Export to youTube

I’m pretty proud of Frozen Synapse’s export to youTube feature – it’s something people like a lot, and over 1400 match videos have been uploaded – but it’s a long way from perfect.

Here’s an example of what the exporter produces at the moment (the comments are all Alex Max though…)

If you make that full screen and you up the quality you can just about see what’s going on, but it doesn’t exactly put FS in the most flattering light.

A couple of months ago I set about producing an algorithm which would attempt to show the match in much more detail, by showing each turn several times and focussing on each event.  I called it “Snapcam v1″ and this is what it looked like:

I like some elements of it, but it’s pretty confusing.  For instance, Taylor still doesn’t understand it to this day.

I woke up this morning and decided to try and get a nice halfway house at least.  I decided to go for an ultra-simple approach which shows the whole match but only zoomed out as far as it needs to be.  Here’s the first attempt:

Getting better – certainly better than the standard one.  Finally I added some nice preamble and tuned a couple of things:

Hmm… I wonder if the widescreen nature of that will break the blog… do full-screen it and up the quality.

I’m really posting because I want your guys’ opinions.  An FS match happens so fast when viewed in real time, and so much is going on every second, that it’s very difficult to convey it in an obvious way.  That’s what I was trying to do with Snapcam1, and I kind of feel like I failed.  This second attempt is a big improvement, but I can’t help thinking that I should be doing something a bit more exotic.

What do you guys think?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 3:59 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “Export to youTube”

1. JWill:

   § December 2nd, 2010 at 6:47 pm

   I really love the idea behind Snapcam. The huge problem with watching those old youtube exports is trying to follow four things going on at once. Snapcam solves this problem and lets you delight in the meticulous planning that went into each movement, and how these opposing plans interact. With the standard export, or the nicer zoomed-in-properly export, it’s impossibly to follow everything at once. At best you only notice when soldiers die, rather than the events leading up to their deaths.

   However, the problem with Snapcam is that it’s difficult to keep track of what time it is in the match, and it’s not too clear when it jumps forward or backwards in time. Perhaps you could experiment with adding an onscreen indicator showing which round Snapcam is currently showing.

   In short, I really like the idea behind snapcam, since while it may currently be a bit confusing, it showcases the thought that goes into a 5 second plan, and the beauty of a flawless execution.

   Keep up the great work. No matter what you do from this point in, Frozen Synapse is already the deepest and most engaging tactical planning game I’

2. JWill:

   § December 2nd, 2010 at 6:49 pm

   Oops, that would be the problem with accidentally hitting ‘tab’ then space… No editing comments Well, to continue where I left off:

   … No matter what you do from this point in, Frozen Synapse is already the deepest and most engaging tactical planning game I’ve encountered.

3. Mark:

   § December 2nd, 2010 at 10:09 pm

   I like the first vid. One modification you could do is skip the “close up” when there’s no action. For example, on Secure/Charge games, you could leave it zoomed out in Vid 2 style until the shooting starts?

4. beefiest:

   § December 3rd, 2010 at 12:26 am

   It should definitely be an option, but not default or mandatory

   i can see using it whenever i am watching replays, but i want full control over what i am watching during the actual playing and viewing of individual turns

5. Flap:

   § December 3rd, 2010 at 6:54 pm

   That’s interresting, but indeed, very confusing.

   First, you should maybe make it clearer when it rewinds. Maybe change the color (more grey, less blue), or have the same type of marks on the screen that we had when rewinding a videotape.

   Also, a bar at the bottom telling how mate we are in the action would be usefull (and thus would go back and force in time).

   An other very different solution would be doing like a football match : the whole game is played, and then some interresting events are zoomed or replayed.

   The zooming when moving from a specific action could be done differently. On standard, the video is at full distance, but then, action stops, a rectangle appears on the action and widdens to reach full screen. At this point the specific bit of action would be played. And the zoom goes back to full view when the zoom started.

6. subedii:

   § December 4th, 2010 at 4:37 pm

   As you say, one of the key problems with a game like this is that there’s a huge amount of complexity of that simply doesn’t come through in the 5 seconds of actual game time each turn.

   FS is all about the planning, and players are constantly going to be simulating all their actions, running through several iterations of plans before finally settling on the one they want.

   I realise this would require a pretty large shift in how your turns are currently handled, but if you want people to get a clearer understanding of what’s happening with the game, they need to be allowed to see those planning stages as well.

   Basically what I’m suggesting is that instead of just seeing the turns themselves, an option might be to do a sort of “fast forward” playthrough of all the iterations of planning that each player pressed play on, showing pathing / aiming and so forth. It only needs to be a few seconds but it may give that insight into the turns themselves. Then after that, the turn they “primed” which plays out in real time. Then repeat for the rest of the turns.

   Like I said, I realise something like that is probably a pretty huge shift in how your turns are handled, if for no other reason than the much larger amounts of data that would need to be stored for each turn. But I think it could provide the clearer picture you’re looking for. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be a collection of all the plans. Say, just a collection of 3 plans a piece, selected from early, mid and late stage planning before they primed. Or a random selection.