The PsychoScrum Championship Highlight Reel is finished!!!! :)

Watch it here . Download it to your hard drive and then double the window size. QuickTime format, 76.6 MB, 9:59.

You can also get the whole game on DVD here !

Enjoy!!!

-Rx

EDIT: DVD Menu Screenie:

Last edited: Sunday, November 21, 2004 at 4:09:46 PM

LilAlien: Actually you can make red players at will! One night in the MonkeeMods we tried an experiement where we had 12 players: 4 blue, 4 green and 4 red. Sort of a 3 team scrum. It worked fine - other than the red team's score doesn't display the total score. It was kind of like a hybrid between indie scrum and team scrum. But yeah it should work fine! Here is a screenie from that game.

Looks fun! Can't wait to try!

REALLY!!?? When we tried to do our "Big Battle Royal", by whoever was working on it, we were told that only one player could be red. But yeah… doesn't matter much if the score doesn't show either.

WOOT!!!!! Got my DVD!!! THANK YOU REAGENT X!! It's like I'm a coach reviewing last weeks game. It's very nice to be able to speed up and slow down w/ the DVD player too.

One thing…
That goal where Master TMO "appears" to go THRU the goal but doesn't get it. Not the case…
As he goes towards the goal his treads get "tripped" by my head which makes his tank start rotating. Then just has he enters the goal, the ball gets tilted outside the goal as his body passes thru it. Freakin' hilarious and pretty good programming if you ask me :) So be carefull ya'll, make sure the actuall ball makes it thru the goal.

Cool aye!! Glad you enjoyed it!! XD

"And the replay official in the booth says..."!

Yeah - you mean the goal about halfway into Game 2, where Ho is denied a goal. The one in the Highlight Reel right? I slowed that one down so we could watch in slow-motion. But I remember in the game it appeared to be loss of posession due to a bump by you or a teammate. So I went back and got the clip at the original speed. I think you can see the scrum become slightly dislodged, float in roughly the same trajectory as Ho, an then sort of snap back to his tank after he goes through the goal.

Let me know what you think. Here is a clip of just that play at normal speed (QuickTime, 6 sec, 600kB). Ho you were there - you remember what happened from the cockpit?

-Rx

Nah… watch when he lands, he's still got the ball. Its MUCH more clear watching it on a TV screen BTW. You see him going… going… tip my head and spin… and land on the other side of the goal, still with the ball. THEN someone taps into him and takes it.

That play was odd, tho there were others that I found to be a bit off as far as the syncing goes.
One in particular:
I'm on D, I kill someone, loose ball.
Mem rolls by and grabs it, but it seems like his magnet is waaaaaaay strong so while I'm still going to where I think the ball is going to be, it's on mem's tank for an easy goal.
I think it was game 1 or 2, will research.

The ball broke free from Ho for a slight second. You can tell by the flag pole. Unless attached to a tank the flag will stay in a perfect vertical position. If you watch, the flagpole snaps to a vertical position temporarily. It was at this point when it was dislodged. A very brief moment later the flag is pulled back to Ho's tank and Ho's angle and the flag pole is no longer vertical.

Exhibits A-D

Ho with possession - near side of goal

Ho without possession - near side of goal

Ho without possession - inside of goal

Ho with possession - far side of goal

The white lines show the vertical and the angle of the scrum. As you can see Ho lost possession of the ball before he entered the goal, but regained possesion on the other side... Poor Ho. ;)

—Monkee

Last edited: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 at 6:26:03 PM

There must have been a second spitter,

BUT that shot where Ho is at an angle, he's JUST entering the goal. Watch my positioning… I'm just in front of the goal when he taps me and the ball tilts outside of the goal… which is when he enters.

You really gotta watch this thing on the DVD… it's so much more clear.

This is why WE NEED TWO CAMERAS!!!

Yeah… spending WAY to much time on this.
I think I deleted the wrong frame in between the second and third, it looks as if his treads ARE in the goal in the third frame, BUT he gets tilted from bouncing off my head, which is still in front of the goal… observe…

Last edited: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 at 8:48:51 PM

So is it actually true that the ball itself has to be in the goal? Or just part of the tank? I know many a time I score with just my "toe" in the goal. At those times I bet the scrum is still outside of the goal. Will have to keep an eye on this.

Nice analysis MM and LilAlienD!

@rX - Max CR is also on our team.

POKEMALO!!!! We need the official ruling on this one.

:)

X, I agree with you about the toe bit. I never thought the ball mattered, but maybe some part of the ball is actually what is passing through when it appears only a toe is.
Conversely, I think I have been in positions where the ball or flag is in the goal, but the tank is clearly not and no points are awarded.
How's the engine work we say!

@TMO: Ack I knew I missed someone. The team rosters were taken down and I couldn't remember everyone. I have fixed the DVD credits now. Sorry Max!

Ah but lilalien, your frames start after Ho has already lost possession. Note the vertical flagstaff in your first frame. He regained possession of the ball within or on the other side of the goal. If you check the video again you will see a definite "snap" when the flag goes back to vertical. This is when it is dislodged. And you won't see it snap back to an angle other than 90° until Ho has already passed within the outer circumference of the goal.

Exhibit E

_{Ho has control of the ball just outside of the goal (flagpole at angle of Ho's tank).}

Exhibit F

_{Ho lost control of the ball and is still just outside of the goal (vertical flagpole).
Note that Ho's tank is still at the same angle as Exhibit E}

As far as the code goes... It is set so that if a tank enters the powerup (which in this case is the goal) with possession of the flag, the score increases by 1,1 (1 for player,1 for team) and the flag respawns and a new spawn point is chosen for the goal. The tank has to enter the goal not the flag. ;)

BTW, amazing goal fight and wonderful footage RX! Sure is cool to see a replay frame by frame. :)

—Monkee

Last edited: Thursday, November 25, 2004 at 2:07:08 AM

Tally doesn't ever loose posession of the ball. Even if he did, he got it back before going into the goal, hence the ball snapping to an angle in my third frame as he enters the goal… just after clipping my head which is in front of the goal.

And yeah…

X,
Dash is on our team as well :)

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury....
ah forget it. :)

Nice analysis Lil ( _{even if I do disagree} ) ;)

Happy Turkeyday Lilalien and all!

— Monkee

I have to chime in, there have been many times when my rear end wiggled through the goal but the flag was still outside of the goal, and yet I got a point.
Moral of the story, a girl only needs to shake her booty in order to score.

(was this an inappropriate post?)

:-)

Katherine

Are you saying your rear end is large? ;)

TG. W/o photographic documentation, nobody's believing nothin'.
I lost possession outside the goal, though the scrum seemed within magnet range while I passed through the border of the goal.
within the goal, it snapped back in arbitrary, I guess I do love you fashion.

Hmmm... Just an idea for a possible future product...

Is there anyway to record a game from everybody's perspective, then edit the clips together? For instance, for the PS7 Championship game that would have given you 8 possible different perspectives, as well as the "overhead camera" that was rX. Naturally you wouldn't use all 9 views for every scene, but rather pick and choose the best viewpoints of the action.

A cut game with best perspectives from all players could be very nice. But it would requive that everyone uses same skins, or otherwise the video would be pretty odd. Think about video where everyone uses different skins and after the game have been cut to final version. It would just be odd when the terrain, tanks, etc. Changes their look.

Good point! Probably won't happen any time soon (not to mention the difficulty of getting the videos all sent in). I know my terrains are non-standard; not to mention tank skins.

Last edited: Friday, November 26, 2004 at 9:49:24 AM

^Well… even more so then the skins. There's plenty of screen capture software out there, but it's all very processor heavy and highly reduces gameplay. To get around this Rx uses a simple S-Video output to his camcorder that is on his new video card.

So if we all have that S-Video out port… we can all record our games.

There IS the little terminal script "j-record" or something that will record from the second you open the game to the time that you close it, and it saves it into a pretty small text file. I haven't heard of any successful "sharing" of these documents though.

I've tried a couple times to get that to work with no luck so far...

Was the flightcam info ever sent out by Monkeeman?

Been away for a few and wanted to start looking into it...

Napalm

He havent posted the info about it for public.

Double post, doh.

Actually BlindCide has gotten the -jSave and -jPlay feature to work quite well for him. Maybe he can post a little tutorial on how to use it.

I found it cumbersome to use. But, it is an amazing feature that is already built into TT, that allows you to record games as fairly small text files. Maybe with a little more research we can figure out how to share these text files, and then we could splice together some multi-angle footage. The biggest problem as I recall is that there is no way to pause or stop playback without force-quitting. I also noticed playback seemed a bit faster than real-time (I think).

I'm wondering if you can bypass the video out (physically on the card) by videoing the playback with a video camera? I may try this tonight as I have to transfer some vhs stuff to my camcorder. We'll see.

Napalm

Reagent,
I myself have USED the jSave and jPlay feature with no problems, but from what I understand… the problem is in sharing the text files with someone that can record the games and convert them to video.

N yes… the jPlay speed is a little faster then regular game play.

@LilAlienD: Good point. If it worked smoothly we could have other players from the game send me their text files and I could convert them. Would be nice to be able to fast forward though, etc. Otherwise this would take forever to find the right footage.

@All:
Here is a little more info on jPlay and jSave from my website .

More info on using -jSave and -jPlay (Mac):
This assumes your TT application is located in your main Applications folder.

1. Open the Terminal application.
2. Type in the following: /Applications/ThinkTanks/ThinkTanks.app/Contents/MacOS/ThinkTanks OSX -jsave TTmovie1.txt
3. Press return!
4. ThinkTanks will automatically open and you can start playing.
5. To stop recording, you must quit TT.
6. To play it back, open up Terminal and type:

/Applications/ThinkTanks/ThinkTanks.app/Contents/MacOS/ThinkTanks OSX -jplay TTmovie1.txt

7. The TTmovie1.txt file will be located in your Contents/Resources folder (same place as the main.cs file and any sceenshots you take).
8. This generates about a ~150kb file per minute of TT.

Here is a sample TTmovie.txt file (288 kb, right-click and Save As...) I generated during a very short TT session (< 2 minutes). Would be curious to see if it works for you!

This would solve the varying skins problem Triv mentioned, since the -jPlay command displays the action with whatever skins you have loaded in your version of TT as a viewer.

-Rx

Last edited: Friday, November 26, 2004 at 4:10:40 PM

Open the main.cs file and u can check out the syntax for all the thinktanks.exe switches.

I find it STUPID for the files to have a.txt extension....has nothing to do with text...also I havent found anything but TT and the TGE that can view them, let alone edit them....

Anyone else have any ideas there?

It lags the crap out of you when you play and record and also the speed is a little whack...

The best way to record a game without lag that I can think of is to use the svideo or dual output of a video card like X uses and hook it to another computer (so u dont need a digicam)...then edit it

B

I can't improve on Reagent X's instructions for using the jsave/jplay method of recording.

I'll note that if you change anything in your computer/video card/monitor setup after recording, it might not work. For instance, just using a different monitor will result in a different playback speed. That would also explain why nobody seems able to play others' recorded.txt files.

I've had the best experience from doing the jplay playback right away. I ran process viewer (Mac) while playing TT in a window and perceived no slowdown while recording with jsave. The only time I had a slowdown during recording was while using Bolo-codes. ;)

The simplest/easiest way to record games is to use an s-video out graphics card connected to a "pass-thru" DV camcorder that's connected via firewire to another computer. This avoids the time limitation of the DV tape and saves the time involved in the DV tape play/record-to-disk step.

Just for fun I made the camcorder's LCD screen the primary in a three desktop extended setup. The icons were barely recognizable. What a hoot!

I tried to play TT on my AGP graphics card while exporting via a mirrored PCI s-video out graphics card but it was slowed too much. You have to be playing TT on the same card (AGP or PCI) as you are using to export via s-video.

I also tried using a TV-tuner card with s-video input on the second (recording) computer but it was too slow. [edit] I tried this again but using only the one graphics card on the source/output computer and it worked. So it is possible to do this without a camcorder.

Smile XD , you're on candid camera!

Last edited: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 at 3:45:48 PM

Hey BC,

I'm wondering if the video resolution settings have to be the same for recording and playback (with jsave and jplay). Can you try recording a very short TT session with -jsave and posting the file? I want to see if if I can view it on my computer.

-Rx

Just wanted to thank those of you who got the DVD.

I have just about covered all the costs involved in putting it together. Thank you! :)

Limited time offer: I am going to do one more burning run of a dozen or so DVD's before I archive the 16 GigaBytes that is filling up my hard disk. If you would like one, I will send it to you for free! Just e-mail me your address and I'll drop one in the mail.

Woooot!

-Rx

Last edited: Sunday, November 28, 2004 at 12:51:40 PM

One thing about the shell command from RX-

You need to add a backslash between the words "ThinkTanks" and "OSX" to handle the space. The site parses out the character. Without the backslash + space, it won't work.

PS- I tried playing your text file, but it caused my TT app to unexpectedly quit. Anyone else have any luck?

Last edited: Sunday, November 28, 2004 at 3:50:33 PM

BTW folks, I just wanted to let you know that I have released the observer script.

Go here

—Monkee

The garagegames forums have some info regarding the record and play feature....it does look like its tied to the system and not sharable....at least at first glance...

X: where is my dvd?

:)

B

Should be there tomorrow aye! If not lemme know.

@OM: Too bad. BlindCide was also not very optimistic about sharing these -jSave files :'( Oh well. So close and yet so far!

4 DVD's left!

E-mail me if you want one for free!

-Rx