Bragging & Bugs: Battle Recording anyone?

[ExitJudas]

Just at thought:

I've just played a marignon SP game and have already twice seen damage bugs in the battle screen, where arrow attacks on normal units and fire attacks on ice elementals respectively adds negative damage to the unit, healing it. That made me think of how useful a battle recorder could be. Not only would it be great to save some of your coolest battles for posterity, strategy discussion, etc. It would be a wonderful tool to capture such bugs.

Is such an addition a great task to implement? If not, i would suggest it as a great addition to an already great game.

[Taqwus]

Note -- probably not bug. The negative HP loss on an elemental results when they are "killed" to a lesser form, but the resulting hp on the lesser form exceeds the hp it had right before it was killed in the greater form.

Saving the game files should work.

[ExitJudas]

ahh i see . I hadn't thought of that.

and of course you can save you game file so the feature is basically already there, albeit in a slightly user-unfriendly way. thanx for you insight.

[lch]

ExitJudas said:
Is such an addition a great task to implement? If not, i would suggest it as a great addition to an already great game.

Yes, too much of a task. It's a nice idea with not too trivial complications (what's the resulting file format supposed to be? Mac favors Apple Quicktime, Linux favors OGG, Windows favors AVI), but there are more pressing things at hand that need to be fixed / added. You can always use third party programs to record battles, like Fraps for Windows.

[ExitJudas]

for sure. come to think of it: there is one functionality i really miss in the battles: buff and debuff icons for all effects. there are some, including most blessings i think, but if you cant have visual effects for all buffs (would be too much in the end) i would like icons to show up on the individual units, so you can really track the effects of said buffs/debuffs. and this doesn't only pertain to spells but also environmental buffs/debiffs scales, storms , etc.

[Arralen]

icons
Quite a lot of spells do have a visible effect (various shields, e.g.) or an icon ..

battle recorder
There's no need for a battle recorder: Battles are re-calculated from saved random seed each time they're watched. Therefore, simply save your .trn and .fthld files and you will be able to go back to any battle you want. Use the -DDDDD command line switch to watch the AI think (log file, can get quite big).