Good vs. Evil

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lenscas

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Jul 31, 2013
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73 decided to make the auto recording a bit better and how you interact with that script in general.

It now accepts either -c or --compress which will run the gzip command on the output file after you are done. If you want to see a record it also automatically unpacks it for you if you give the same flag.
You can now also say how the file should be called by using -f or --file and it will go in a folder called records.

I let it go for about a minute (3526 frames to be precise, thus 58.7667 seconds assuming there was no lag) and this resulted in a raw file of 416.0 KB which got compressed into just 85.5KB.
I'm not sure but I think that that is pretty small. But then again, if I really wanted to I could make it a lot smaller if I go with a real custom file type rather than pure text.
 

lenscas

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Jul 31, 2013
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74 How are you doing the compression?
75 just running the gzip command on the file after each run. There may be better options, but this is quick enough :)

edit: and, I got a basic bot up and running
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Im5gVEfD1y2CsC9LkxowaslpZsNU_Pku/view?usp=sharing
when in "bot" mode the game stops caring about keeping 60 fps a second as game ticks and frame ticks are the same.

The number at the end, above the "you died" text is how many frames (and thus game ticks) it survived. In this case that is 35157 frames, which would be about 9 minutes without lag.

Compressed this results in a file of 753.2 KB in size for the recording. I'd say that that is pretty nice for 9 minutes of footage.
 
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lenscas

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76 Ok. So you're just using a built in compression algorithm, rather than a custom system.
77 yes. I didn't want to end up spending too much time on it. If I only cared about file size I would just record what key's where pressed at which frames together with the seed and just feed that back into the game.

But, the current system is good enough I think.
 

lenscas

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79 I am storing the same stuff that would normally go to the terminal because you can control the cursor of said terminal with text and I use newlines to separate each frame.

As a result you can technically watch it back in the terminal using cat but because computers a bit too fast nowadays I also wrote a small lua script that writes the lines at 60 Hertz (resulting in 60 FPS).
Also this script takes care of turning off echo and output buffering and makes the cursor invisible for as long as the script is running.
 

duckfan77

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Mar 18, 2013
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81 Well, I just uninstalled all my audio drivers and reinstalled them, because the Audio Service kept crashing.
 

duckfan77

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Mar 18, 2013
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84 OOH. Documentary. Those are always good, even when you have no idea what they're about. Also, I figured out what I was doing wrong. I went too far down to fundamental constants, and so ended up with an equation that was unsolvable. There was no way to get it in terms of what I needed it in terms of.
 

lenscas

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84 OOH. Documentary. Those are always good, even when you have no idea what they're about. Also, I figured out what I was doing wrong. I went too far down to fundamental constants, and so ended up with an equation that was unsolvable. There was no way to get it in terms of what I needed it in terms of.

85 its a joke about the map "forest nothing". Which is a custom AoE2 map that consist of nothing but trees (and a town center + 3 villagers for each player of course), which somehow got a bit popular and spawned more maps of that type. That is all I'm going to say though :)
 

lenscas

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88. Oh nice! :) a bit like the original Starcraft then.
89 yes, except AoE 2 takes place after the fall of rome and the conquest expansion after the discovery of america.
AoE 1 takes place before rome and the expansion name (rise of rome) should speak of itself where it is placed.
You also have AoE 3 and a fourth is coming up but that is windows store only :(

You also have AoM (Age of Mythology) which is basically AoE but now when you go an age up you get a god power and instead of many civilizations there are only 3 but you also pick a god to start with and each civ plays very differently instead of just giving each civ a special tech, unit, some bonuses and enabling/disabling certain things from the tech tree there is now also a difference in how to get a certain resource (faith) and some other stuff.

Also, if you don't mind windows store only AoE 1 got a "definitive" edition not so long ago.


Also, the age of Empires/Mythology series has just the best cheat codes.
I mean look at these http://aom.heavengames.com/gameinfo/cheats or https://www.gamesradar.com/age-of-empires-2/cheats/ and http://artho.com/age/files/cheats.html
Yes, AoE 1 has a cheat code that turns catapult stones into cows, villagers flying like superman or doing cartwheels. Someone clearly had too much time on their hands. (remember, this was before you could load 3d models into a game and have it perform decently let alone good)