I have already shown this off in the "For Opera Users" thread, but now I have got it working in Firefox and IE7. It is also reported to look okay in Safari, but I haven't seen that myself.
My intention is to let WWPA members select games to pull from the live server and archive on the WWPA server, and then keep games on a much more long-term basis. This would, of course, also allow you to free up your live-server HQ and archives more liberally.
This ought to be an effective substitute for the in-game replay, whenever said replay breaks down (which is fairly often, as we all know). AFAIK, the WWPA replay should still work in many of the cases where the Last Turn replay doesn't work on the live server.
Secondarily, I will be able to gather and report on a much more expansive range of stats about games and combat, such as the previously mentioned damage probability histograms, damage done vs. damage taken ratio, real-time army breakdowns and comparisons, and so on.
Comments, thoughts and suggestions welcome. ![]()
looks awsome!
Wow. Looks good, and yes it worked on safari for me.
suggestions:
How about making the progressbar scrollable. like: if you know that a certain event happened more to the end of the game, you klick inside the progressbar to roughly where you want, like when you are watching a movie. It would also enable you to go back if you wanna see something again. also, not sure if its usefull at all, but maybe an option to adjust playback speed?
If you do this much effort already, how about including a ticker? you seem to have all the data anyway, so it should not be too much work.
nice work though
Streen: Thanks for your feedback. Yes, I have had full intentions from the start of making the progress bar usable in some fashion. My first move will be to make it clickable, and it will forward to the clicked point in time. Unfortunately, the Javascript technology is not advanced enough to allow me to make it draggable like in media players, at least not without a tremendous amount of reworking of the whole thing.
I could do a ticker, though I'm wondering if that would be distracting. After all, the eyeball would have to view two things at once, or only one or the other. I would rather perhaps improve the actual replay graphics themselves. For example, I intend to highlight the two units of each combat engagement, because at present I find it a little hard to follow who is attacking whom. I may do a ticker later down the road.
My next few steps will be integrating into the WWPA, so people can import their games and clear up their HQs.
I already have code in place for playback speed, it's just a matter of making an interface available to make use of it.
I will also probably have links or buttons to let you view the last turn, the last round, or the last x rounds. You will also be able to use this to view active games (i.e. games that haven't finished yet).
http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/20004
Okay, you can now click on the progress bar to jump to that point in time. You can also view the last round, or the nth last round.
Nicely done Pistos.
wow
I try to hate pistos cause he kicks me azz in one game, but it's hard to hate him, it's hard! ![]()
nice![]()
It is surprisingly slow though, if you click in the progressbar. how come?
How do you implement that stuff anyway if I may ask? Javascript?
Streen: It is slow because it is doing a full recalc of the whole map, units and webpage for the point that you clicked on the progress bar. It is not just doing calculations client-side (in your browser). It's a full-blown HTTP request.
And yes, it's Javascript.
If anyone would like to help test this prior to release, leave a message here. I have captured a number of my own game replays, but have noticed that there are a few difficulties that my code runs into. If anyone is interested in offloading finished games from their HQ and archives, let me know.
Ohh me. Umm the game is http://weewar.com/game/29070
masterofwiiman: Thank you for volunteering. I've attempted to archive the game, but this same bug is creeping up. I'm trying to determine what the problem is.
Anyone else?
Did the code change for weewar recently? I don't know much but the replay frose about the time they released more info about the game.
I'm not sure. I do notice that the full replay for that game works on weewar.com, but not in the WWPA. More investigation...
Yeah I saw, It worked about 1/5 of the way
We are aware that replay sometimes break on Weewar and will be addressing this asap. Until then you should only use replays that actually work to build your tool as the broken ones may contain ill-formatted events.
Ok, That makes sense.
I found the bug in that particular replay, I'm hoping it is the same issue for all other ones, because it's easy for me to work around. ![]()
Alex/bert: Event 12142703 is a duplicate of 12142702 (in game 29070). I am working around it by specifically checking for back to back duplicate events, and ignoring the second one.
Yep, that fixed things. ![]()
masterofwiiman: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/29070 Enjoy your archived replay.
Let me know if you see anything else suspicious.
Anyone else want their replay(s) archived, to help me test this?
Here's a pretty recent replay without any bugs: http://weewar.com/game/31082
Hm, I notice that 29070 has some drawing artifacts towards the middle. ![]()
scorp: Data has been captured, but I have to import that map as well. I'll get back to you.
Looks good in Safari, thanks. Captured harbors are showing up as bases. Other than that I didn't notice anything funny, though it was pretty slow at the end of the replay.
if you need more games:
Master is a friend of mine
if you need more, here is a real biiig one. We got crushed by the Russians![]()
scorp: Ah, of course! I totally missed that.
I'll have to fix that up. I'll check out the speed issue, too.
Streen: I'll get to yours.
scorp: Okay http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/31082 should be fixed, re: the harbours.
My game is a little weird, like some of them aren't disappearing and stuff.
masterofwiiman: Yep, I'm gonna check that out.
Okay, I think I fixed your replay: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/29070
I'd give a cookie for 'Replay from turn (enter #)'. Say it's turn 42, I want to see the last 3 turns, I could simply punch 'Replay from turn 39'.
Full game replay is good for visitors, but not for players themselves.
Lol, I was gonna ask for another replay, but I realised you already imported our rematch. Well, did you get around to our first match? sorry I am kinda wanting to know.
hugo: Just use a negative number after the game id. For example: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/27369/-5 will start from the 5th turn from the last.
masterof: Which game id exactly? There have been two or three in this thread that have proved problematic.
Oh no umm, I was just saying something. umm, nothing was wrong but it was 30174
masterofwiiman: That particular game has a bug in it, it seems. It wasn't one of the ones that was smoothly imported.
Okay, after much delay, I am finally, tentatively introducing replay storage to all WWPA members. Simply login (or join) and click on the new "Games" menu item.
Unfortunately, since the Weewar API does not provide a list of archived games, I am unable to automatically determine your archived games for you. As a result, all game ids have to be manually determined and entered. You can provide the IDs of active games, but I have not yet coded an "overwrite" mode, so any future imports won't do anything.
I only have a handful of maps imported. You can still import games that are on unimported maps, but you won't be able to view them until I import the map. Let me know if you encounter such an unimported map, and I will get to it so you can view your replay.
Please test this out, and provide any feedback in this thread.
i'm testing it now... after it imports, successfully, and then i click on the game number link, i get a page that has about four scrolls worth of this kind of stuff "‹�oG�ì½[ÜH²&ø^¿"W§ªÞé”hî¼VW°`ff€9»»ÀÁA#¤" on it.
Hm, is your browser set to explicitly reject gzip-encoded content? The replays are rather large, so I am gzipping the pages.
i can't find anything in firefox - tools - options about gzip-encoded content. i'll try explorer now.
It's working for me... Has anyone else had this gzip problem?
Working for me. (Firefox)
Not working for me. FF 2.0.0.6 Ubuntu 7.04
I'd like to note that your other demo replays did load and display fine for me. Also, is there a way to remove replays from our list?
And finally:
No such map islanders2 in WWPA.
No such map fortress in WWPA.
At the moment, no way to remove them besides explicitly asking me to manually do so. Reason being: It is just one shared replay among all the players, so if you want to delete it, the others might not want to. I have to code up a "hiding" mechanism.
I'll check out your non-working replays. What's your Weewar nickname, Cornmaster?
It's CornMaster
I'd like to add that one of your recent post and maps:
Cruel Intentions: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/28599
Lakes: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/32900
Don't work for me. Last week they worked from here so I imagine it is something that you change recently that is causing problems for some of us.![]()
28599 is broken at weewar.com: http://weewar.com/game/28599 So until they fix that, we don't have much hope of exporting to the WWPA.
I can see the gzip problem now with 32900. I will check it out. Thanks for reporting.
Okay, fixed: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/32900
luckymustard: Yours should be fixed, too. There was a problem with my server, re: gzip.
CornMaster: Let me know if there are other broken ones that I haven't accounted for, which are working on weewar.com.
I think I've discovered the cause of a few other broken replays. I apparently forgot to include Assault Artillery in my unit set here. ![]()
If anyone has a replay that was partially imported, but does not run completely in the WWPA, let me know. I just coded some things that work around logic errors in the weewar.com event data, and this makes some of those replays stable.
for a big map like "Lakes", which is what my 30592 game is on, to see purple and yellow move i have to scroll down. now that's not awful, but i scroll down to see one of them move then it maybe either quickly reloads the page causing it to scroll back up to the top or it does that for some other reason. is there a way to now have it do that? tx, looks great otherwise! ![]()
oops, spoke too soon... "last round" and "last 2 rounds" don't seem to work. do i not understand something?
luckymustard: I experimented a bit in the past with "autopanning" the display to have the screen shift to whatever unit is acting. It didn't work out too well, but I may return to that. Something else you can try is altering the zoom of the page. In Opera it's Numpad Minus. That lets you fit even the biggest maps in your browser window without scrolling.
Are you saying that the vertical scroll jumps around during the replay, though? It shouldn't.
I looked at 30592 just now. There is an import problem with that game (and others like it). My current hunch is that I am not handling capturing units correctly, especially when they are destroyed. I will look into this. This is probably the same issue with a number of other replays.
good tips there. yes, i am saying that the vertical scroll jumps around during the reply, but only when i've scrolled down already. i can leave it at the top and it won't jump around, which is actually what i'd rather it do. understand? tx
Right. You want it not to jump around under any conditions. Right?![]()
i'm sorry i guess i said that wrong from what i was really thinking earlier... got a bit of a headache going on now though...
ideally it would jump around to show what is going on. however, the possibility of just making it smaller on my screen is a workaround to have it work in a way that makes sense to me. again, sorry. i'll try to get back to you tomorrow... i'm gonna take a break for the rest of the day.
I'll get back to that auto-panning code I have.
luckymustard: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/30592 is fixed now.
If anyone else has a replay that seems to only partially work, please try to reimport it. It may fix it. If it is still problematic, please report the game id here. Thanks.
hugobrain: I see that you already imported it. It seems to be working for me, but that is one monster replay! 51 rounds, 4 players. I think there are so many events that the JS is so huge, causing the browser to take a long time to render it.
I think we have found the need to show just portions of a replay. Such as, as you suggested, one turn at a time, or maybe a few turns only.
Hello Pistos. After I posted that ^^ I revisited this thread and remembered somehow we could import a game w/o your help. Which I did. Awesome!
I wanted to share with a friend some ways to break a HA line. Around turn 40 or so. To go through the full replay is long... too long. At first I was not able to see any turn using the /replayer/game#/-(turn#)option you mentioned above. I had to start from beginning and let it roll. But I stopped it - it was just too slow to wait for turn 40.
However moving the 'turn lever' around worked at times. In fact it seems it works only once: open the page, click the turn cursor, and replay works. Doing it again (re manually to move the game to another turn) and the game would stall and not work all the time.
I also noticed that the URL would change to a decimal when sent to a turn - instead of a -(turn) URL. Like this: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/26866/.323 Thus I'm wondering if the (-turn#) still works or if you're experimenting with a different system? FYI I use Safari.
More; trying to load directly from a decimal did not work, unless it seems the decimal was perfect. But I'm not sure.
In sum here's how I had it work for sure (re. selected turn replay):
1- Load the Page
2- Click on the Turn Lever approximately where you want it to be, and enjoy!
To view another time period of the game, I quit my browser and star anew. No big deal at all. Perhaps it's restricted because it's a big game?
Finally, indeed it would be nice to have 'show replay from turn (#) to (#)'. A bit like page printing... 'Print All' vs 'Print Page (40) to (45). Perhaps even before the default map loading... Asking a user if he wants the full game or only certain turns would save the upload, which is fairly slow.
And yes it's a big file. I have no idea how many kb/mb it can take. I hope you were not waken in the middle of the night with your emergency server kicking in!
hugo: First, thanks for your feedback and commentary. The load on my server for replays is actually pretty minimal. All the load is on the client side, i.e. your browser and computer.
The full uncompressed data sent to your machine is probably in excess of 1.5 MB, maybe more. ALL the event data is sent to your machine from the starting point to the end of the replay, and the web browser attempts to load all of the Javascript into memory and process it. I saw that it was quite slow to load on my machine. I'm not sure what is happening in Safari, because I don't have access to that browser. But in Firefox and Opera, it will have a large load time.
My fix will be to let us view a specific slice, turn x to turn y. As well, I will experiment with AJAX to perhaps load and unload the events in chunks, instead of all at once.
As for the number after the game id:
Both should work. If you put a negative integer, it means that many turns from the end. If you put a positive float, it will go to that part of the replay (0.500 meaning halfway through, etc.) They may have appeared broken for you only because this game has such a huge replay. Try these features with some other smaller replay, they should work. If not, please let me know.
Yes that's what I semi-figured... Long load indeed. I got a new compu, but somehow Weewar sems very resource-heavy. With my former G4 I couldn't even play the game.
heh 1.5MB. That's a small file. I'll experiment some more, but I also think it's due in great part to the size. There are perhaps 200 units on that map. What I do / did is empty the cache, quit safari and reload anew. No big deal, really. Still impressive how long it takes to rebuild a turn!
I'll get firefox before long...
Okay, hugo, try this. I have set it up so that you can specify a starting round and an ending round, and it will only replay the specified round range. Example: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/26866/30/31
It still takes a while to load up and prepare the initial unit placement, but once it gets going, it seems to run fine. Let me know if this works for you.
Ok I tried it and it works great! This is the best so far - and the simplest way to integrate this turn range thingy.
Also between reload I empty my cache. I have no idea if it has any effect other then psychosomatic voodoo, but it seems to work faster and fine.
Decimal is crazy and counter intuitive.
The URL / - (turn#) is not bad, but so far the latest upgrade is the best!![]()
You can do gameid/turn and it will do just that one turn. And, as we have shown, gameid/startturn/endturn does a turn range.
Glad it's working for you. ![]()
hugobrain: Okay, I imported Rocky Ride. Try now.
No such map badlands in WWPA.
hugobrain: Okay, imported.
so I was able to import a game, that is good. Every time I click on the "last round" or "last two rounds" buttons on the top it just restarts the whole replay.
Is there a way to "fast forward" or start it half way through, towards the end, or even , say, the last two rounds?
strange,now I cannot even log back into wwpa site
^ Pistos booted you. He does not like whiny people
. Try that below (re. turn range), and also empty your cache, it helped me. Lastly I quit Safari and restart it then goes to the reply. Since it's mostly browser side, I like to start with a fresh browser.
Okay, hugo, try this. I have set it up so that you can specify a starting round and an ending round, and it will only replay the specified round range. Example: http://weewar.purepistos.net/wwpa/replayer/26866/30/31
tried all of the above and it still just started at beginning, and stalls at round 25 (of 38 current rounds)
Baba: It should normally work. Game 34074 has a problem in it. I'll try to investigate ASAP, but I can't at the moment. You should see the "jump to any spot" functionality working in any other problem-free game. Try to import a different one.
Yes the problem in 34074 is that 3 players are ganging up on me
Pistos: Is there a way for us to see or download the processed data/events of a replay after we have imported it into WWPA?
kumasawa: I can work with you. What did you have in mind, I mean, to do with the data? I can put the data in as easily-digestable a format as fits your needs.
Pistos: By profession, I'm a java swing developer specializing in GUI design and implementation. Part of me is just curious about the game data and replay format. Part of me thinks that it would be fun to write a java app for weewar replays with cool animation and other UI bells and whistles (although I'm not sure how much free time I could currently devote to such a project). I really like how you have enhanced the UI in your replay app and I just think that it would be fun to play around with something like it too. Anyway, I know that you have spent a lot of time and effort on the WWPA, so I understand if you want to keep control of the data -- just thought I would ask anyway since I'm not sure when/if the weewar guys will actually get around to providing an API for replay info. Thanks for your reply by the way.
kumasawa: Well, it sounds like you're a developer with some experience. Rather than using my data, you may be better off getting it yourself straight from weewar.com. All I did was sniff the AJAX calls used during the game. All weewar.com AJAX responses are in XML. Send me a private message and I'll give you the exact methods I use to get the full replay event data. I'd be interested to see what you could come up with by way of a standalone replay applet or application. I have some Java (1.3, 1.4) background myself, with experience in AWT and Swing.
Pistos: thanks for your reply. I sent you a message on WWPA, but it said that your inbox was full. Is there a better way to contact you? I can give you my personal email address.
kumasawa: I cleared out my inbox a bit. I forgot that I programmed that limit.
I should display the inbox's fill state somewhere...
You can message me here on Tangler now, though.
Pistos: just figured out how to start a private conversation with you here on Tangler. I guess we can continue this discussion there. Thanks!
Sending ...