana have variable frame rate, and Ikachan has a modal dialog on startup, and those games work fine. Things done in dialogs or other windows or menus aren't recorded yet, though, so that might be a problem for certain games.
Lex wrote:
I tried 50 fps, and it desyncs. I actually tried 50 before trying 47. Playback synchronizes when recorded and played back at 47 fps, but doesn't with 50 fps.
That's probably just a coincidence (that it works like that in this game, I'm not saying it won't be repeatable)... I'll try looking for a sync bug with Geoffrey the Fly. What other options did you set besides the framerate (such as sound or multithreading options)?
ALAKTORN wrote:
I made a TAS of a level in Rotate Gear, but it desynchs instantly apparently, not sure why
Did you revert any save files the game created or changed (everything in the "save" and "replay" directories) before playing it back? I think this is one of those games I was just talking about where you need to do that, at least until this issue is fixed. Also, it's best to start from a clean new game. If you still have problems with it, please send me the movie file and let me know which version of the game it's for.
Joined: 6/9/2011
Posts: 29
This is so awesome that i still can't believe this thing actually works!
Lex wrote:
Elasto Mania syncs for me with a 60 fps setting, full screen allowed, and hardware acceleration disabled. Elasto Mania TASing is now reality!!! :D
Tried this one out and it seems to stay in sync and work properly, except for the fact that input is buggy in menus - one keypress switches two positions. This leads to inability to select "save replay" option for example, and makes it harder to pick odd-numbered levels (however, this is possible to do, as there is an even number of positions in that menu). I fiddled with options a bit, but can't seem to resolve that problem. Is there any fix for that?
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