Feature request: rewind button when viewing tapes

RedDwarf · 2014-01-25 20:19:14

When viewing a security tape, I'd really like the option to rewind the action by a step.

If I'm watching a long burglary, I'll hit play and then faster a couple of times to get to the death scene It's mostly all I care about, but sometimes along the way the thief will do something I didn't expect, and there is no easy way for me to go back and re-watch what they did. All I can do is restart the tape. It's frustrating when the bit I want happens after a couple of hundred steps and/or the thief retraces their path several times and I'm not quite sure when they're going to do the bit I want to watch.

May I request a "step -1" button to go alongside the "step" button?

This is my first post here. I'm absolutely loving the game. I can't put it down. No really. It's gone 3am and I don't want to go to sleep in case my house gets ransacked. My wife and kids were brutally murdered. The house is all I have left. Oh, and the 24 pit bulls .. so far ... I bought in their honour. Just try opening a door in my house. I dare you. Mwahaha.

SomeGuyNamedDavid · 2014-01-25 20:25:31

I'll second this. I've had to restart a tape to get a replay a few times before.

Hopefully you made sure the pitbulls see them before they open the door, so you can get those instant kills.

Last edited by SomeGuyNamedDavid (2014-01-25 20:25:40)

jasonrohrer · 2014-01-25 20:37:11

This is something that I may add someday, but it will require quite a bit of work.

The reason is that a robbery tape playback is a fullblown "simulation" of that robbery. The "tape" is actually a move list (up, left, up, up, down, right, saw_used, left, up, brick_used) plus the starting state of the house map. From that, we can simulate the robbery step-by-step.

The problem with rewinding is that time only goes in one direction in this game. From state T, you cannot infer state T-1, even if you know what move the robber made to get to T from T-1. The best example is a dead cat at step T. You don't know whether it was alive in step T-1! So, you can't just step backwards.

The only way to do it is to save a FULL snapshot of the map in RAM for each step that has played so far (so when you hit the StepBack button, it can just jump back to that map state).

In the ideal, you'd have full blown "scrubbing" with a jog wheel. But there are some messy things that I'd need to do to make it work that nicely (like scrubbing back through tool-target selection would be hard, and scrubbing forward the first time, before playing the whole tape, would be laggy).

SomeGuyNamedDavid · 2014-01-25 20:44:55

Since it seems like moving forward can be done quickly enough, instead of going back a step you could just tell it to restart and then instantly advance n-1 steps. Either that, or just include entity state changes in the move list. So a cat dying would be recorded, so the step back would know to un-kill the cat. The former might be problematic in very long tapes, while the latter would probably have to record the movements of all entities, so drawbacks with both.

Garcian · 2014-01-25 20:59:13

That'd be a pretty cool feature, I'll support this idea.

DethBringa · 2014-01-25 21:00:00

Would be a cool feature. Maybe a box where you can input the number of steps to jump to and a step counter. That way you can watch the tape through to roughly the point you want on fast, hit the stop button and see what step you are up to say 120. Then hit restart and type in say 100 then hit play. It would quickly play through the first 100 steps at super fast then auto stop at the number you set.

jasonrohrer · 2014-01-25 21:10:18

Yeah, there are other ways to handle this for sure.... ways that would require far less work on my part!

Having a step number display would be a good place to start... then at least you could know where to try and stop as you fast forward from the start again.

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2014-01-25 20:19:14

Feature request: rewind button when viewing tapes

#2 2014-01-25 20:25:31

Re: Feature request: rewind button when viewing tapes

#3 2014-01-25 20:37:11

Re: Feature request: rewind button when viewing tapes

#4 2014-01-25 20:44:55

Re: Feature request: rewind button when viewing tapes

#5 2014-01-25 20:59:13

Re: Feature request: rewind button when viewing tapes

#6 2014-01-25 21:00:00

Re: Feature request: rewind button when viewing tapes

#7 2014-01-25 21:10:18

Re: Feature request: rewind button when viewing tapes

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