create nice map stats with the spring demonaut!

[hoijui]

YEAH that would be nice!

[knorke]

Can it make animation into web viewable form too?

If you want to get down to the specifics - you could even watch the replay yourself :O

animated gifs might be possible. although probally by using external bitmap-to-vidoe programs (irfanview, avisynth or virtual dub) to create the animation...
(dont know of any good libary that allows output as .gif)

A feature to only show a map between a certain time frame would be useful

i think that will be possible :)

next week ill hopefully have some time so maybe new version then.

[Licho]

Its for dotwars-like fun, replaying demo is time consuming, you must get it, run spring, skip through it etc.

Fast running web animation is more accessible.

You don't need to generate animation yourself :) I bet there are plenty of tools that are able to make movie file or animated gif from series of images.

[knorke]

I bet there are plenty of tools that are able to make movie file or animated gif from series of images.

yes thats what i want to use...
should be less cpu & memory demanding than using fraps and video compressing.

[TradeMark]

Nice, this is just what i was going to make for replays.adune.nl

Though i wanted it to animate so i can fast rewind the battle to see whats happening there by approximately... (easier to find some game). Could also record the complosions/nukes and other big explosions, as they change the game a lot and makes you remember it better.

We were talking about this at #sy once with some guy... was it you? planning to make flash viewer with objects that moves (probably doesnt need to render more than 2000 objects at once, shouldnt be a problem as they are just small sprites), and not a video player or anything (would just take too much space/cpu to render and bandwidth).

Edit: is there any way to make it run without rendering the replay and as fast as possible? that would make it to generate the data ~100x faster...

Also, does it have to mark (with the drawing functionality in spring) every unit in order to save the data in the files? or make it as a message in the game o.O

[knorke]

is there any way to make it run without rendering the replay and as fast as possible? that would make it to generate the data ~100x faster...

yea i know, thats really stupid. but i think in the demo files spring just saves the commands given to units, so to go through a replay you would have to do all the simulation spring does...
if spring could run without graphics, that would be faster maybe but i was told running spring minized is also a lot faster. then you can just have the widgt go /setminspeed 100 and wuuuush. (thats already in the widget, but it only does speed 2 because it might lag some peoples
computer if faster) (there might be a command to start spring minized?)
anyway, speed is limited to how fast your computer can run springs simulation iam afraid...

does it have to mark (with the drawing functionality in spring) every unit in order to save the data in the files? or make it as a message in the game o.O

the markers it draws are just stuff so you can see its working. also helps you see what events it registers.
you can just remove that in the .lua (put -- in front of the addmarker and echo stuff)
next version will have an option to turn this off, its for testing mainly.

We were talking about this at #sy once with some guy... was it you? planning to make flash viewer with objects that moves

not sure, but i had a similiar idea but wanted to use animated .gif images or a autogenerated javascript slideshow thing with .jpg files as i dont know flash.

probably doesnt need to render more than 2000 objects at once, shouldnt be a problem as they are just small sprites

yes, i think thats doable for people who know php, flash or whatever. only problem might be that while they probally wont be more than 2000 objects, you would need to save their position every other moment in order to make it a movie. so if you save units position every 10 seconds (probally enough) a one hour long games becomes 360 x 2000 coordinates.
probally still ok for cpu/memory i guess.

actually i think more interessting than replays is to make stats of games that were just played and then make a bot post a link in the battlechat you can click.
Actually I have that 95% done and except the knorkebot soon to spam this stuff all over the place
(its going to work like this: http://www.abload.de/img/howstuffworks55n2.jpg or maybe it wont, who knows)

also less sucky font now and automagic mode (no clicking, every via command line) but since noone really uses that thing anyway except me i made a dotwar (usual way with fraps) but added stats at the end:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZV1rj2J0g
wow thats so interessting

tl;dr
there were recent advances

[manolo_]

knorke your new avatar is hurting my eyes

[knorke]

carrepairer made me do it
but yea imo it looked like flushing the toilet.

[Pako]

I have made a simple widget to help making simple GIF battle animations. GIF compresses suprising well, 100 megs of screenshot to 1.5 MB.

I think the whole process can be easily scripted, TradeMark post here ASAP if you are interested integrating it to your replay site because I'll stop spring this week. This solution would be far from optimal but I think it could be very easy to do.

For a real solution for demonaut or animating battles, SVG could be the best solution.

[hoijui]

very nice!

would be perfect if there were some controls. Mainly animation speed, and a slide bar like in movie players. Any idea how this could be done? convert to flash movie or using javascript? or maybe create a flash movie right out of the 100MB images?
if not easily possible, this is nice enough

[zwzsg]

TradeMark post here ASAP

He can't, some moderator decided to ban him on the ground of trolling.

[AF]

There's nothing trademark can do that hasn't already been investigated by Aegis and knorke, for Now talk to them

[knorke]

gifs and stuff

hey thats cool! :)
problem seems that a ~hundred frames/pictures are too few for a nice dotwar animation. An attacking army is only be visible for maybe 2 or 3 frames :/ But of course its nice still, just needs a small delay / black frame before it restarts.
Also, how did you create the .gif? I found no tool that could be operated via command line but that is needed for automatisation.

GIF compresses suprising well, 100 megs of screenshot to 1.5 MB.

I tried virtual dub and they and always come out wtf-large?!

convert to flash movie or using javascript? or maybe create a flash movie right out of the 100MB images?

I think even uploading to youtube would be possible? I found some python script on google that does that. (it did not work) Spore (that evolution game) also has a upload-to-youtube function so it must be possible.
Problem would be that encoding + uploading takes a while but for the replay site it would not matter.

I'll stop spring this week.

nooooooo why?

[knorke]

me too, me too!


maybe with some (motion) blur / fading it would be better?

[knorke]

omg thread is on page 2 must bump with recent advances
(the images are clickable)


walk a mile in a commanders boots and then look where you walked.


also with commanders health graph! see if you were close to killing the enemy com or if the attacks were totally useless!
might add activity of commander like "walking", "idle", "building" etc.


some try at a heatmap thing. I found if you only show destroyed mobile units that gives a much representation where battles take place. with a thresholdfilter thing to get rid of some spread out single dots it would probaly look better.


zomg breaking news: west team of DSD usually controlls more area of the map

[manolo_]

wow its still awesome, cant this lil app included into the spring-engine or the installer, i think its a really nice benefit

[TradeMark]

Awesome! i never thought about commander health graphs, thats really interesting to see.

[AF]

What about their cookie bank balances?

[knorke]

thanks :)
bundling with springinstaller is probally not so good as it is quite a niche-tool and a little tricky to set up. Not good to confuse 99% of spring players with it.

I am restructuring some stuff and seeing as i know of nobody who tried the very first/only public version making a good userinterface+manual is not top priority
Thats not saying i will not upload newer versions. But a stable release worthy version is not as easy to make as I thought so I do this mainly for my own fun and to learn blablabla lazy.
For example i need to learn to make better lua because that likes to crash way too often due to the new added healthgraph thing

What about their cookie bank balances?

steadily increasing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPWZU9kW ... re=related yoyoyo!

[jhonsadins]

Hi there..
Now integrate into autohosts, add to uploader and make some useful/interesting images.A feature to only show a map between a certain time frame would be useful too I think..