Posted: 10/2/2010 10:42 PM
Post subject: PC TASing Tools
Quote
ogurets
Joined: 10/2/2010
Posts: 2
Greetings. I'd like to share some technique of TASing a PC games. You can see the samples here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z75TJnFkcqs and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldiwOxwe2r8 Sorry for a bit too enthusiastic descriptions, at that moment I haven't seen any of TAS videos and was quite impressed by the idea. So, here's a deal - I've written a library, similar to Speed Gear, but operated by a Shift key, which is able to slow down almost any game, and I'm looking for someone willing to help me integrate it with a screen capture software. As you can see, I've recorded the videos above at full slowdown and edited them manually. It would be too difficult to find every place where I used slowdown key and restore the original speed. If there were some software that could change the capture framerate when a specific key is being held down, people could use it to make TAS on PC. Also, this software could exploit the quicksave/quickload keys to make segmented videos, able to rewind and continue after a quick load. But it's not essential, cause even a quick save/load is a slow operation for modern games and there is no way we could juggle them just as easy as NES games on the emulator.
Posted: 10/2/2010 10:58 PM
Quote
Ilari
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1113)
Joined: 5/1/2010
Posts: 1217
Rookie of 2010 New systems TASer of 2010 New systems TAS of 2010
Based on the description, that sounds like "multimedia" TASing. "Real" TASing (as is done on this site) has these three elements: * Frame advance (step one frame at time; although one could do with extreme slowdown, frame advance is far preferable). * Savestates (point in time to return to, if needed) * Input movie (records the input given to game in linear time, can be played back later, even on different computer). The end result is sequence of input given to game, in linear time. This button sequence is far easier to check for cheating than video recording.
Posted: 10/2/2010 11:39 PM
Quote
ogurets
Joined: 10/2/2010
Posts: 2
Ilari wrote:
The end result is sequence of input given to game, in linear time. This button sequence is far easier to check for cheating than video recording.
Thanks for the reply! I've tried recording the button sequence on PC, but unfortunately, most (or all) PC games have some random factor (suppose it's caused by a hardware lags, when the physical engine is forced to use a larger time step and could "miss" some event it had processed correctly before). This effect breaks a demo playback in most cases, so it seems the only way is to record every entity's position, velocity, and other game parameters to restore them during playback forcefully, sometimes allowing the interpenetration of physical objects or processing a hit even when a bullet have missed the target, if that is written in the recorded file. That would be as difficult for the anti-cheating verification as a video file. Anyway, could you give me some links to these "multimedia TAS" videos? I'd be happy to see them!
Posted: 10/3/2010 1:09 AM
Quote
Ilari
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1113)
Joined: 5/1/2010
Posts: 1217
Rookie of 2010 New systems TASer of 2010 New systems TAS of 2010
ogurets wrote:
Anyway, could you give me some links to these "multimedia TAS" videos? I'd be happy to see them!
"Multimedia" TASes take video each individual linear time segment in timeline and concatenate those into final video. You still need equivalent of savestates and verification is almost impossible (but you don't need input to play exactly same way every time). The only high-profile example I recall was Bisqwit's Chrono Cross TAS (9 hours!). There are also gamecube TASes (I think mostly partial demonstrations) produced that way (before the breakthrough with re-recording in Dolphin). And to highlight importance of verfication, there have been actual instances of video editing to make run faster than it really is (its difficult to tell if single frame has been dropped). BTW: This might be interesting: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8750
Posted: 10/3/2010 10:15 AM
Quote
Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
Ilari wrote:
The only high-profile example I recall was Bisqwit's Chrono Cross TAS (9 hours!).
Indeed it went like that. I modified* pSX to produce a continuous stream of video encoding of every frame it renders, and I added code that takes note whenever savestates are loaded / saved; when a savestate is saved or loaded, it records the current position in the video stream into a log file. When the TAS is finished, the log file can be parsed to see which sections of the video recording must be stitched together to produce the actual TAS video, where undone segments are removed. As a side effect: if no stitching is done, a recording can be retrieved of the whole TASing session with all the redo-redo-and-redoes. pSX already supported pauses, so given the possibility of frame-by-frame capture, a frame advance feature could also be implemented, but slowdown was introduced naturally by the recording process. *) Not so much modify the emulator, but rather, modify the environment it runs it so as to achieve the desired result. More details.
Posted: 10/9/2010 10:42 AM
Post subject: Re: PC TASing Tools
Quote
Percut0r
Joined: 10/9/2010
Posts: 1
ogurets wrote:
Greetings. I'd like to share some technique of TASing a PC games. You can see the samples here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z75TJnFkcqs and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldiwOxwe2r8 Sorry for a bit too enthusiastic descriptions, at that moment I haven't seen any of TAS videos and was quite impressed by the idea. So, here's a deal - I've written a library, similar to Speed Gear, but operated by a Shift key, which is able to slow down almost any game, and I'm looking for someone willing to help me integrate it with a screen capture software. As you can see, I've recorded the videos above at full slowdown and edited them manually. It would be too difficult to find every place where I used slowdown key and restore the original speed. If there were some software that could change the capture framerate when a specific key is being held down, people could use it to make TAS on PC. Also, this software could exploit the quicksave/quickload keys to make segmented videos, able to rewind and continue after a quick load. But it's not essential, cause even a quick save/load is a slow operation for modern games and there is no way we could juggle them just as easy as NES games on the emulator.
Very very really old technics. I used to slowdown my games for amazing gameplay. ================= Simple technique: - Download CheatEngine. - Open it twice. - Process (window 1) -> YOurGame.exe - Process (window 2) -> fraps.exe or gamecam.exe or... capture software. - Enable speed hack -> Set the same speed in window 1 and 2. ( Tips-> your can associate hotkeys for 5 speed, and 2 hotkeys for speedup and slowdown with a customizable delta. ) Result: YourGame.exe and CaptureSoft.exe syncronized at the same speed = video.avi at normal speed. Enjoy. N.B With C.E i'm able to do a fake frame-by-frame gaming (step-by-step?) with a little modification. MyHotkey : Speed: 0 -> Speed: depend on customized delay-> speed: 0. Hold MyHotkey: Speed: customized. ================ The big problem now is save-state. ------------------------------------------------------------ EDIT: I just opened a Youtube account for slowed down gaming. user: PCAmazinPlay pass: ************ ----------------------------------------------------------- Post edited by a moderator: Removed the password for that Youtube account. It's not safe to hand out passwords to your account on a public forum.