webtiles footv?

[njvack]

Not a FR, but musing: are there technical things that would prevent a webtiles frontend to crawl ttyrecs? (Or does such a thing exist?)

[duvessa]

Yes. There's no such thing as "crawl ttyrecs". They're just ttyrecs: a recording of the game's text output. They have nothing to do with Crawl; they only know the characters that are printed out.

[njvack]

There is such a thing. It's a ttyrec of a game of crawl. There could be vi ttyrecs.

But yeah, you're right; how would you know what O on the screen actually meant?

Respectfully withdrawn

[rchandra]

It would be very difficult to write, especially when players re-glyph things - probably easier to have the server actually record a video! Of course one would probably need a ton of disk space/cpu upgrades for that, making it not so feasible for all the friendly server hobbyists.

[Siegurt]

Well, if crawl stored replay data in its own efficient format, in theory you could replay it with any client, and it could be more efficiently stored than a ttyrec, of course that would be significant effort.

[njvack]

It might not be too terrible, honestly; since webtiles currently exists, the serialization format and viewer are already done. Fundamentally, it'd be capturing the webtiles data stream and then playing it back in the client. I suspect the console client doesn't speak the webtiles serialization format currently.

[neil]

It might not be too terrible, honestly; since webtiles currently exists, the serialization format and viewer are already done. Fundamentally, it'd be capturing the webtiles data stream and then playing it back in the client. I suspect the console client doesn't speak the webtiles serialization format currently.

You'd also need the tilesheets and other game_data (essentially the whole client side of the game) for that particular revision of Crawl. And, yeah, you wouldn't be able to watch it from console; but that just means you need to record both tty and webtiles for each game.

[Siegurt]

Well, what I would really salivate over would being able to replay *offline* games, there's a sufficiently large offline player base, that it'd be kinda cool for those people to be able to post a recording of their game and get pointers on subtle bits of playing strategy that you would normally only get when people observe your online games.

I was thinking more an abstract set of data which dictates what happened move by move in a game, rather than what it actually looked like (So it would be agnostic as to what kind of client played it back)

I think ideally I'd like an observer to be able to peek at the skills/inventory of the player while they were playing as well (without interrupting the game), to better give them feedback, and I'd like the same capacity available in a playback as well.

Heck if something like that existed, you could probably have observers of live games go back and replay earlier parts of the same game, say, you came late to the party and wanted to know how the player got into that situation.

[njvack]

It would be sweet for advice.