Hello all,

I have been working with Reagent X (Reagent X website) (TT Movies) Mucho info! (Ya, the guy who made the Scrum Championshiop DVD last season (Awsome)) and we are taking up a project to document many of the Scrum games, playoffs, and finals. We would also like to record all of the 3 on 3 tournament games.

Here's what I think we are trying to do, and we can modify this at any time. Please feel free to post your suggestions!

Here's what we have so far.
We are able to transfere -jsave files between our Mac's, there are some differences in playback speed if the files are recorded on a G5 and played on a G4 or vise vera. So we are trying to stay in one or the other but between us I think we can get all the footage in somehow.

I have been told PC and Linux are able to swap and I'm looking into something that may break this thing wide open. Stay tuned!

Here's what we are asking of you, The TT community
We would like as many people to record thier games as possible, the more the better. If a couple of people per game just record the two or three games and send the files to me, or Regent X, (or maybe find someplace to upload and store the files) we can then start the process of putting together some footage of the various game types.
We're not just looking for mundane stuff to watch, and it's not limited to just scrum leagues. It can be pick up games in sluggy's, mine, reagent's, or anyother server, even (should I dare go there) a Shockwave server. Anywhere you play you can record.
we're looking for those special plays, great runs, mid air passes and blocks, domination, brilliance, and the you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it situations.

But to make this truely great we need you guys to help us out.

Something interesting I found is that the playback function uses local tank skins so if you want the footage to look as it did on you machine I would ask you send me the skin your using and I will change them out prior to running the -jplay function and recording to a camcorder.

Copied from Regent X's web site
Mac info
1 This assumes your TT application is located in your main Applications folder.
2 Open the Terminal application.
3 Type in the following: /Applications/ThinkTanks/ThinkTanks.app/Contents/MacOS/ThinkTanks OSX -jsave TTmovie1.txt
4 Press return!
5 ThinkTanks will automatically open and you can start playing.
6 To stop recording, you must quit TT.
7 To play it back, open up Terminal and type: /Applications/ThinkTanks/ThinkTanks.app/Contents/MacOS/ThinkTanks OSX -jplay TTmovie1.txt
8 The TTmovie1.txt file will be located in your Contents/Resources folder (same place as the main.cs file and any sceenshots you take).
9 This generates about a 150kb file per minute of TT.

Windows info
1 Go to the think tanks directory. I think it should be C:Program FilesBraveTreeThinkTanksdedicated.
2 Open any of the batch files and replace the contents with
cd..
ThinkTanks -jsave "your_name/date_here".txt
(this will help organize the files later) (Remove the parentheses and everything in between, replace it with whatever you want the file to be named) then do a save as and name it like -jsave and save it in the dedicated folders.
3 right click and open the file you just saved )-jsave.bat

That's it.
It will launch TT and record the action as you play, from your perspective.
There will be a file in the C:Program FilesBraveTreeThinkTanks directory called your_name/date_here".txt or whatever you named it.

To play the just recorded file:
Open the just created save.bat file
Replace the -jsave with -jplay (the file name in here and the newly created file names must match)
Do a save as and save that as a jplay.bat (batch file)
Locate the jplay.bat right click and select open. This will play the recorded file. Done

So what do you think?

Napalm

Last edited: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 at 8:03:52 PM

@ nap

This is a fantastic idea.

Can you provide some details as to the -jplay function?

Edited:
Added the Mac and Win info to main header statement.

The -jSave function is a way to essentially capture a record of your TT session. It stores all the info as a text file that can be played back through the TT game engine. The good thing is that the text files are reasonably small compared to a real video capture.

Before people would get crashes when they tried to share these files. Napalm and I were able to share them successfully when we kept our game settings identical and used similar machines (both Mac G4's). This is a significant breakthrough! There is a test file on my website (link in above thread) that you can give this a try with. I will update my website with some more recent test files later tonight, so stay tuned.

Here are the settings we would suggest (set in your TT options window):
resolution: 800 x 600
Details: High, 32 bit
Mode: Fullscreen

Do not toggle between windowed mode and fullscreen mode when recording.

The downside: there is now way to quickly turn recording on and off. Thus you have to start TT (via the Terminal command) to begin recording and quit TT to stop recording.

Therefore, this is probably best suited for League games where you know the exact start and end time of a good game.

Anyone interested in giving this a try is welcome. At first, try making a very short test recording and send your files to me and Napalm and we will see if we can extend the compatibility of these files to more kinds of machines.

We want to assemble an NFL-style highlight reel. So if this works out we can make an awesome highlight DVD -- starring you!!

We know you've had the most amazing one-of-a-kind things happen during a game and you wish you could see a replay. Well now you can keep the film rolling! And when that does happen, make a rough note of when it occurred (or the score at the time) and submit your foootage.

-Rx

Last edited: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 at 11:55:16 AM

If u both have g4's how is any non-g4 user gonna share with you?

B

B

I'm trying to work that out right now

Napalm

OK I updated my movie info page a little bit and listed some test files there.

Here is a short clip that works for Napalm and I. This was recorded on a G4 in FullScreen mode under the settings in my previous post.

FS_G4_test.txt.zip (60 Kb)

-Rx

Last edited: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 at 5:31:25 PM

I got it to play normally on my dual 1 Ghz tower with a 4X AGP Ati Radeon 9000 PRO.

When I tried to play it through a PCI Radeon 9200 on the same machine it was slow.

It was slow on an nVidia MX 2 4X AGP in a 867 tower also.

I recorded a game played using the PCI card and then -jplayed it through the Radeon AGP card and it was rediculously fast. On the nVidia it was just fast.

I wish I could experiment with the OpenGL profiler to see what changing the video card profile does.

Wow interesting result BC! This helps show that the video card is a big contributor to the speed problem!

Thx now I can record but how do u edit the bits u want?

@Kristoffer/Spartan

Well theres an additional step, The game need to be put into a video editing program. In our situation we output the video signal from a svideo jack on the pc to a firewire camera. The the video tape is imported to a video editing program (reagent X and I use Apple's imovie.)
From there it to the DVD baby!

Ok! ACTION!

Napalm

Latest highlight reel posted in PSL8 thread.

I captured the game directly on tape this time and then edited it down in iMovie.

RUT RO!

-jsave doesn't play nice with observer. If you use observer you must tape live.

@BC
Are you saying we don't have our match recorded??? :(

@BC what about if you observe in someone else's server? I assume you mean when you are joining your own server? (I haven't tried either of those as I still prefer to record using tape).

Two questions:

CAN you play in a bit higher resolution? I would be all for recorded some of my games, but not if I have to play 800 x 600 all the time. I also have a cinema display (17" iMac), so would a cinema resolution work too? If not I don't have to play that way.

Also, what about the 3X radar? Do you think it makes a difference if I use the jsave with it loaded, but you don't when you play it back?

@LilAlienD (FU)
I don't think the resolution makes any difference. In my tests, regardless of how I recorded the action the application used the last saved settings to play back the recording.
For example. If I recorded at 1280X1024 full screen. And then quit the app. I then played some games at 800X600 and quit. I then run the -jplay it would run at the 800X600 because it was the last saved settings. This surely suprised me as I thought it would retain the settings of the recording.

Naplam

It just "plays" the movie like a game...all the settings of the game (not recording) intact

Resolution, skins, etc

B

I recorded the scrum games last night and tried to import the QT movie into imovie but apparently exceeded the max file size to import.
WTF?
It's only 9gb

Holy crap. I'm going to have to try another method or break this up into little pieces.

Another approach is needed.

Also which observer are you using. I'm using Monkeemans and I was able to record in observer mode and then actually joined that game as well with no issues.

I, for some reason, play back faster on the same machine with the same hardware. Not sure why this is happening.

More to come..

Napalm

Last edited: Thursday, February 24, 2005 at 9:56:08 AM

@Napalm
Does iMovie copy the 9 GB so that you need a total of 18 GB available on your disk?

@ Rx
It gets "out of sync" on playback and is different each time. I was recording using a different machine although the server was on my local network.

@Paisano
Sorry, but it didn't turn out nice. I got your "eat it" goal though!

Last edited: Thursday, February 24, 2005 at 10:09:05 AM

@BC
can I still get a copy of what you have? Especially that eat it goal! Lol... Not my proudest moment but hey, we were getting punked in a major way!
It felt good and I think it helped turn things around as we came back to win the next two games. :)