Want to record your Freeciv games?

[sveinung]

I have created a Java program that can record a Freeciv game and later replay it to a Freeciv server. A replay can be seen by connecting as an observer to the Freeciv server it is played back to. The program has rough edges. Bugs are expected. Please follow the instructions in the README file to test that everything works before trying to record a long game.

Downloads

• A version compiled for the Freeciv 2.4 beta can be found here. The Freeciv 2.4 beta and Java (6 or 7) must be downloaded from somewhere else unless you already got it. This file also include the source code and the Freeciv source code used to generate some of the Java code.
• The above in a zip file can be found here (if you have 7zip or something else that can open tar.bz2 pick the above file in stead)
• The source code alone can be found here (nothing else included). This can be compiled to support Freeciv 2.4, 2.5 or trunk.
• If you want a compiled version for 2.5 or trunk tell me and I'll create it.

Feedback
To give feed back reply in this thread. I would appreciate to be told about bugs you discover. This includes bugs in the documentation. I would also like to be told that everything works great. Knowing how important various bugs or missing features are to you can help me decide what to focus on during the time I use on the recorder.

• This is a command line program. It assumes that Freeciv is started from the command line as well. I'm considering adding a GUI. I'm also considering adding automatic launching of the Freeciv server. If you want to test the recorder but don't know how to use the command line please tell me.
• At the moment a recording is stored in one file pr connected Freeciv client. To play back a multi player game all the files must be sent to the play back program.
• Unless a name is specified the record files will be given a default name. The next unnamed record wil overwrite it unless the files are renamed or moved.
• The recorder cause a delay when its recording. The default mode can be made faster.
• A record of remote players played back locally or local players played back remotely usually won't work.

Known issues

• The Freeciv server had a bug that crashed it when a global observer viewed a game. This has been fixed in recent versions.
• If you have a time out during a game but don't record time information the recording will be useless.
• The Windows implementation of the Freeciv hack protocol may use a different location than Freeciv use on some set ups.

[AndreasR]

Hi Sveinung

I think this recorder of Freeciv games could be very useful! Good work!

If I could suggest something to this project, then it would be that you setup a public
server running your recorder app, make the server available on meta.freeciv.org
so that people can try it out easily, without installing Java and getting it up and running locally.
I think people want to record and playback Freeciv games, but it has to be very easy for them to use.
You could integrate this into a web application, and also show animations from the nice mapimg output from the freeciv server, and setup some graphs and statistics ( I remember seeing some nice statistics code in this forum before).

It would also be very interesting with some kind of integration between this recorder and Freeciv-web.
Recording and playback of games would be very useful there. But the recorded games must be very small in file-size,
and recording must not effect performance of the server much. Keep up the good work!

Andreas

[sveinung]

Hi Anders,

thank you for your kind words.

If I could suggest something to this project, then it would be that you setup a public
server running your recorder app, make the server available on meta.freeciv.org
so that people can try it out easily, without installing Java and getting it up and running locally.

I considered this possibility before the recorder was ready. Somehow I had completely forgotten it. Thank you for the reminder and the web app idea.

It would also be very interesting with some kind of integration between this recorder and Freeciv-web.

That would be great.

But the recorded games must be very small in file-size, and recording must not effect performance of the server much.

How small should a record be? How much performance loss is acceptable? How important are they relative to each other (as long as both are under the previous limits)? (There are cases where I can get a lot of one by sacrificing some of the other)