Re: [VANILLA-LIST:3160] Developers Must Play

[David Swasey <swasey@cs.cmu.edu>]

If you go with a standard digital video format like QuickTime you have to
find libraries for creating the files.  Creating these files by hand, and
getting all the details right, would be a pain.  Unix playback programs
exist (eg, xanim) but I've never seen any unix-based movie creation tools.

I suppose it wouldn't be hard to modify the windows COW port to convert
cambot files into a quicktime movie, but this seems like the wrong
approach.  Too much human effort is involved in creating a given clip.

Of the suggestions so far, I like using cambot recordings.  They are
pretty compact and very easy for the server to create.  It shouldn't be
hard to make cambot files support partial recordings.  The next step
would be to let users save clips from COW while playing back a game.
Or to add a "snapshot" command to the INL robot which produces a cambot
clip of the last 15 seconds of play.  The final step would be to resurrect
JTrek, or parts of it, and use that to display cambot files over the web.

Just my $.02.  I can't spend any time on this, but I have some old
quicktime movie creation code if someone wants to go that route.

-dave

On Wed, 10 May 2000 16:23:57 EDT, Karthik Arumugham <karthik@arumugham.com> wrote:
> But it might be nice to have a way to use a standard graphics
> format to create a clip of a portion of a game that can be viewed in any
> graphical browser and saved to disk easily.